My Son David's Dog, Charlie Brown (1999-2012) Song: "No Tears in Heaven" by C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Why All Dogs Don't Go To Heaven - The Catholic View

I Cor 15:13-20

A loving benediction is conferred upon human beings by our pet animals. Perhaps that's why we value them as we do. They ask little, and they give us so much in return. Sometimes they even sacrifice their lives for us. Jesus said that no man has greater love.

Such was the case with our family dog, Silver. Silver was my preschool boys' best friend and playmate, She was a big, incredibly gentle dog, mostly German shepherd. One day she broke the chain we used to keep her in the yard when the neighborhood mean kid, Raji, rode by on his bicycle. Obviously under the impression that Raji was menacing the boys, she was charging directly at Raji's throat, teeth bared, when she was (thankfully!) hit by a car. Thanks to modern veteranary care, Silver survived, but had to be put down a few days later when it was obvious that she would not recover. Raji (and I) have God and the inattentive driver to thank that Silver didn't get the chance to tear off his head!

The boys, of course, were devastated. After seeing "All Dogs Go To Heaven" some years later, the subject of Silver came up. Sadly, I had to explain to them that our religion maintains that all dogs do NOT go to heaven. They don't go anywhere. Unlike people, they don't have souls. They just die.

Rest In Peace, Silver!

We were reminded of canine mortality again recently by the death of my son David's dog, Charlie. A friend of David's found a garbage bag full of puppies on Christmas of 1999, and gave David one. David named him "Charlie Brown," and Charlie and David were companions ever since. Charlie was a good dog. He used to sleep under the dining room table until about ten minutes before David came home from work, and then would wake up and wait for him by the door. How he knew David was coming, given that he was asleep and David's odd hours, I don't know. He peed and pooped on the carpet only a few times, and then always in hidden places. David always cleaned up after him so that I wouldn't find out and make him get rid of Charlie.

Charlie almost certainly saved David from drowning in Hurricane Katrina; David said he didn't want to evacuate, but Charlie was so nervous that David decided to go to Tennessee to visit his sister and her dog during the storm. The land where David's home was washed away, but, thanks to Charlie's doggy intuition, David and Charlie weren't there.

About seven years later, Charlie was injured. David thought that he was still enjoying life, but eventually Charlie was obviously not well and he quit eating, and David decided it was time for Charlie to be put out of his misery. He put Charlie to sleep for the last time on October 19th, 2012. He told me on the telephone about an hour later that "Charlie is better now."

The Christian belief about what happens after death revolves around the assertion that, unlike all other material beings, the human being has a component that is not subject to physical laws. All living things die because of a property called "entropy" which basically says that physical processes tend to go from order to disorder. Of course, the ancient Christian philosophers didn't know about entropy, all they knew was that living things invariably died, decayed and were eventually gone. On the other hand, Jesus promised that people would live forever if they followed his teaching. Resolution of this apparent contradiction requires that it has to be true that (1) whatever it is that makes a person who he is must be something that doesn't die, and (2) eventually every one of these undead parts will be reunited with its own body. Presto, you have the doctrine of the soul and the general resurrection. The part of the human person that doesn't die is the soul. It's not a thing in itself so much as it is a part of a thing, namely, a part of an individual human being, like his liver or brain.

The atoms that once constituted the body of Ugg, the person who invented fire, are still around somewhere, so one could say that Ugg's body is all in pieces, possibly parts of other human beings. We believe Ugg's soul exists now as a separate thing, but it's still just a part of Ugg. The fact that we can't see it doesn't necessarily mean that it's "somewhere else." It could be invisible, hidden or camouflaged somehow. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Nonetheless, Ugg won't be complete again until he gets his hairy body back in the general resurrection, which means it has to be reassembled again for that to happen. The precise process by which that is going to be accomplished is something Catholics don't know, but presumably God does.

The uniqueness of the human soul is obvious from the uniqueness of human activity. Other living things develop, consume nutrients, excrete waste, grow, reproduce and die. That's pretty much it. Some of them herd sheep or win races, but always under human supervision. None of them has ever been known independently to design a computer or manipulate the stock market. This unique characteristic of human nature makes it possible for humans to make rational choices and modify their behavior accordingly. We don't have to behave like dumb animals even if we want to. It also makes it possible for us to observe the world around us and draw conclusions. One of the conclusions that humans can come to is that there is a rational being we call "God" and that they have a responsibility to Him. If humans don't have a God to worship, they will worship stones. (It's happened several times throughout history, and maybe in earlier cultures that we don't even know about!) It's part of our nature! All human beings (but only humans) are capable of belief, choice, virtue, and sin. Living humans are very complicated creatures.

We talk about "going" somewhere after we die as if heaven and hell were different places. I suspect that the Christian world is strongly influenced by Dante's "Inferno," "Purgatorio" and "Paridiso," which were specific places, but they were fantasy lands, like Middle Earth, Narnia, or Oz, and bear no relation to the real world. Strictly speaking, the soul doesn't "go" anywhere because it not material and therefore there is no "where" for it to be or go to. Physical beings are made of "stuff." They take up space and can be located in the space/time continuum. Not so with the soul part of the human being. The body which it animates, being material, is always somewhere. Even dead, its constituent atoms and subatomic particles are someplace. But the associated soul isn't anywhere at all, so it doesn't "go" anywhere else after death.

Living things are what are called "state machines" in computer science. A state machine can go from one state or condition to another such state or condition, but its operation is defined by the fact that it can only go from certain states to certain other states. It's like driving a car in North America. You can go from the state of Iowa only to the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri. If you want to go from the state of Iowa to the State of California, first you have to go to one of the states just mentioned, then to another state, and eventually to one of the states (Oregon, Nevada, Arizona or Baja California) from which you can get to the State of California. The next state that you can go to depends in part on the state you're in now.

While a being is alive, every cell of it is in one of several almost infinitely complicated possible states and moves from one permitted state to another under the direction of what, for want of a better term, is called the "animating principle." In humans, the animating principle is the soul. In dogs, earthworms, trees and grass, it is a complex set of chemical forces and interactions which cease when the being dies. The change of states of living things is governed by the animating principle. The change of states of dead things is governed by physical laws and entropy, so that the dead thing, including the human body, begins to decay away until it eventually reaches physical and chemical equilibrium with its environment. Dead humans are pretty dull!

The Catholic Church teaches essentially that human beings, body and soul, move from each permitted state to another from the moment of their conception until death, whenever that is. After death, the body ceases to be animated by the soul, which is then fixed for all eternity in the state it was in when the human being died, while the state of the body changes slowly from order to disorder. The soul is immediately and irrevocably released from the limitation of having to act through the body and getting its information from the body's limited senses. If the soul is infused with sanctifying grace ("salvation" in Protestant terminology), it immediately perceives within itself the glory of God. If it is separated from God through sin, it is immediately aware of what it has forever forfeited.

The idea of being thrown into a blazing pit by an angry God to be tortured for all eternity for disobeying "His laws" is a part of Protestant Christianity and Islam that is not included in Roman Catholicism. So is the idea that one has to be a practicing Christian to be saved (whatever that means) "through Jesus Christ." The Catholic view is that God condemns no one, and that Jesus Christ, being God, is in fact the savior of mankind, regardless of what one believes about it. All persons, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. can be saved through Him, in His name, if they conscientiously do what they believe is necessary for salvation. I go into detail about this elsewhere, so I won't do it here. Basically, we design, build, modify, furnish, decorate, refurbish and rearrange our future during our mortal lifetime, and live there eternally afterward. If God, however one understands Him, is part of that future, it's called "heaven." If He's not, it's called "hell."

Because the soul is only a part of a human being, Catholics believe that it is necessary for the soul to be reunited with the risen bodies after the general resurrection. Otherwise, they wouldn't be saved people, they'd be saved parts of people. Jesus and his friend Lazarus, whom he raised from the dead, showed us how this is done. One's soul is in the same state it was in when he dies, but the body is "fixed up." Jesus demonstrated that he was still wounded, but he wasn't apparently suffering. Lazarus didn't smell as bad as people expected. Isn't God clever?

Catholics believe in a state called purgatory, as a logical conclusion of the apparent contradiction that only the just can be saved and only God is just. Like North America, purgatory isn't mentioned at all in Scripture, but that doesn't prove that it doesn't exist. Catholics believe that it is a state in which the soul is aware of God as well as the temporary separation from Him which has resulted from the person's less than perfect love. The nuns in school used to describe this in gory detail and made purgatory sound really awful, but the word itself means a place where you go to vomit to get rid of what makes you sick to your stomach. The vomiting isn't at all pleasant, but you feel better afterward. I don't know the exact experience one has in purgatory (and I hope not to find out), but the souls in that state are assured of salvation. They are "happy souls." They have "made it." They are irrevocably "saved," members of the Communion of Saints.

We say the souls are "in" heaven, purgatory or hell after they die, and that eventually the souls "in" purgatory will "get into" heaven, but the souls "in" hell won't. But again, they aren't really "in" any place, so there isn't any place for them to "get into."

There is a common unofficial Catholic belief in a place or state called "limbo," very much like the concept of "paradise" in Islam, (and some Christian concepts of "heaven") in which the souls of unbaptized good people and infants exist in a state of natural happiness for all eternity. The word itself has come to mean a region or condition of oblivion or neglect. The source of this belief is the problem of what happens to unbaptized people who are not wicked sinners. The Church used to teach that they "go down into hell" but noted some time later that this did not mean the hell of the damned but some other kind of hell which is, after all, simply the state (or place) of all the dead. When we say "he descended into hell" in the Creed, what it really means is that Jesus really, truly, no kiddin' died, not that He went to the place of damned souls. It is absolutely Church teaching that heaven is so special that you can't even experience it unless you have the supernatural power conferred by sanctifying grace, which it is the function of baptism to provide.

There is the argument that it doesn't seem fair that God would reward people who merely got sloshed with water as babies with eternal bliss and send unbaptized people who endured torture and death for their Christian faith, before they had the opportunity to be baptized, someplace else. The Church weasels out of this by proclaiming a "baptism of blood" as being sufficient for salvation. This is how we justify claiming the Holy Innocents as saints all these centuries. In recent centuries, theologians have also gradually and, it appears to me, reluctantly, conceded that there is a "baptism of desire" by which the desire is sufficient for salvation if one dies before his desire is fulfilled in baptism. This squares with Jesus' assertion that one must be "born again of water and the Holy Spirit" (John 3:3, 7) and his failure to mention that when people asked him what they had to do to live forever. (Matthew 10:22; 19:16, 17; 24:13, Mark 10:17-21; 13:13; Luke 10:25-37; 18:18-22; John 5:39; 6:54; 10:28, etc.) (Catholics believe that Jesus is your Savior, not that acknowledging that fact gets you saved.) Of the catechumens, even unbaptized ones, Vatican II says, "...the Church already embraces them as its own."

To the question of "well, what happens to babies who die without baptism?" the unofficial answer is, "they go to limbo." This underscores the definite Catholic teaching that some kind of baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation, because otherwise the person just doesn't have the capability to understand or appreciate it, rather like a hamster at Disneyland. (Can you imagine being a hamster at Disneyland?) The fact that sacramental baptism is so simple is ample proof of how much God earnestly desires that everyone be saved. One can be a Catholic and believe in limbo, but my personal belief is that God doesn't always tell us what we don't need to know, and how He saves innocent dying babies (including those who are murdered before they are born) is really none of our business. We don't pay sufficient attention to what is our business as it is!

The Church seems in recent years to be leaning towards this view. The official position is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1261, which says:

"As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: 'But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me,' allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism...."

Catholic theologians teach that the animating principle is what makes a living thing distinct from other living things. In humans, this is the part that doesn't die because it is not subject to the forces that cause death. The animating principles of living animals and plants are mortal and die along with the rest of the organism they animate. Thus, there is no life after death for cats, dogs, gerbils, trees, flowers, bacteria, etc. if they actually are what we believe them to be. Even if there were, living things other than people don't commit sins, lacking the capability to do so, so they would all end up "in" heaven (or perhaps in limbo, if they hadn't been baptized). The ability to commit sin is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings.

While the Church does NOT teach that the souls of animals (and plants) live on after death, it says nothing about the possibility of being part of the world after the general resurrection. The Catholic view is that the same bodies that people had will rise in the state they were in just before they were "undeniably and reliably dead" as their pets were, and be reunited with the undead souls to make them complete living human beings once again. The saved will continue to be saved, and the unsaved will continue to be unsaved. Beyond that, take your pick. It seems reasonable to me that all those people will have to live somewhere, and that it would be pretty dull ("in heaven") without pets. It is just as easy for God to resurrect Charlie, Silver, Shamu, Phar Lap, Trigger and Morris the Cat as it would be to make new ones. He could simply restore them in a "fixed up state" similarly to human bodies before they died, and they would be just as they were, all memories intact, frisky and playful. He is certainly that clever, after all! The restoration of state would be kind of like continuing a road trip through New Mexico after an interruption there to get married and raise a family.

Isaiah the Prophet explained it this way:

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.." (Isaiah 11:6-9)

The official teaching of the Church is that animals don't go anywhere when they die. They just die. A dead dog is just a dead dog. Thus, Pope Francis' fabricated offhand remark that "Paradise is open to all God's creatures" requires a little interpretation.

The knowledge regarding the dead dog (and other things) is believed to be eternal, to reside in the immortal personality of the dog's human. Humans and dogs have been loving and faithful companions for all of human history, and there is paleological evidence that dogs have been helping and protecting our species for at least 30,000 years! There is strong evidence that the evolutionary pressure that separated dogs from their wolf ancestors was the benefit derived from associating with humans. In effect, wolf-like beings became dogs by choosing to be companions to man, not the other way around. It was they who chose us to be their friends. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a fundamental psychological bond between humans and dogs, by means of which they were instrumental in pushing our species over the edge to intelligence. (Catholics see no problem in the belief that evolution is the process God used to make us.) Silver and Charlie were certainly important parts of our lives. Is there something of them that still resides in us, ready to restore them again in the afterlife? Do pets "get into heaven" in the bosom of human souls? I just don't know.

I'll mention in passing another idea that is not opposed to Catholic teaching, but isn't supported by it, either. We know that things are not always as they seem, and the animating principle of what appears to be a cat or a little dog that knows when people are dying and tries to comfort them in their last moments (or just greets us happily when we come home and knows when that will be) could, in fact, be something else, like the manifestation of an angel, which Catholics believe will be "around" in heaven. I don't hold with this idea, but I could and still be a good Catholic. Like I say, I just don't know.

David had shared almost half his lifetime with Charlie, and Charlie shared virtually all of his with David, with his wife and her dog, and their children. Their lives had their ups and downs, but each knew that he could depend utterly on the other. Charlie was an old dog, 91 years old in "dog years," and taught David many things. Caring for him made David a better boy, a better man, a better son, a better husband, and a better father. In the end, David gave Charlie the gift of freedom from suffering, and Charlie gave David the gift of doing the right thing, no matter how difficult. They owed each other their lives. I think he and David repaid each other many times for their kindness and concern.

Jews disagree on whether there is a life after death. The mourner's kaddish avoids the controversy by pointing out that "eternal life" can mean many things. I think it applies to beloved pets, including Charlie Brown and Silver.

"The departed whom we now remember have entered into the peace of life eternal. They still live on earth in the acts of goodness they performed and in the hearts of those who cherish their memory. May the beauty of their life abide among us as a loving benediction."

Would that such a thing might be said of each of us.

Rest in Peace, Charlie!

John Lindorfer