Paul McCarney and PETA congratulate Pope

From a recent interview by the Vice President of PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals], Dan Mathews of Sir Paul McCartney.

D[an]: There is some exciting news: The last Pope was the first to say that animals have souls, and now Pope Benedict has come out against factory farming, saying it makes a mockery of God’s creatures. As someone who was raised a Catholic, do you have a message for him?

P[aul]: God bless him! I think it would be fantastic if someone in his position who’s able to reach so many people took a strong stance on that, because one of PETA’s strongest points, and one of mine, is compassion. That certainly is a basic tenet of the Catholic religion. I think it would be terrific if he took a strong stance and urged people to come out against that kind of thing.


First, a correction - the Catholic Church has always believed that animals have souls, just not human/rational souls. They have animal souls.
Second, don't expect the Catholic Church to give up meet [except on Friday's] any time soon.

However, in the reference which is made - in fact an interview with then Cardinal Ratzinger - the now pope does call animals our "companions in creation" and states that while it is moral to use animals for food,

...we cannot just do whatever we want with them. . . . 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.