Writing to the Catholic Times on 9 March 1894, the noted anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe claimed that within the past decade, two ‘entirely opposite’ views of vivisection had come from subsequent Archbishops of Westminster, and thus from the nominal heads of the Roman Catholic Church in England.Footnote 1 Cobbe was referring first to Cardinal-Archbishop Henry Edward Manning, who during the eleven years prior to his death in 1892 had called for abolition of the practice. She was referring secondly to Monsignor John S. Vaughan, brother of Manning’s successor Archbishop Herbert Vaughan. Writing from the archbishop’s residence, John Vaughan defended the practice of vivisection, albeit on condition that the experiments were medically necessary. Other prominent Catholics weighed in on this issue between 1878 and 1914, with calls for abolition from bishop of Nottingham Edward Bagshawe, Fr. Wilfrid Lescher O.P., and prominent Catholic lay writers Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, W.S. Lilly, Charles Weld-Blundell, and Edward Berdoe. Equally eminent Catholic clerics joined in Vaughan’s defence of the practice, notably Joseph Rickaby S.J., George Tyrrell S.J., John Gerard S.J., and the Reverend Robert F. Clarke. Their views too were defended by Catholic laypeople. The debate within the Catholic community reached its apogée between 1888 and 1903, and was conducted in books, pamphlets, and the popular press, including Catholic newspapers such as The Tablet, The Catholic Times, The Dublin Review, and The Month. Non-Catholic leaders of the anti-vivisectionist movement, notably Frances Power Cobbe, Stephen Coleridge, Ernest Bell, and Henry Salt, commented upon and replied to the statements of Catholic writers, making a number of claims concerning the role of Catholic doctrine in the vivisection controversy. Such statements evoked replies from Catholic writers, so that the debate within the British Catholic community was part and parcel of the wider debate.
What lay behind this division within the Victorian Catholic Church? To what extent was it motivated by divisions among Catholics over larger questions, such as the rights of non-human animals and the duties of humans toward them?Footnote 2 An examination of Catholics’ speeches, letters, books, and pamphlets on vivisection indicate that Cobbe’s claim was an exaggeration; far from revealing two distinct schools of thought, these Catholic writings show a wide range of views concerning animal-human relations, with some disagreements within the anti-vivisectionist side and some significant agreements between it and the defenders of vivisection.
Although Catholic writers on both sides of the vivisection issue adopted many of the arguments of the wider British community, a study of the debate within the Catholic community is useful for several reasons. First, it bridges a gap between studies of the Victorian Catholic Church and studies of the anti-vivisectionist movement prior to the First World War. Biographical studies of the leading Catholic participants in this vivisection debate make little mention of their participation.Footnote 3 Studies by Lloyd Stevenson and later by Chien-hui Li of the role played by religious groups in the vivisection controversy do not examine the works of specific Roman Catholic leaders other than Manning.Footnote 4 In a short piece Daniel A. Dombrowski describes the debate over animal rights between Frances Power Cobbe and the Jesuits Rickaby and Tyrrell, but confines himself largely to a critique of the Jesuits’ logic and does not place their exchange within the wider social and political context of the vivisection debate. In an even briefer summary, E.S. Turner quotes Manning and Rickaby but misinterprets a statement by Lescher without including his name.Footnote 5
Other studies of the vivisection issue include Roman Catholic scholars primarily within the context of the overall British debate, which included Anglicans, Nonconformists, Evangelicals, Theosophists, agnostics, and atheists, and seldom go beyond Manning’s well-known statements.Footnote 6 According to Richard French the vivisection question ‘had no theological bearings that made of it a sectarian issue – with perhaps one exception –’, and that exception was the Catholic Church’s teaching ‘that it is a theological error to hold that man has any duty toward animals; he has, however, a duty to God and to himself not to treat animals wantonly or cruelly.’ ‘The issue’, continues French, ‘was almost entirely academic in Britain because of Cardinal Manning’s very public allegiance to the movement.’Footnote 7 In a more recent study Chien-hui Li states: ‘The support of leading religious figures was so valued precisely because of the lack of official support from certain Christian communities, as was the case with Cardinal Manning when the Roman Church’s denial of humans’ duty to nonhuman animals was widely known.’Footnote 8 Further study of the debate within the Catholic community, particularly after Manning’s death in 1892, reveals that such ‘denial’ was more nuanced than French and Li suggest.
This debate shows a general theological consensus among later Victorian Catholics concerning the roles of animals vis à vis humans. In applying those teachings to the specific issue of vivisection, however, these clerics needed to choose from amongst the conflicting biological and social arguments made by the wider anti-vivisectionist and pro-vivisectionist communities. Did moral theology predispose a given Catholic individual to take specific biological and social views, or vice versa? Both are clear possibilities, but the apparent pro-vivisectionism of Vaughan, Rickaby, and Tyrrell sprang primarily from their academically-oriented focus on moral theology, while the arguments of Manning, Bagshawe, and Lescher were driven more by social, political, and scientific views. Andreas-Holger Maehle commented in 1993 that many of the social and cultural forces behind Victorian anti-vivisectionism had relatively little influence on the ethical arguments themselves.Footnote 9 Catholic figures’ arguments during this period challenge that assumption.
Legislation and public debate
Vivisection, ‘the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study’, had become ‘common scientific practice’ in western Europe by the late seventeenth century and was included from then on in discussions of the proper treatment of animals.Footnote 10 It was not until the nineteenth century, however, following the first successful legislation against the mistreatment of cattle in 1822, the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, and then the Protection of Animals Act of 1835 that vivisection emerged as a widely-debated issue among the British public.Footnote 11 Experiments on animals in Britain by Continental physiologists had shocked the British public as early as 1824, and by 1874 increasing public pressure led to the formation of a Royal Commission on Vivisection, whose investigations resulted in the passage in 1876 of the Cruelty to Animals Act, also called the Act to Regulate Vivisection.Footnote 12 This Act stipulated that vivisection experiments must have as their purpose the advancement of knowledge leading to the saving or prolonging of life or to the alleviation of suffering, that anæsthetics must be used in such experiments, and that such experiments were not to be used for educational purposes in medical schools. However, it also provided for exceptions to each of these stipulations, upon certification that the exception was essential to the purpose of the experiment. To prosecute a vivisector, moreover, one had to obtain special permission from the Home Secretary.Footnote 13 As a result, the 1876 Act greatly disappointed many of those who had pressed for its passage. Licences, they held, were easy to obtain, and once licensed, vivisectors could practice without facing any legal threat. The necessary inspection and certification would be performed by officials generally chosen, as one anti-vivisectionist put it, ‘from the fraternity of vivisectors or supporters of vivisectors.’Footnote 14
The frequency of vivisection consequently increased after 1876, along with the prestige of the British medical community. British physicians Joseph Lister, Frederick Treves, and Victor Horsley, among others, followed the lead of Continental physiologists such as Robert Koch, Claude Bernard, and Louis Pasteur in accepting the germ theory, using new surgical techniques, and participating in antitoxin research. This involved experiments on animals as well as observation of patients, so that the definition of ‘vivisection’ came to include not simply the cutting of a live animal but the injection of drugs and disease microbes. By 1900 British and Continental doctors could point to a host of important medical breakthroughs, including the use of ether and chloroform, antiseptics in surgery, and x-rays, as well as Pasteur’s rabies vaccine and the development of antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus.
Ironically, one result of these advances was to make the deliberate infliction of pain, under any circumstances, increasingly anomalous and hence unpopular in Victorian Britain and in the USA. Earlier in the century Enlightenment thinking, increased education, and growing urbanization had led to greater public sensitivity and repugnance toward cruel practices of all sorts.Footnote 15 After the 1840s the use of anæsthetics in particular had led to a significant decline in physical pain as a part of ordinary human life. As a corollary, bodily-invasive judicial punishments such as flogging and birching were coming under increasing attack by organizations such as Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League. Not surprisingly, any painful experiments on animals increasingly called forth objections on ethical grounds from clergymen, literary figures, socialists, feminists, and other public intellectuals whose views often had little in common in other respects.Footnote 16
In 1875 the anti-vivisectionist physician George Hoggan, together with Frances Power Cobbe, Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Lord Shaftsbury, and William Thomson, the Anglican archbishop of York, formed the Victoria Street Society for the Abolition of Vivisection, later titled the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS).Footnote 17 It was by no means the only such society, but it was recognized as the most prominent, and had forty-nine branches by 1911.Footnote 18 It also produced a journal, The Zoophilist, which, together with the Society’s articles and pamphlets, presented the entire range of anti-vivisectionist arguments.
The resultant battle for public opinion between pro- and anti-vivisectionists continued into the twentieth century. The latter group sought legislation either abolishing the practice or regulating it much more closely than the Act of 1876 had done, while the former sought, with increasing success, to convince the public and Parliament that the practice should be allowed as a necessary price for medical progress. The battle was marked by increased polarization and vituperation, with accusations of heartlessness, greed, and godless materialism being met by counter-accusations of anti-scientific blindness, sentimentalism, hypocrisy, and unconcern for human welfare.Footnote 19 A second Royal Commission on Vivisection studied the issue from 1906 to 1912, and in its final report it upheld the value of vivisection and rejected any prohibition of the practice. The failure of the NAVS to push through more restrictive legislation apart from the Dogs Act of 1906, which did little more than prevent police from sending strays to vivisectors, showed that the vivisectors had largely won over the political elites and much of the general public.Footnote 20 As Richard D. Ryder points out, the onset of the First and Second World Wars ‘broke the momentum’ of animal welfare movements generally, and this included anti-vivisectionism. The number of experiments on animals in Britain increased enormously over the course of the twentieth century, no successful prosecutions of vivisectors were ever carried out under the provisions of the 1876 Act, and the next major legislation restraining vivisection in Britain was passed in 1986.Footnote 21
Seeing the issue as primarily a moral and religious one, prominent British anti-vivisectionists such as Cobbe, Shaftsbury, and Stephen Coleridge appealed for support to all Christian churches. The results were disappointing; while some clergymen of every denomination joined the anti-vivisectionists, no church, as an institution, condemned the practice or called for its abolition.Footnote 22 Though approving of kindness to animals, the Roman Catholic Church as an institution made no authoritative pronouncements specifically on vivisection.Footnote 23 This left the British public to look for statements by leading Catholic clerics as indicators of what the Church thought of the practice. In October 1895 the Zoophilist stated: ‘we are anxiously waiting some pronouncement from Roman Catholic dignitaries in this country to the effect that the RICKABY, or perhaps we should say the Jesuit, philosophy does not represent the teaching of the Roman Church on this question.’Footnote 24
For such Catholic dignitaries, questions over vivisection were of three categories, the answers to each of which could both depend upon and determine answers to the others. One category involved the abstract moral issues of animals’ rights, duties, rationality, and souls. Thomist philosophy, as explained earlier in the nineteenth century by Cardinal Tommaso Maria Zigliara, held that animals were given by God to humans for human uses, that such use had to be rational and not wanton, that humans owed it to God, though not to the animals themselves, to treat animals kindly, and that animals’ souls were not rational and hence not immortal.Footnote 25 Such concepts, however, were open to differing interpretations and could be seen as matters of degree, particularly with regard to animal rights and duties.
The second set of questions involved the physical facts of vivisection. Were the vast majority of animal experiments no more painful than the prick of a needle or done under anæsthetic, as the vivisectors claimed, or was there truth to the anti-vivisectionists’ stories of many animals being baked alive, given electric shocks, and being operated on and kept alive in agony after the anæsthetics wore off? Did most of such experiments lead to useful discoveries, as opposed simply to satisfying physiologists’ curiosity or to demonstrating principles in medical schools? Were there ways to reach useful discoveries without vivisection? How much did animals suffer in being killed for food as opposed to being ‘tortured’ in a laboratory?
The third set of questions were of a socio-political nature. Could the bio-medical research community be trusted, without participation by non-scientists, to determine whether an experiment was truly ‘useful’? Was it even possible adequately to regulate vivisection by law? Did vivisectors approach their experiments with compassionate regret or did they delight in them and thus undergo moral degradation? If vivisection dulled the natural compassion of doctors, did it make them more willing or even eager to vivisect humans? Were indigent charity patients being so used in British hospitals, as was apparently the case on the Continent? Did anti-vivisectionists’ love for animals make them less concerned for human welfare? Were such sentimental non-scientists competent to judge scientific questions rationally?
Differing Catholic responses: Manning, Vaughan, and Rickaby
Though not the first Catholic figure to deal with these questions following the passage of the 1876 Act, Cardinal Manning drew by far the greatest attention as a representative of the Catholic Church.Footnote 26 With John Henry Newman the most famous of the Anglican converts to Rome, Manning had been made a cardinal in 1875 and served from 1865 to 1892 as archbishop of Westminster. In a series of speeches to the Victoria Street Society between 1881 and 1887, he gave clear answers to the second and third categories of the above-mentioned questions, though not to the first. Disappointed by the increased frequency of vivisection following the 1876 Act, Manning asserted on 25 June 1881 that the Act had been ineffective, and he called for the complete abolition of vivisection as ‘a detestable practice without scientific result, and immoral in itself.’ Like other anti-vivisectionist speakers, he cited examples of horrific experiments on animals by physiologists. Making the argument that the sufferings of the animals were certainties while the hoped-for benefits were only conjectural and indeed useless, he agreed with his fellow anti-vivisectionists that because vivisection could not be controlled it must be prohibited.Footnote 27 Reflecting Aquinas’ teaching that cruelty to animals led to cruelty to humans, in an 1882 speech Manning asserted that vivisecting surgeons and physicians would sink into a state of moral insensibility, and asked what the ‘term or limit’ of the practice was to be.Footnote 28 Though a non-scientist, he confidently claimed on 26 June 1884 that nine-tenths of vivisectors’ experiments were made to satisfy curiosity and led only to ‘a supposed knowledge, which I believe to be, in large measure, barren of result.’Footnote 29 In his speech of 29 March 1887 Manning insisted that scientists were not impartial or unbiased in judging their own work, and he called for greater transparency and detail in vivisection licensees’ reports.Footnote 30
More sympathetic Catholic attitudes toward vivisection, however, were emerging at this time. The Tablet, a leading Roman Catholic newspaper, had been purchased in 1866 by Herbert Vaughan, later Cardinal Vaughan, and successor to Manning as archbishop of Westminster.Footnote 31 In editorials of 11 March 1882 and 6 December 1884, The Tablet condemned vivisection experiments as they were currently being conducted ‘throughout Europe’, including Britain, as torturous, unnecessary, and even frivolous, and agreed with Manning over the morally-degrading effects of the practice. As an ‘abstract proposition’, however, The Tablet accepted vivisection if it genuinely contributed, in the words of the physician Sir William Gull, to ‘the advancement of beneficent knowledge’ and was conducted with a ‘due sense of proportion between the benefit and the pain.’Footnote 32 In an 1888 article Herbert Vaughan’s brother John S. Vaughan agreed with the latter view and went on to assert that while vivisection experiments could not be justified until they were ‘clearly and unequivocally substantiated,’ the fact of such substantiation was still undecided, and many authorities could be quoted one way or the other.Footnote 33 A priest and former professor of mathematics, John S. Vaughan would by 1908 not only have the title of Monsignor but be described as ‘the brain of the English Roman Catholic community.’Footnote 34
In 1888, Joseph Rickaby S.J. (1845-1932), a philosopher, theologian, and professor at Stonyhurst College, published the first edition of his Moral Philosophy, with a second edition in 1889. In this tract Rickaby explained the bare logic of human-animal relations:
Brute beasts, not having understanding, and therefore not being persons, cannot have any rights... They are of the number of things... We have no duties to them, — not of justice, as is shown: not of religion, unless we are to worship them, like the Egyptians of old; not of fidelity, for they are incapable of accepting a promise... It is not for the present treatise to prove, but to assume, that our nature is not common to brute beasts, but immeasurably above theirs... We have then no duties of charity, nor duties of any kind, to the lower animals, as neither to stocks and stones.
Thus, although humans are not to be wantonly cruel to animals for sport,
there is no shadow of evil resting on the practice of causing pain to animals in sport, where the pain is not the sport itself, but an incidental concomitant of it. Much more in all that conduces to the sustenance of man may we give pain to brutes, as also in the pursuit of science. Nor are we bound to any anxious care to make this pain as little as may be. Brutes are as things in our regard: so far as they are useful to us, they exist for us, not for themselves; and we do right in using them unsparingly for our need and convenience, though not for our wantonness. If then any special case of pain to a brute creature be a fact of considerable value for observation in biological science or the medical art, no reasoned consideration of morality can stand in the way of man making the experiment, yet so that even in the quest of science he be mindful of mercy.Footnote 35
Although Moral Philosophy was published in 1888, its meaning for the vivisection issue was apparently not widely noticed by anti-vivisectionists until 1895, when it came as a ‘shock of surprise’ that it was being taught at Stonyhurst.Footnote 36 Rickaby’s arguments would be repeated frequently by anti-vivisectionists as the debate became more polarized, not least because of Rickaby’s scholarly reputation. His Moral Philosophy would become a popular seminary textbook in Britain and the United States, seeing many editions. Rickaby would go on to join the staff at Campion Hall, Oxford, and would write nearly thirty books over the course of his career.Footnote 37
Echoing Zigliara, Vaughan and Rickaby held that humans owed nothing to animals per se, but that they owed to God, the maker of those animals, obedience to His law of kindness and mercy.Footnote 38 Insofar as he dealt with these concepts, Manning’s positions were similar. Though condemning as absurd and hideous the doctrine ‘that inasmuch as animals are not moral persons we owe them no duties, and that, therefore, the infliction of pain is contrary to no obligation’, he nevertheless admitted in his speech of 29 March 1887: ‘It is perfectly true that obligations and duties are between moral persons, and therefore the lower animals are not susceptible of those moral obligations which we owe to one another’. But, he said, ‘we owe a sevenfold obligation to the Creator of those animals. Our obligation and moral duty is to Him who made them’.Footnote 39 Vaughan and Rickaby were in complete agreement with these statements; their difference with Manning lay in their definition of ‘cruelty’ as it applied to vivisection.
Upon his death in 1892, Manning was lauded by the Zoophilist as ‘the first great divine of the Church of Rome to define the existence of any moral obligation of humanity towards the brutes’.Footnote 40 His primary contribution to the anti-vivisectionists’ case, however, had been to add his considerable reputation to their affirmations of the cruelty and uselessness of vivisection, of its pernicious effects on its practitioners, and of the impossibility of restraining it. He had been far less decisive as an anti-vivisectionist representative of Catholic teaching on animal rights and human duties toward animals. On 12 December 1895, in a speech to the RSPCA, a non-Catholic J.P. would assert that Manning had been able to ‘rise superior to the dictates of a creed’ without formally challenging the letter of it.Footnote 41 On 21 June 1882, noting a popular perception that English Catholics saw vivisection, if not with approval, at least with ‘great indulgence,’ Manning had affirmed that there was nothing in the Bible or in Catholic teaching or theology in favor of the practice.Footnote 42 Vaughan would respond in 1896 that an absence of approval is hardly a basis for abolition, since there were many innocent practices not mentioned in the Bible or in Catholic teaching. Focusing on the first phrase of Manning’s 1881 statement that vivisection was ‘without scientific result, and immoral in itself’, Vaughan also argued that Manning had opposed vivisection entirely on the grounds of its alleged uselessness, not from any defence of animals’ rights or of human duty to animals. The allegation of uselessness, according to Vaughan, lay beyond Manning’s purview as a scholar.Footnote 43 In his March 1887 speech, Manning had stated that vivisection, ‘as it is now known and now exists,’ was at variance with God’s perfections, which left open the possibility that circumstances might exist under which vivisection was justifiable.Footnote 44 Both Vaughan and Rickaby emphasized that their defences of vivisection were based on the hypothesis that the experiments were indeed necessary and not wanton.Footnote 45
Nevertheless, there was more to Manning’s anti-vivisection stance than an agreement with Cobbe, Shaftsbury, and Coleridge over the physical realities of vivisection. As Richard Ryder has pointed out, many Victorian moralists were frightened by the new science’s apparent dismissal of morality ‘as just another form of behaviour which had evolved through natural selection’, for it meant ‘power without principle’.Footnote 46 In his March 1887 speech Manning had asserted: ‘I believe that science consists in the knowledge of truth obtained by the processes which are in conformity with the nature of God, who, the Holy Scripture says, is the Lord of all sciences.’ Vivisection, said Manning, was not such a process; it was at variance with God’s perfections, and therefore ‘science is not attained by that path’. Currently ‘we are under the tyranny of the word science’, he continued. ‘I believe in science most profoundly within its own limits; but it has its own limits, and, when the word science is applied to matter which is beyond those limits, I don’t believe in it’.Footnote 47 According to Vincent McClelland, Manning saw all human conflict as ‘ultimately theological’ and inseparable from Christian principles.Footnote 48 Consequently Manning believed that scientists needed to be restrained by morality and theology and could not be left, as Vaughan advocated, to decide for themselves which experiments were permissible.
In 1894, Vaughan would reaffirm that animals did not have rights, but that humans had duties toward themselves, to act as reasonable beings and not commit acts without sufficient or just reason. He defined ‘cruelty’ as wanton or unjustifiable infliction of pain and held that vivisection, under the right circumstances, was therefore not morally wrong. Responding to the Catholic Charles Weld-Blundell on 23 April 1894, Vaughan also held that ‘It is not the province of the theologian to decide disputes of medical men upon medical subjects.’Footnote 49 Clearly feeling the polarizing effects of the debate, however, Vaughan protested that he loved animals, opposed cruelty as properly defined, and believed that mercy and compassion were as much God’s gifts as reason and intelligence were. Affirming that he himself would never vivisect for any reason, while refusing to condemn a conscientious vivisector who believed that his work benefitted humanity, Vaughan went on to give vivisection a lower moral status:
In the Catholic Church there are hard and fast laws which bind under positive sin, and there are counsels which only point to a higher way. We may follow the higher way ourselves, but what we have no right to do, is to condemn all those who refuse to follow us.Footnote 50
Cruelty, pain, and animal rights: disagreements and agreements
By the time Manning died in 1892, other prominent Catholic clerics were publicly opposing vivisection, including John McEvilly, archbishop of Tuam, and Edward Bagshawe, bishop of Nottingham.Footnote 51 A vice-president of the Victoria Street Society by December 1892, Bagshawe asserted in the autumn of that year that vivisection was misleading and useless, but even if it were not, ‘the fearful moral evil of so encouraging a diabolical spirit of cruelty, and the serious danger to the human race thence arising, would, in my opinion, far outweigh any possible gain.’ Like Manning, Bagshawe was more inclined to limit the domain of science rather than limit that of moral theology. Like many anti-vivisectionists he regarded as extremely dangerous, indeed, a denial of the human soul, vivisectors’ claims that human intelligence comes from brain cells: ‘that mind proceeds from matter, and that matter can generate intelligence, and will.’Footnote 52 Early in 1894 Bagshawe was joined in his anti-vivisectionist stance by Fr. Wilfrid Lescher (1847-1916), Prior of Woodchester, Gloucestershire, and a Preacher-General in the Dominican Order. Ridiculing Vaughan’s claim that ‘silly old women of both sexes’ were giving to animal causes money that should have gone to the human poor, and insisting that vivisection was wrong from the standpoint of Roman Catholic theology, Lescher also cast doubt on the usefulness of vivisection and noted the danger of vivisectors becoming callous and hard-hearted.Footnote 53
Bagshawe had taken the latter idea a step further when, at a Nottingham conference in November 1893, he had insisted that if vivisection were allowed to continue humans would be vivisected, and that this might be happening to the poor already in British hospitals. Bagshawe reiterated these fears at a public demonstration in April 1895 and in his letter of 15 November 1895 to the Animals’ Friend.Footnote 54 The fear that charity patients were being used in experiments had been voiced as early as 1838, would continue into the twentieth century, and was backed by beliefs that such behaviour flowed naturally from the vivisection of animals.Footnote 55
In his 1896 Thoughts for All Times, which was seen to bear the ‘imprimatur’ of his brother the Cardinal, Vaughan responded that the vivisection of animals provided no moral justification for the vivisection of humans, first because beasts were created for men, whereas no set of men is created for the use of other men, and secondly because man has an immortal soul and animals do not.Footnote 56 However, in order to refute fully the arguments of Lescher and Bagshawe, Vaughan also needed to deny the morally-corrupting effect of vivisection on its practitioner: to claim that the vivisector regretted the pain that he was inflicting and therefore suffered no moral degradation. Anti-vivisectionists frequently cited the statements by Continental vivisectors that they had approached their work with ‘joyful alertness’, or at least with the ‘greatest composure’, calling themselves ‘Artists in Vivisection’.Footnote 57 Defenders of vivisection countered that the vivisector was a heroic figure, mastering his natural sympathies in order to make his discoveries but feeling remorse and pity nonetheless, and therefore suffering from the experience.Footnote 58 In confining himself to the moral and theological side of the question, Vaughan stated that he was arguing on the assumption that the vivisector regretted the pain that he was inflicting.Footnote 59
In dealing with the question of pain, however, Vaughan had to back up his moral theology with biological arguments; he had to agree with the claims of physiologists that animals do not suffer ‘with anything like the degree of acuteness that we do’. This was, according to Vaughan, because humans have more refined senses, more intellectual power to imagine, and a soul;
Feeling is of course in the organism instrumentally... It resides in the nerves and spinal marrow certainly, but only when informed by the living principle, which in the case of man is the soul. The consciousness of pain is a resultant, dependent upon the union between body and soul.Footnote 60
Other scholars, including the Catholic priest Robert F. Clarke, made the argument, based upon observation, that animals did not feel pain in the same way that humans did, but Vaughan added: ‘This strikes us as a legitimate conclusion from what Catholic philosophers teach concerning the necessary part played by the soul, even in every corporal sensation.’Footnote 61
Vaughan also repeated the pro-vivisectionist argument that such experiments were no worse than letting the animal be eaten up by predators or dying a ‘lingering death of old age.’Footnote 62 With no more biological expertise than Vaughan, Manning had disagreed with this view of suffering, differentiating strongly between killing animals for food and torturing them in laboratories. That differentiation was also made by the Catholics Edward Bagshawe and Charles Weld-Blundell as well as by Coleridge, Cobbe, and other anti-vivisectionists.Footnote 63 Agreeing with the Thomist premise that ‘God has given animals to men for their food and service,’ Bagshawe would insist in 1903 that vivisection was a different matter entirely, and ‘As for sports, there are some which are cruel and detestable, others which are not more than the taking of life.’Footnote 64 Regardless of whether one defended or attacked vivisection, it was essential to combine biological fact with theological principle.
Much of the debate within Catholic circles revolved around the question of animals’ rights. Despite his anti-vivisectionist stance, Bagshawe on numerous occasions agreed with Vaughan and Rickaby that, because animals were not rational creatures, they did not have rights.Footnote 65 Manning had been less clear. At the Victoria Street Society meeting of 29 March 1887 he had denied the contention, made by the anti-vivisectionist Catholic author W.S. Lilly, that there was no prohibition of vivisection in Christian ethics. The practice, according to Manning, was ‘contrary to the law of Nature’, i.e. to God’s law. Manning and Lilly, however, put this question in the context of ‘abstract right’; the implication was that freedom from cruelty was a right of animals and not just a law of God.Footnote 66 Lescher went still further. Though admitting in 1894 that ‘As an academic proposition [animals have no rights] it might pass’ as a ‘truism’, he asserted that in another sense this idea was but a ‘convenient sophistry’, used as a cover for the vivisector’s horrible cruelties. In rejecting Rickaby’s separation of all creation into inanimate stone and rational human beings, Lescher insisted that sentient animals lay in between, and thus made claims for a form of animal rights. Zigliara, he insisted, ‘denies to the animals jura, and by these he evidently understands rights in their high human sense only.’ There were other rights, according to Lescher, ‘animal rights’, which could be termed rights or simply claims, that constituted an ‘intrinsic bar to cruelty’. In other words, animals had the right to freedom from torture, and this right was to be found in the animal’s own ‘living and sensitive nature, which reason tells us is higher and better than inanimate natures, subject to less of law and more entitled to freedom.’Footnote 67
In July 1894 another Catholic priest, Robert F. Clarke, had similarly argued that because of the ‘divinely-implanted principle of moral benevolence’ humans owed animals freedom from the gratuitous infliction of pain, and that therefore animals ‘have claims on us which are analogous to rights and have been called “Analogical Rights”’.Footnote 68 In defending vivisection, however, Clarke was more sophisticated than Lescher in his analysis of animals’ nature. Lescher would note in 1896 that ‘We train them and punish them, and they recognize their accountability to man by evident signs.’ From that observation Lescher concluded that animals had duties as well as rights.Footnote 69 Clarke, on the other hand, had asserted that, while Protestants might believe that animals possessed a moral nature and could look forward to an afterlife, Catholicism rejected such a claim; ‘moral good and evil emerge only when they are viewed in relation to the moral law, and are then freely assented to or dissented from.’ There was no evidence that animals did this, according to Clarke, and considerable evidence that they did not, but were merely creatures of ‘simple or associated pleasures and pains’.Footnote 70
Vaughan would similarly insist in 1903 that ‘To declare that animals have rights, in the sense in which the Catholic Church uses the term, is to imply that they are moral beings, possessing a conscience and responsibility and a knowledge of right and wrong,’ which Vaughan declared to be impossible.Footnote 71 Here again, a moral argument depended at least in part upon an assessment of biological facts. Lescher’s claim that animals ‘recognize their accountability’ may have stopped short of an affirmation of moral conscience, but he was nevertheless crediting animals with much greater rational and moral sensibility than were Clarke,Vaughan, and Rickaby. This in turn led to his moral assertion: ‘The power of life and death over animals does not annul their rights and duties.’Footnote 72
Lescher was thus more willing to see rights as a matter of degree than were the Catholic defenders of vivisection. Neither Manning nor Lescher directly answered the arguments of Vaughan and John Gerard S.J. that humans are inconsistent in their moral regard for dogs, horses, and hummingbirds while lacking such regard for snakes, spiders, and other vermin.Footnote 73 In citing animals’ recognition of their accountability to humans, however, Lescher implied that rights can be assigned only to animals capable of such accountability. Further, by holding that ‘Man has power even over his fellow man who has unquestioned rights in the highest sphere’, Lescher affirmed that man’s control over animals is similar to man’s control over other men, at least insofar as the assigning of rights and duties is concerned.Footnote 74
In September 1895 The Tablet reported that the Jesuit journal The Month had opened its September issue with an ‘excellent article’ by the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell (1861-1909). Tyrrell’s article explained and defended the ‘brutes are things’ argument made by Rickaby, which had been attacked by Cobbe in her pamphlet The Divine Law of Love. Reminding Cobbe that Rickaby’s statements did not hold the authority of a ‘Papal definition’ and that they were to be read scientifically, as an ‘orderly technical treatise’, Tyrell reiterated Rickaby’s claim that the hunting and the vivisection of animals were only cruel if the infliction of pain was the direct object of the hunter’s or vivisector’s will and not the indirect consequence of it. Further, if the difference between animals’ alleged vernunft (reason) and that of humans is a matter of degree, ‘there is no reason why we should not treat the lower savages as we treat the higher brutes’.Footnote 75
Tyrrell also held that exaggerated sympathy for animals was part of the present age’s neglect of man’s ‘moral and spiritual evils’ in favor of his ‘bodily pains and discomforts,’ and that such neglect ‘credits brutes with an equal sensitiveness to the same grievances’ so that our pity is
wholly for the pangs of the senses and feelings. But in the Christian religion it is otherwise; there is no comparison between physical and moral or spiritual evil... It is through suffering that the soul is purified. Hence as the Epicurean will suffer pain for an eventual gain of pleasure in the same order, the Christian will suffer pain for a gain in an immeasurably higher order of good. And he will inflict pain on himself and on others for a like reason.Footnote 76
In July 1894 Robert Clarke had similarly opposed what he termed the Utilitarian objection to vivisection, which identified pleasure with moral good and the infliction of pain, no matter how justifiable, with moral evil.Footnote 77
Although Bagshawe remained a vice-president of the Victoria Street Society and continued to speak against vivisection at rallies and meetings, it was clear by 1895 that his anti-vivisectionism, unlike Lescher’s, was not based upon any belief in animal rights. When asked by the Animals’ Friend in 1895 for a definitive opinion on vivisection, he described it as detestable, useless, corrupting, and probably being practised on destitute patients in hospitals, but he also asserted that ‘Catholic doctrine is not in accord with the principles of non-Catholic zoophilists in general, or with what Miss Cobbe calls the Golden Rule of Zoophily, “Treat beings beneath you as you would wish to be treated by beings above you.”’ In March 1896 Bagshawe stated: ‘Revelation and reason alike show that animals have not the faculty of reason, and that they are therefore separated by an impassable barrier from man, who has it. Man has rights. Animals have not.’ In May 1901 Bagshawe insisted, in response to the Zoophilist’s complaints that more Catholics did not support anti-vivisectionism, that the anti-vivisectionists had repelled potential Catholic recruits ‘by insisting on’ the doctrine of animal rights.Footnote 78
In believing, by contrast, that vivisection should be abolished because it was ‘wrong by the English law’, Lescher asserted that ‘In the English law animals have legal rights corresponding to a reality embraced by every sound mind. They have rights therefore – animal rights.’Footnote 79 Bagshawe insisted, to the contrary, that ‘immunities and privileges granted by English law’ were not the same as personal rights given by God. The latter were given to humans only; if they could be taken away, then ‘vivisection of men would be no more unjust than vivisection of animals.’Footnote 80
In his letter of 15 November 1895 Bagshawe had even justified some field sports, thereby eliciting a fierce reply from the Humanitarian League founder Henry Salt, who, while praising Bagshawe’s personal kindness, asserted that the Bishop’s general principles ‘appear to be substantially the same as those of the Catholic vivisectionist school.’Footnote 81 Bagshawe’s response to Salt was again reminiscent of the arguments of Vaughan, Rickaby, and Tyrrell, as he asserted that the hunter’s ‘health-giving exercise and recreation’ were worth the pain suffered by the fox, and that the fox himself had torn ducks to pieces. In an argument resembling Tyrrell’s assertion of Christian redemption through pain and suffering, Bagshawe held that ‘The infliction of a painful death upon animals on account of man’s sin is not inconsistent with God’s mercy and love. It is an act of God’s justice, and man need not go out of his way to make exceptions to it.’Footnote 82
Given Bagshawe’s views, it is no surprise that the Animals’ Friend in October 1895 saw the statements of Rickaby and Tyrrell as the ‘laying bare of Roman Catholic teaching on animals’ rights’, and asserted that Father Lescher was the only Catholic priest to have followed Manning’s lead.Footnote 83 Even as Bagshawe could justify some forms of hunting despite his anti-vivisectionism, however, so too could Tyrrell modify his vivisectionist position in its practical application. Tyrrell did not deny that animals were sentient, and thus pointed to the insufficiency of bare scholastic logic in its practical application:
Nor in practice can we stop thus to philosophize and correct the persuasion of our imagination that brutes feel as we do. For this reason we are often formally cruel, when we are not materially cruel (another casuistic trick!), and so far as it is formal and not material cruelty, which brutalizes the agent, we do well in this matter to pay some deference to our imagination at the expense of philosophy.
Although we have no duties, not even ‘rudimentary’ duties (whatever that may mean), to animals, we have many duties concerning animals... We did not need a “Quaker Saint” to tell us that the Great Creator intends for them a certain sweetness of life under our government, and that in following Nature’s manifested intentions in their regard, we are following the safest guide. It does not follow that, because some of them are made for man principally, that all of them are made for man solely.Footnote 84
Tyrrell’s article consequently drew from the British Medical Journal the statement ‘we can hardly hail Father Tyrrell as a whole-hearted ally, inasmuch as while allowing the right of vivisection in the abstract he ranks himself with the antivivisectionists in the concrete.’Footnote 85
For his part, having enraged anti-vivisectionists with the narrow logic of his stocks-and-stones argument, Rickaby showed greater pragmatism in his 1902 Political and Moral Essays, as he warned that ‘The sentiment of tenderness to dumb animals is growing apace, too fast for medical students or casuists to ignore.’ He echoed Manning and Bagshawe in stating that ‘We may fear the effect upon the moral character of the vivisector, and still more of the young students who witness his operations, — fear lest they grow hardened to cruelty, and come to try experiments on patients of the more helpless sort of their own species.’ Rickaby went on to advise both sides to eschew moral arguments in favor of the factual one of vivisection’s necessity. Rickaby even speculated that, were the allegations made by the anti-vivisectionists true, vivisection ‘might assume a new aspect in the eyes of the moralist.’Footnote 86 Rickaby would continue to assert that the government should not forbid vivisection if it led to valuable results unattainable by any other means, and that the medical faculty alone must decide that question.Footnote 87 Clearly, however, Catholic positions on vivisection were becoming more qualified and nuanced by both defenders and attackers.
Lay Catholic opinion
By 1894 lay as well as clerical Catholics were weighing in on both sides of the vivisection question. In May of that year the editor of The Tablet stated that it had received ‘more letters on this subject than we can ever hope to publish.’Footnote 88 Although the Animals’ Friend expressed the fear that too many Catholics could and did use Rickaby’s and Tyrrell’s philosophy to abuse animals, it also asserted that there were many Catholics, the ‘better-disposed and humane laity of their church’, who would repudiate that philosophy.Footnote 89 In December 1897 the Christian Commonwealth expressed gratification that many Catholics had been shocked by Vaughan’s ‘hardened attitude’ toward vivisection, and asserted that ‘Although Cardinal [Herbert] Vaughan has thrown his ægis over the practice by endorsing the work of Monsignor John S. Vaughan, the plea of his illustrious predecessor [Manning] will have far more weight with the majority of Romanists than his own authority.’Footnote 90 These were only hopeful predictions; Catholics wrote letters to the Tablet and other newspapers in defence of vivisection as well as in opposition to it.Footnote 91 The Tablet in October 1899 insisted that only a ‘very small section of Catholics’ would object to Vaughan’s treatment of vivisection. At a London anti-vivisectionist meeting on 30 April 1896, however, the Catholic layman R.S. Wood claimed that ‘thousands of his co-religionists’ opposed vivisection. Writing to the Catholic Times in October 1899 a Catholic held that many fellow anti-vivisectionists were ‘members of our holy faith’.Footnote 92 In the absence of a numerical poll, such statements suggest that there were considerable numbers of Catholics on both sides of the issue.
Other letters suggest that some Catholics were unhappy with what they saw as their clerical leaders’ outdated theological approach to vivisection. What Hugh McLeod has called the ‘liberalisation of Christian theology’ in later nineteenth-century Britain affected Catholics as well as Protestants.Footnote 93 In July 1895 Edward Berdoe, an east London physician, spokesman for the Victoria Street Society, and editor of the Zoophilist from 1898 to 1915, expressed disappointment that Vaughan and Rickaby were backtracking, in favor of a ‘mediæval ethical teaching’, from Manning’s more modern, humane, and rational doctrines. Inasmuch as Vaughan’s pronouncements were coming from ‘Archbishop’s House, Westminster,’ apparently as assertions of what the Catholic Church now taught, Berdoe wondered whether he could continue to make his act of faith as a Catholic, for he could not agree that humans had no duties to animals, even if ‘the whole college of Cardinals proposed it’.Footnote 94 Berdoe had only converted to Roman Catholicism in 1889, but in April 1894 Charles Weld-Blundell, of an old Catholic Lancashire family, had insisted that the ‘arrogant and “infallible” tone’ taken by pro-vivisectionist clerics had helped to strengthen anti-Catholic feeling and to popularize the notion that ‘Roma locuta, causa finita est.’ ‘Fortunately it is reserved for clerical pedants and narrow formalists’, Weld-Blundell asserted, ‘to present the Church to the world in the light of a hard and cruel step-mother, hidebound with age and smothered in effete dogmatism.’Footnote 95
There was an element of anticlerical resentment in these complaints. In his article of September 1895 Tyrrell suggested that Berdoe was actually a Protestant without knowing it.Footnote 96 In replying to Weld-Blundell and Cobbe on 23 April 1894 Vaughan dismissed them as ‘amateur theologians’. Replying to Vaughan in May Weld-Blundell asked why he was angry because Weld-Blundell was a country gentleman; Weld-Blundell was not angry because Vaughan was a priest. In the meantime, Weld-Blundell asserted, opinion on vivisection was ‘free as air until the Church decide,’ and it was unfortunate that the Church had lagged behind a ‘spontaneous moral movement’ that was more truly in accord with Christian teaching.Footnote 97 In a 1903 article written in response to the Catholic anti-vivisectionist M.A.R. Tuker, Vaughan not only refuted Lescher’s views of animal rights, quoting Bagshawe and Manning as well as Newman, but chastised Ms. Tuker as a theological ignoramus. In her earlier article Tuker had deprecated the opposition of ‘clerical minds’ to anti-vivisectionism and had equated Italian Catholic clerics’ denial that animals suffer pain with a justification for the sixteenth-century burning of heretics.Footnote 98
With the British public’s long-held view of the Catholic Church as backward and authoritarian seemingly confirmed even by anti-vivisectionist Catholics like Bagshawe, not only the latitudinarian Salt but the Catholics Berdoe, Weld-Blundell, and Tuker held that it was pointless to justify kindness to animals on theological or philosophical grounds. For Berdoe, English moral theology, as opposed to the Roman Catholic moral philosophy that had been crystallized in the Middle Ages, ‘is happily not crystallized’, and it was reaching a higher moral plane: the idea that the gospel of Christ extends to animals as well as man. Ridiculing Vaughan for allegedly telling his hearers that ‘animals had no right to good treatment or life’, Tuker insisted that the focus must be on rights of moral sense as opposed to rights of moral law, and that ‘It is here that current [Catholic] theology traverses the modern conscience.’Footnote 99
Berdoe, Weld-Blundell, and Tuker were not alone among the Catholic laity in seeking a more liberal Catholic approach to animals. As early as 1878 the anti-vivisectionist Catholic Henry Oxenham had affirmed his belief in a future life for animals, and had held that their very inferiority to and dependence upon human beings ‘gives them that claim upon our kindness which the weak have upon the strong, and which it has been a special function and glory of Christianity to enforce.’Footnote 100 In 1897 a Catholic correspondent wrote to The Animals’ Friend of a recent biography of Saint Benedict, which ‘will convince your readers that the saints of the Catholic Church did not hold the views expressed in a well-known volume of Jesuit theology’. In a 1901 review of The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts, the Catholic Truth Society’s Catholic Book Notes stated that ‘Our good teachers are, no doubt, rightly enough, so zealous to preserve the true theological aspect of the relations between man and beast that it sometimes looks as if the Franciscan attitude towards our “little brothers and sisters” were in danger of being ignored.’ In November 1903 the Zoophilist noted that the Catholic Times had opened its pages to the vivisection issue, ‘and that the correspondents whose letters are published are anything but complimentary to the theological position taken by certain R.C. dignitaries.’Footnote 101
By this point, however, little more was being added to the debate, which had settled primarily into how one defined cruelty and whom one trusted to define ‘necessary’ experiments. Having stated in an 1896 article that nobody had ever claimed that vivisection was right ‘except as a bare necessity’, Lescher in a 1908 pamphlet pursued a tighter definition of ‘necessary’ infliction of pain, by differentiating between ‘necessity’ and ‘utility.’ The latter was not enough, he wrote, to justify vivisection, and no scientists had ever opined that vivisection was at most anything other than a utility.Footnote 102 Again, the scientific claim could not be separated from the sociopolitical one; echoing Manning’s unwillingness to trust scientists to police themselves, Lescher insisted that ‘every act of cruelty may be made “scientifically useful,” and rendered of service to the march of “knowledge.”’Footnote 103
The Catholic press continued to weigh in, with sympathy towards anti-vivisectionism but with the same equivocation as that shown by most Catholic clerics. On 15 September 1903 Catholic Book Notes favorably reviewed Berdoe’s anti-vivisectionist tract Broken Gods, stating
Whatever may be urged in defence of vivisection, whether from a theological or scientific standpoint, it can hardly be doubted that its practice is accompanied with a great deal of unnecessary cruelty: and cruelty is apt to exercise an evil influence on the character of those who indulge in it.Footnote 104
On 27 November 1903, the Catholic Times noted that, contrary to popular impression, vivisection was being used not simply to discover remedies for disease but for medical school teaching, and vivisectors were obtaining certificates to conduct vivisection by claiming that anæsthetic would frustrate the purpose of the experiment.Footnote 105 In its autumn 1904 review of Berdoe’s Catechism of Vivisection, The Tablet affirmed that it had little sympathy with ‘mere scientific curiosity’ as a reason for vivisection and no sympathy for the vivisector who said that he approached his task with ‘joyful excitement.’ ‘While, therefore, we in no wise advocate the total prohibition of vivisection,’ the Tablet continued, ‘we nevertheless think Dr. Berdoe’s book a well-timed protest against abuse.’Footnote 106
Bagshawe died in 1915, Lescher in 1916, and no other prominent Roman Catholic clerics succeeded them in their public anti-vivisectionist stance. In affirming that the Church had always taught kindness to animals, a papal letter of 19 June 1915 stated that ‘Providence has granted to us rational use and not insane abuse’ of them, which Vaughan, Rickaby, and Tyrrell could clearly accept.Footnote 107 Without papal condemnation of vivisection, and with its continuance the accepted status quo in Britain, anti-vivisectionists continued to regard the Catholic Church as divided into a Manning-Lescher school and a Vaughan-Rickaby school, with the latter’s rejection of animal rights apparently having prevailed as far as the Church as an institution was concerned.Footnote 108
Conclusion
With Vaughan calling the refusal to vivisect a ‘higher way’, however, and with Tyrrell admitting that humans owe animals a certain ‘sweetness of life’, while Bagshawe could defend hunting partially on the grounds that animals had no rights, our examination of Victorian Catholic clerics’ views on vivisection is revelatory less of two distinct schools of thought, or even of a spectrum, than of an oft-confusing intellectual mosaic.Footnote 109 Theology influenced, but was also influenced by, specific scientific and social views, but whether the latter or the former were the more significant owed much to the writer’s occupation and activities.
With regard first to occupation, Vaughan, Rickaby, and Tyrrell saw themselves primarily as moral theologians writing scholarly tracts; they separated theory from practical application and were drawn unwillingly into the newspaper debate when anti-vivisectionists exaggerated or misunderstood their arguments. Hence the scholarly care with which they defended themselves with ex hypothesi arguments and backed up their theological claims by citing the authority of the scientific community. For their part, Manning, Bagshawe, and Lescher appeared more comfortable in the genre of public speeches and letters-to-editors, and the motives for their positions came primarily from their beliefs concerning vivisection as it was currently being practised. Thus they backed their beliefs with moral theology when necessary but with less thoroughness or precision than did Vaughan, Rickaby, Tyrrell, and Clarke. ‘Because I cannot fix the exact amount and degree of wrongness in it,’ asked Lescher in 1896, ‘am I therefore prevented from opposing vivisection? Am I to pause and turn aside and utter no protest against atrocities because I cannot define what sin there is in them? My common sense tells me that this is the tyranny of pedants.’Footnote 110 In October 1898 Bagshawe insisted that ‘It is a part of Catholic Philosophy, rather than Morality, that animals have no rights’. For Bagshawe, Catholic morality holds that we do have duties towards animals: ‘duties towards them indeed, though owed to God, not to them.’Footnote 111
Manning’s and Bagshawe’s greater ease with popular public discourse may have come in part from their social activism; both men were unusual among the British Catholic hierarchy in their concern for labourers and the poorer classes, to the extent that each was regarded as a socialist, while Rickaby appears to have been more conservative over socialism and labour issues.Footnote 112 It is probable that this social activism, together with their experience of diocesan administration, not only inclined them to focus more on current conditions than on hypothetical ones but to be instinctively less willing than the professors Vaughan and Rickaby to trust scientists to confine themselves to truly ‘necessary’ experimentation. Given the difficulty, present in all scientific exploration, of accurately predicting the extent to which an experiment will help alleviate human suffering, the mathematician Vaughan’s and the philosopher Rickaby’s academic backgrounds may have made them more trusting of their fellow scholars in physiology and medicine.
Despite the advantages of over a century of scientific, philosophical, and theological scholarship, modern Catholic writers show the same conflicting mosaic of views that Victorian Catholics did. In 1997 the Catholic moral theologian Germain Grisez asserted, as had Rickaby a century before, that animals, ‘not being persons, have no rights,’ and that it could be appropriate to kill them ‘to serve any significant human interest’.Footnote 113 In a contrasting 2014 article Charles Camosy and Susan Kopp echoed Manning’s stress upon animals as God’s creatures, and Lescher’s concept of animal rights based upon their being sentient creatures, by asserting: ‘For Christians, the very first pages of the Bible explain that non-human animals were created “good” by God independent of any instrumental value they may have for us.’Footnote 114 Even as Lescher saw an animal’s freedom from torture as a ‘right’ regardless of that animal’s rational capacities, so in 2014 did James Helmer insist that
If rights are regarded not as directly protecting spheres of moral choice but rather as protecting certain essential interests… then the effective criterion for rights ascription will be the latter, and if it can be shown that moral patients are indeed interest bearers in the sense described, then it may be legitimate to recognize them as rights bearers, on the basis of interest bearing.Footnote 115
Modern Catholic moral theologians also note, as Manning and others had done, that there are potential conflicts of interest among those who experiment on animals. The ability to predict whether a given experiment will lead to greater human well-being can be as elusive today as when Manning claimed that nine-tenths of such experiments were only made to satisfy curiosity. Consequently, the question of who should have the power to permit or deny such experiments remains controversial, as do the criteria for judging the pain of the animal versus the importance of the human need.Footnote 116
In a 2014 article John Berkman pointed out the inconsistencies of the 1997 Catechism, which asserts that animals are, like plants, ‘by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity’; this had been asserted by Vaughan in 1896 as standard Christian teaching. The Catechism’s affirmation that ‘Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice, if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives’ could similarly have been taken from Vaughan’s, Rickaby’s, or Tyrrell’s commentary. The Catechism also states, however, that human dominion over animals is not absolute, echoing Wilfrid Lescher’s 1894 statement that human dominion over animals is limited, that limit being ‘their own living and sensitive nature’. The Catechism calls for a ‘religious respect for the integrity of creation’; one is reminded of Manning’s belief that God gave humans dominion over His creations on condition that they be used ‘in conformity with His own perfections’.Footnote 117 The Catechism’s statement ‘It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly’ leaves ‘needlessly’ as undefined as Vaughan left it, and its affirmation that ‘It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery’ had been made by Tyrrell in 1895.Footnote 118 Well might John Berkman affirm that the Catechism’s views on the treatment of animals ‘are at best in tension with one another, and perhaps even incompatible with each other’, but the complexity and intractability of these problems for the Church had been revealed over a century before in the Victorian Catholic debate over vivisection.Footnote 119
