Do Cats Go to Heaven? The Bible Does Not Say, and Christians Differ

The Bible never tells us whether cats go to heaven. No verse describes an animal’s life after death, and Ecclesiastes 3:21, which asks the question, leaves it open. Christians have answered it both ways. Thomas Aquinas taught that an animal’s soul dies with its body, while John Wesley and C. S. Lewis saw room for animals in the new creation.

So we hold the question open, as Ecclesiastes does, and we hold on to what Scripture does give us, which is the way God looks at the creatures he made. Jesus said of sparrows sold cheaply in the market, “not one of them is forgotten before God” (Luke 12:6). Whatever comes after, a cat that shared our home was never beneath his notice, and there is nothing foolish in grieving for one.

From Genesis to Revelation, the King James Version never mentions a cat. Cats appear just once, in Bibles that include the book of Baruch, which the Catholic Church counts among the books of the Old Testament. In a chapter that mocks idols, the Douay-Rheims translation reads: “Owls, and swallows, and other birds fly upon their bodies, and upon their heads, and cats in like manner.” And the next verse draws the lesson: “Whereby you may know that they are no gods.” The cats are there to make a point about the idols, which cannot even keep animals off their own heads.

Scripture has nothing to say, then, about cats and heaven in particular, and whatever it offers on the question, it says of animals in general.

That depends on what we mean by a soul. Genesis is a good place to begin, because it uses the same Hebrew phrase, nephesh hayya, for the animals in Genesis 1:24 and for Adam in Genesis 2:7. The King James Version translates it “the living creature” for the animals and “a living soul” for the man. Fr. Lawrence Farley, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, suggests “animate beings” as a better rendering, since what the words tell us is that animals and people alike were made alive, able to feel and move.

Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican and Doctor of the Church, used “soul” in that older sense: the soul is “the first principle of life of those things which live.” So in his account animals have souls, but he held that “the souls of brutes,” meaning animals, “are corrupted, when their bodies are corrupted.” An animal’s soul ends when its body dies, and the human soul does not. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches of every spiritual soul that “it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death,” and it says this of human beings, making no such claim for animals.

So a cat has a soul in the old sense, because it is a living creature, but whether anything of it outlasts death is another question.

A psalm tells us plainly what becomes of the body of every creature God feeds: “thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust,” and it goes on, “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth” (Psalm 104:29–30).

Ecclesiastes says the same of people and animals together, “as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath,” and “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:19–20). Then the writer asks, “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?” (3:21). Read quickly, the verse sounds like proof that animals do not go to heaven, but it is a question, and what it asks is who knows. Aquinas met an argument built on this passage, that people and animals share one end. He answered that the writer “reasons thus in the person of the foolish,” because the likeness holds for the body, he said, and not for the human soul. Fr. Farley reads the whole book more gently, suggesting that “Ecclesiastes should be read more as asking questions than as offering answers.”

Christian writers who hope for animals in the life to come point to three passages, though none of them names a cat or any pet, and each can be read more than one way. All three describe a renewed creation at the end of time rather than heaven as the dying enter it. Fr. Farley draws that line when he writes that Christians go to heaven at death, but their final destiny is “the new heavens and the new earth in the age to come.” The wider question of whether pets and other animals go to heaven turns on the same verses.

Passage	What it says	What it leaves open
Isaiah 11:6–9	Wolf, lamb, leopard and lion live at peace	Whether animals that died are raised to be there
Romans 8:19–22	Creation itself will be set free from decay	Whether that means each animal or creation as a whole
Revelation 21:1–5	A new heaven and earth, with no more death	Animals are not named

Isaiah 11:6: the wolf and the lamb

Isaiah 11 foretells “a rod out of the stem of Jesse” and describes the peace that follows: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” The scene ends, “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6, 9), and Isaiah 65:25 says it again: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together.”

Animals belong, then, in the prophet’s picture of God’s peace, and the peace comes on the earth. But Isaiah does not say these are animals that once lived and died, and he says nothing of the animals people have kept and loved. Billy Graham quoted the passage when readers asked him whether animals will be in heaven, after granting that “the Bible does not specifically answer this question.”

Romans 8:19–22: creation set free

Paul writes that “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:21–22). God’s rescue, in other words, reaches beyond human beings to the creation they live in.

Aquinas quoted this verse to say that decay itself will end, and he still held that animals, being wholly subject to decay, “will not remain at all in that state of incorruption.” John Wesley, one of the brothers with whom Methodism began, read the same verses the other way. He gave a whole sermon to them, “The General Deliverance,” and took them as a promise to the animals, who will be delivered “not by annihilation; annihilation is not deliverance.” He concluded that “something better remains after death for these poor creatures also.” Aquinas and Wesley came away from the same verse with opposite answers, so it cannot settle the question on its own.

Revelation 21:1–5: all things new

John sees “a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away,” and hears the one on the throne say, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:1, 5). Then “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (21:4). The promise is made to God’s people, “they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them” (21:3), and the chapter does not mention animals. Wesley thought the blessing reached further, to “every creature according to its capacity,” because, he said, “there is no such restriction in the text.”

Neither the Catholic Church nor the Orthodox Church has a defined teaching that animals go to heaven, and neither rules it out. The Catholic Catechism teaches that the visible universe “is itself destined to be transformed,” and adds, “We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way in which the universe will be transformed” (Catechism 1047–1048).

The Catechism speaks of animals under the seventh commandment. “Animals are God’s creatures,” it says. “He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory.” And it adds, “One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons” (Catechism 2416, 2418). Those paragraphs are about how we treat animals in this life, and they say nothing about their life after death. Pope Francis, in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, wrote after quoting Revelation 21:5: “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place …” He speaks there of every creature in the life to come, without saying whether a particular animal that has died will be raised.

A line credited to Pope John Paul II, that animals possess a soul, is not in the published text of the general audience it is traced to, on 10 January 1990. FAITH magazine compared it with the Italian original in 2010 and called the usual wording “at best a very rough translation.” What the Pope actually said was this: “Other texts, however, admit that animals too have a breath or vital spirit received from God.” He did not speak there of what becomes of animals after death.

On the Orthodox side, Fr. Farley writes in a reflection published on oca.org, the Orthodox Church in America’s site, that “the Church has never spoken definitively about this question, and so an authoritative reply is not possible.” It is one priest’s reflection, and he goes on to offer a guess of his own. He would love to befriend a lion in the age to come, like the one St. Gerasimos tamed. He borrows an image from the novel Watership Down, in which a dying rabbit’s life flows out into the rabbits he leaves behind, and wonders whether “the life and love of our pets flow out into the animals we will know and love in the age to come,” so that “the cats I have known, loved, and wept over will perhaps find a final home in that lion.” Then he adds, “It is all just a guess of course.”

Among Protestants, Wesley and Billy Graham answered as individual writers, not for a church. Wesley made the case for hope in a whole sermon, and Graham pointed readers to Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom while granting that Scripture gives no direct answer.

Lewis took up the question in The Problem of Pain (1940). He granted that Scripture and Christian tradition are silent on whether animals are immortal, but he thought an argument from silence weak. For creatures that only feel, with no self, he saw no question of immortality at all, and he allowed that every animal may be like that. But if the higher animals, and tame ones especially, do have a real self, he suggested, as an idea open to correction, that they may have “an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.” He pictured a household raised together, in which the dog knows its master and, “in knowing him, will be itself.” And still he wrote that Christians “may justly hesitate to suppose any beasts immortal.”

Five years later, in The Great Divorce, Lewis imagined a meeting with one of the great saints of heaven, a woman followed by animals: “A cat—two cats—dozens of cats.” The narrator’s guide explains that every creature that came near her found a place in her love. Lewis warned in his preface that the book is a fantasy and that its picture of the afterlife is “not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us.”

No verse says that cats do not go to heaven, and nothing in Scripture sets cats apart from other animals. Christians who doubt that animals live on after death reason from what an animal is, not from which animal it is. Aquinas held that an animal’s soul ends with its body, and the supplement added to his Summa after his death argues that animals could not earn anything “since they lack free-will.” That reasoning covers a sparrow, a horse and a dog as much as a cat, and the same answer runs through the question of whether dogs go to heaven.

Nor does Scripture give any ground for thinking a cat could go to hell. It never speaks of an animal being judged or punished after death, and Wesley gave the reason in one line: “They could not sin, for they were not moral agents.”

Scripture makes us no promise either way, but it does show us how tenderly God cares for animals now. “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” Jesus asked (Luke 12:6). “O LORD, thou preservest man and beast,” says a psalm (Psalm 36:6), and another, “The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works” (Psalm 145:9). Wesley tied his hope for animals to that mercy. Fr. Farley, after all his guesses, ended on what he did not doubt: “The precise details of our future joy are not given to us, but of the reality of that joy there can be no doubt.”

Nor does Scripture count it foolish to care for an animal: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10).

The promise of Revelation is made to God’s people, and it leaves no tears out: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). That includes the ones shed over a cat. If not one sparrow is forgotten before God, neither is the sorrow of the one who loved it.

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