For those of you not in the know, or who have blocked out the truth, Original Sin means that you were a wretched creature before you were even born. Before you were even conceived! When you were still an idea in the mind of God, as my mother used to say, you had already committed the ultimate evil of being about to be a human.
Huh? That’s right. Before your nervous system had even developed, evil intentions filled that blob on the ultrasound.
Good Lord, do Catholics consider all life to be evil? Well, no. Animals are considered innocent. They don’t do bad things on purpose. They are hardwired to fight and kill and look cute without makeup on.
So are we, without the cute. Yet the Catholic story goes that we have souls and other animals don’t. Souls are inherently corrupt like a computer hard disk that is bad right out of the box. There is nothing you can do with it except yell at the manufacturer.
The good news is that your soul has a religious warranty that enables it to be sent out for repair. Other animals are SOL; they simply die and are gnawed down to their innocent little bones in some backyard.
Try explaining that to first graders in Sunday school.
“Susie, innocent Fido has died and become nothing but fertilizer with a few crunchy bits. But you, dear Susie, are bad bad bad and will die and then live forever with the X-men!”
Who would little Susie, who doesn’t even know what the word innocent means, choose to be?
Once kids have bought into the notion that they and they alone have immortal souls, they are then ripe to be shamed and guilted about their very existence. Somebody did them a huge favor even though they didn’t deserve it. Other creatures, declared innocent in Sunday school, die for good.
Wow. That human get-out-of-death almost for free card is very powerful.
Fortunately a lot of people with Catholic roots believe differently about animals. They sense their pets’ presence after they die. They see the ghost of Fluffy on the stairs, for just a second, and hear her mewl from inside the closet.
Catholic hunters often say a guilty little prayer after killing their prey. It’s a mental mumble aimed at the soul of the animal who will become dinner or the subject of beer-soaked tales.
I am waiting for the ghost of Fido to bite someone in church. Bite so hard that it breaks the skin and leaves bloody teeth marks on the arm held up in front of everyone. Everyone will claim that it was their departed Fido who did it. Their Fido was special enough to get into heaven.
Don’t believe Fido is a divine messenger? Bite me.
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