Christian or not

Frequently I have been encountering the concept that no “Christian minded” person would be involved modern agriculture. Here, once again, Matthew Scully, in promoting his own book, is attempting to tie foi gras (of which consumption was just outlawed in California) to all other types of meat and egg production and suggest that they “are not, in God’s view, proper treatment of the animals.” This is one area where we had better all understand how to address it and start today.

What are you thoughts? Send to me trent@loostales.com

From Dallas News

Matthew Scully: Factory farm meat not on menu for Feast of St. Francis

In the week leading up to today's Feast of St. Francis, it fell to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to decide whether the sale and production of foie gras should be terminated in California on the grounds of cruelty to animals. At first, the governor called the proposal another "silly" example of a legislature with too much time on its hands. But then Wednesday he signed the bill into law, apparently finding that the cruelty questions are not so easily shrugged off.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, leader of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was asked recently to weigh in on these very questions. “Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."

“Sometimes the most radical thing is to be confronted by one's own standards, and if the cardinal is correct here, then we've got some real problems. Across America and the world, millions of our companions in creation are locked away in industrial "mass-confinement" farms, never feeling soil or sunshine. If they ever see pasture land, it is only from trucks hauling them to industrial abattoirs that kill at a hellish pace of thousands per hour.”

“It was said of St. Francis that "he walked the earth like the pardon of God." What would this man make of our factory farms, and what Christian in his presence would dare defend them?”