Francis is a brave man and doesn’t shy away from tricky subjects, which is what happened while he was speaking on parenthood to a general audience at the Vatican last month.
What he did was squarely take aim at those couples who sensibly choose to have a faithful, adorable hound like myself, instead of choosing to beget some noisy, snotty, disobedient children.
People who have pets instead of children, the Pope said, were being selfish, revealing a “denial of fatherhood or motherhood” that “diminishes us, it takes away from our humanity”.
He was clearly unhappy about the global decline in birth rates — something he described as “a demographic winter” — which is not how we dogs see it at all. So long as there’s enough able-bodied people to keep us fed.
And I like to think that love is an infinite bucket, with plenty of room for me to be loved even after all the dribbling little kidlets have hoovered up their share.
Mind you, it’s not the first pontificating pot-shot Francis has taken at me: when asked in a 2014 interview with a Rome newspaper whether some people in society valued pets more than children, he said it was a reality and that it was a sign of “cultural degeneration”.
I would like to remind him that his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, is the patron saint of animals. Plenty of his papal predecessors have also been in the camp of cultural degeneration — along with The Boss, who grudgingly admits to degeneration on multiple dimensions.
Pope Benedict was particularly fond of cats — a shortcoming, of course, but cats are considered to be pets by some people. I look instead to Pope Pius II, a true Renaissance man, who wrote a treatise about his dog, Musetta.
Then there was Pope Sixtus IV who had an eagle, which must have projected a certain lofty authority. Paul II had a monkey; Pius VI kept a dog named Diana at his summer papal residence. Leo X’s tastes were rather more exotic: he kept a small zoo with lions, leopards and bears.
The Boss’s cultural degeneration occurs not because he prefers pets to children. It’s his general lack of disciplined habits (like forgetting to feed me) and his insensitivity about my daily requirements generally, ranging from vigorous massages to regular snacks and affectionate tummy scratching.
He claims that he got the children out of the way first so he could deal with me — as if I am some kind of burden — but my view is, if he wasn’t prepared to devote his full attention to me, he should have given me to someone who would.
Anyway, he is siding with Pope Francis.
“The Pope is right on the money, General,” he insisted.
“Declining birth rates means there will be less young, healthy working people to keep paying for my pension.
“The older population, relying on fewer and fewer people in the workforce to fund government services, are going to regret choosing dopey dogs like you instead of breeding an army of future income-earners.”
An entirely gratuitous remark — one that brings me back to cultural degeneration, which the Pope had explained by suggesting that “an emotional relationship with an animal is easier, more programmable”, while having a child “is something complex”.
It should be that way, of course, but there is nothing easy or programmable about my life with The Boss. Woof!
9°C