Do Animals Go to Heaven?

This is a longstanding conversation in the Catholic Church. A lot of people say no.

The conventional thinking is that although animals have souls, their souls cease to exist at death. While “higher” animals are conscious and clearly feel emotions, this logic goes, they lack a moral sense. Therefore they cannot merit salvation. But this idea of the animal soul is from Aristotle, not the Bible.

I think this is illogical on its face. Physical things die. We have no evidence that spiritual things can ever die, and that would include animal souls. Think about it. All things we have experienced live on in memory. Memory is their spiritual form, and unlike their physical form, it endures. All memories are in principle eternal. (There is a distinction here between what is in the storehouse memory, and what we are able to retrieve to consciousness; these are two different things).

You might say, but our memories disappear when we die. But that is purely tautological: it is assuming that a soul can die. If a soul is spirit, our evidence is that it cannot.

A second point is that animals can clearly suffer. Would God, a loving God, permit this without some final consolation? The fact that animals cannot sin, and therefore cannot merit heaven, through acts of morality, is not relevant: all suffering is redemptive. This is true for humans; why would it not be true for animals?

And the argument that animals cannot merit heaven through their moral acts seems irrelevant, since none of us can merit heaven through our moral acts.

What about the Bible?

The Bible describes heaven in detail in the Apocalypse (aka Revelations, the last book), and while it does not mention animals, it does talk about all nature being redeemed, even all physical things being redeemed, and it does mention fruit trees. Why would there be plants, yet no animals? So it stands to reason there are animals in heaven.

You might object that Apocalypse describes the end of time. Animals may rise when a new heaven and a new earth appear, but not until then.

This seems like a dubious distinction. In eternity, is there really still a distinction between present and future? Alternately, if the animals simply sleep for a few thousand years, as do our physical bodies, before entering heaven, does this make much difference in terms of eternity?

As further Biblical evidence, there were animals in Eden: God apparently made them to enjoy paradise. They lost this original paradise because of man’s sin.

It follows that, if man is now redeemed, they are as well.

A separate argument is that, if a man dies and goes to heaven, and he has loved an animal, he would be happier if that animal were there as well. Aside from any merits of the animal—and the animal cannot have sinned and therefore merited punishment—the happiness of the man would require that animal to be in heaven.

Next bit of evidence: people in so-called “near death experiences” usually see departed relatives coming to meet them.

But at least some see departed pets.

To cap it off, Pope Francis has actually recently weighed in. In Laudato Si, he writes:

"Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all."

Animals, therefore, must go to heaven. It may be that, to them, the experience is not the same as it is to us. To us, the essence is the eternal presence. They may not be aware of this. But it will at least for them be an infinitely happy place, full of runs in open fields, like Eden before the Fall.