Review: Will our pets go to heaven?

The fondest memories of my earliest childhood include those of my beloved pets: Zena, my black Labrador, my cat Saturn and my New Forest pony Diamond. More recently, I treasured my black Labrador, Dara, whom I named for theological reasons. Dara means “full of compassion” in Hebrew. As a family, we witnessed her slow, untimely death from an unrecognized tick-borne disease while sailing back from New York to Southampton in the summer of 2017, after I had been working in the United States for six years.

Dara, aged just 3, held us in complete trust. The Roman Catholic priest on the cruise ship resisted, at least at first, saying any last prayers for our dying companion. I knew with a firm instinct, rather than from a well-worked-out theology, that Dara had a place in heaven. Her ability to suffer without complaint, and our sense of helplessness at her demise, witnessed to her courage and ability to stir up compassion in us.

A Heaven for Animals: A Catholic Case and Why It Matters, a readable and engaging new book by Christopher Steck, S.J., is dedicated to all those who have loved an animal and hope to see it again. With piercing honesty, he faces the ethical tensions within the Roman Catholic tradition that have swung between arguments for either wanting to use other animals for the sake of human convenience or showing them compassion. The Catholic Church has never formally rejected the idea that animals are in heaven. This leaves room for theological creativity.

Steck’s book is like a jigsaw puzzle that helps us to see why it is that animals are indeed necessarily included in the Christian story of salvation. He goes further than just considering what happens to our pets when they die, even if that is his starting point. Rather, he considers likely differences in what salvation might look like between animals, from those that are intelligent, sentient and companionable creatures through to gnats and worms.

Steck believes that we need to clear some theological ground before coming to any conclusions about what happens to animals at death. The Second Vatican Council marked a significant shift in the Catholic Church’s position. It moved from an acceptance of animal use almost to the point of cruelty, and a complete lack of direct moral duties to animals, to opening the door to a more universal sense of God’s love for all creatures.

Why? Theologically, the retrieval of the idea of the cosmic scope of Christology and eschatology from the early church played a role. Catholic theologians wanting to press for a more inclusive approach also turned to the Bible as a source of inspiration, drawing on the theme of God’s compassion.

Steck doesn’t completely dismiss Aquinas’s refusal to allow animals immortality based on the Thomistic argument that they don’t have an immortal, rational soul. Rather, he uses a divide common among those interested in animal rights to argue that sentient creatures, especially intelligent creatures with a sense of consciousness, could, in theory at least, have a bodily resurrection appropriate for their kinds. The salvation of other simpler animals (and presumably plants) would be caught up in salvation history in a very different way.

Evolutionary theories have challenged philosophies and theologies of sharp human separation from animals. Growing cultural awareness of ecological breakdown has forced a greater sense of connection with the earth and its creatures. But Steck is also aware of animal suffering and what could be termed the natural cruelty built into ecological and evolutionary processes. How do we begin to make sense of that suffering in the light of belief in a loving creator God?

For Steck, the ancient theological idea of a cosmic fall applies: Humanity’s original fall into sin also had an impact on the lives of other creatures. He doesn’t, however, consider why that suffering was going on within the animal kingdom before humans ever appeared on the scene. This would only make sense if the narrative of paradise, creation and the fall is symbolic rather than chronological. Steck is more concerned with emphasizing the ideas of cosmic covenant, stemming from God’s Noahic covenant with all creation in Genesis, and the kingdom of God, pointing to the future ideal of a just and harmonious order.

I wasn’t surprised to find references to Pope Francis scattered throughout the book, given that Francis took his name from the patron saint of ecology. He also cared about the poorest members of the human community and Mother Earth, who, as he says, “is one of the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor” (“Laudato Si’,” No. 2). In several places in “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis hints at the position developed in Steck’s book. Pope Francis did not claim our pets would be in heaven (contrary to some news reports), but he did claim that God cares for the smallest of creatures, and that all creatures are within the scope of Christ’s redemption. Our journey with others is “in union with all creatures” (No. 244) and “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place” (No. 243).

Others involved in animal theology and ethics criticized Pope Francis for not saying enough about the ethical treatment of animals. But Steck builds on what he finds and argues for an intermediary ethical position. I agree with Steck that resisting factory farming is an appropriate ethical response to the evils such practices inflict on both human workers and animals. However, he seems to allow some ethical leeway where it would be difficult for the sake of collective social harmony to refuse food that has its origin in factory farming. These are structural sins that Steck does not really address.

I was also interested to see the reference to the work of a new doctor of the church, St. John Henry Newman. He claimed, in a way that sounds quite modern, that animals who suffer cruelty in domestic settings are joined to the suffering of Christ on the cross. Our charity, therefore, should extend to all creatures.

Hans Urs von Balthasar is another theologian not necessarily associated with animal welfare. Steck draws on von Balthasar’s understanding of the Trinity that proposes an “acting space in God.” This is presumably to make his dogmatic discussion more accessible, though I prefer von Balthasar’s own terminology of “theo-drama.”

Steck extends von Balthasar and proposes that the Holy Spirit is the person in the Trinity who can somehow enable assent to God among sentient, conscious animals, so that they are caught up into the life of heaven. Certainly, if I think back on the animals I have known and loved, I perceive them as having agency and personality. Their drama is intertwined with mine, and helped shape me into the kind of theologian that I have become.

Steck intended this book to be an accessible version of an earlier, more academic book that he published on the same topic. I think he has largely succeeded in this task. Pope Francis hinted at a life for animals in heaven and was not always fully consistent with some of his ethical statements on animal use. Steck has managed to navigate this complex territory with cogent theological and ethical arguments. It deserves to be widely read, appreciated and discussed.

This article appears in November 2025.

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