Tim Powers writes:
Has the Church definitively said that animals _don’t_ go to Heaven, or at least have some posthumous happy state? They suffer, but they don’t sin. They’re not fallen. Their suffering-&-death is both real and undeserved, which is an inbalance, bad math, unless it’s made up for somewhere else in the equation. After all, we’re told that "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid" and all. Maybe that’s literal!
Maybe, though the literal sense of those texts is that God will send a great age of peace, during which it will be as if all strife–even between animals–will be eliminated. There may be an even more literal fulfillment in the next life–if animals have souls that can survive death–but we don’t have strong reason to think that it will happen in this one.
As to whether animals have a posthumous happy state, the standard position is that they don’t because their souls are unable to survive death. This is not something that the Church has taught definitively (infallibly), but it is the standard opinion among theologians historically.
(Note for those who may want to be cantankerous about animals being
unfallen: Many would say that they suffer bad effects due to our fall,
but that doesn’t mean that they themselves sinned. I also would be
hesitant to say that carnivorism only came into the universe with the
fall of man. I tend to go with Aquinas in saying that human death entered the world through the fall of man, but animal death was already there.)
You’re right, though, that there is a bad math problem here: Many animals do seem to live very short lives in which they suffer more than they benefit, making it look like they come out on the negative side of the equation, which is hard to square with God’s justice and mercy.
This isn’t a problem (or not nearly as much of one) for humans since our souls survive death and so–no matter how much we’re banged around in this life–God can make it up to us in the next.
But how can we solve the equation for animals? How can we make sure that they get more good out of existence than bad? It would seem that there are several possible ways:
- Animals are sufficiently insignificant in the moral order that it really doesn’t matter what happens to them individually and whether they suffer more than they benefit from life.
- Animals actually do benefit more than they suffer, because (despite how it may appear if you’re a baby mouse being eaten by a predator who has discovered your warm, cozy nest) life ITSELF is of sufficient value that any amount of it overbalances whatever sufferings you may experience in it (at least if you’re an animal).
- Animals have excess sufferings made up to them in a mysterious way that we can’t perceive in the last moments of life.
- Animals really do survive death–at least the ones who need some suffering made up to them–but they don’t survive permanently, the way we do.
- Animals do survive permanently the way we do.
Each of these has benefits and problems associated with it. The standard account would presumably go in the direction of #1 or #2.
#5, though, seems to be the most common sensically attractive to many (especially children suffering from the loss of a pet), though it isn’t the way most theologians have gone historically.
An especially creative solution (that comes from C. S. Lewis, if I recall correctly) to what to tell a child who is grieving for a pet is that the pet will be in heaven "if you need it" since God will certainly let us have everything we need in heaven. I’ve used that one myself in answering questions on the Catholic Answers Live kids’ show.
