Vegetarian
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
13 Dec 2009
When I was growing up I never met a vegetarian. Even today the idea makes me a bit uneasy for reasons I don't fully understand. One of my bishop friends is a vegetarian and he is distressingly normal, a thoroughly good bloke and amazingly fit and healthy for his age.
Despite this counter example I was still relieved to discover that Hitler was a vegetarian who predicted that the future of the world would be vegetarian. In fact this might be a project for a next generation Human Rights Commission which could sponsor a survey to establish that humans have no right to eat animal meat!
Hitler took this vegetarianism from a German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche who believed God was dead and that it was therefore absurd to claim that humans, unlike animals, are made in God's image, unique in nature and superior to all other forms of natural life.
If there is no God then humans are just another form of animal life, clever and luckier than the other animals, but not essentially different. So extremist Greens suggest that animal welfare is as important as human welfare and even usually moderate Greens can argue that large projects, with consequences for the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of people, can be prohibited because of the bad effects on some animals, such as turtles who breathe through their bottoms.
Political correctness warps traditional human understandings and damages our sense of perspective. All of God's creation is good, although the law of the jungle rules in nature, evidence of the cosmic flaw, of the original sin that helps explain the food chain where species prey upon one another. Droughts, bushfires, earthquakes remind us nature can be tough and capricious.
Humans are the centerpiece and crown of imperfect creation and animals can and should be used for their welfare. The first followers of Christ were fishermen and he sent them out to try again after they had fished in vain all night.
Christians are prohibited from being cruel to animals and share the universal human obligation to respect the planet and preserve the environment for future generations. Francis of Assisi is a Christian saint and genius and he believed God came among us as a man, not as an angel, not as an animal.
Christians are humanitarians and humanists, because humans are central to creation under God. Christians can be meat eaters or vegetarians but pretending nature is like Disneyland is no substitute for God.
