Their names are Shadow, Butch, Misty, Rusty, Sparky, Sunshine, Esther, Marty and Spunky. They are cats, some former strays, some tiger-striped. But to Jan Fredericks of Wayne, N.J., they are family, they are God’s creatures and deserving of compassion.
And in Pope Benedict XVI, Ms. Fredericks, the chairwoman of the fledgling American branch of Catholic Concern for Animals, believes that she has found a kindred spirit: Along with an enormous entourage and a message of peace, the Pope brought with him to the United States a lifelong love of cats.
Benedict’s kindness toward the strays of Rome is already the stuff of Vatican legend. His house in Germany, its garden guarded by a cat statue, was filled with cats when Benedict lived there full time before he was posted to the Vatican in 1982.
And Benedict is, without a doubt, the first pope to have had an authorized biography of him written by a cat — Chico, a ginger tabby who lives across the road from Benedict’s old house in Germany.
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I enjoyed the article. It was well written and done respectively.
I’m glad you liked it. I was also struck by how respectfully the author wrote about the subject. The way a pet lover might feel differently toward his or her religious leader because of his own feelings toward animals is a very complicated, very human phenomenon.
In a class I took at my University on “man’s relationship to nature in western civilization” we learned a lot about St. Francis of Assisi, and I was totally fascinated. Anything about religion and animals reminds me of him now.