The Pope and His Elephant
A Prayer to go to Heaven with the Jack Russell Terriers
By all accounts, Pope Leo X loved his pet elephant Hanno. No other Pope has made their love for elephants public. Hanno was a gift from the King of Portugal and lived just next to St Peters Basilica. Hanno didn’t survive long in Rome and upon his death the Pope wrote this epitaph:
“Under this great hill I lie buried
Mighty elephant which the King Manuel
Having conquered the Orient
Sent as captive to Pope Leo X.
At which the Roman people marvelled,
A beast not seen for a long time,
And in my brutish breast they perceived human feelings.
Fate envied me my residence in the blessed Latium
And had not the patience to let me serve my master a full three years.
But I wish, oh gods, that the time which Nature would have assigned to me,
and Destiny stole away,
You will add to the life of the great Leo.”
It is tear jerking to think of the Pope so upset that Destiny had stolen away his elephant before his time. Hanno is interred in the Vatican Palace, side by side with the earthly remains of many of Gods representatives on Earth.
I googled “do pets go to heaven?” And catholic.com says no they don’t, whatever pets we have before the second coming of christ will not be there in the new creation. There’s another link that offers friendly suggestions of how to break this to your children but I resist going down that rabbit hole of catholic parenting advice.
BUT God may choose to make new animals in the new creation BUT that doesn’t really sell catholicism for me because I think Hanno deserves to go to heaven. Do you think whilst Pope Leo X was writing this epitaph that his faith was rocked at all? Hanno the elephant is not just gone but really really gone, gone more than any human that the pope may be grieving for.
Elephants bury their dead and grieve collectively. So Hanno and Hanno’s estranged family would have wanted Hanno to have a proper burial which is some comfort at the end of Hanno’s short life.
The poem ‘A Prayer to go to Heaven with the Donkeys’ by Francis Jammes sums up how cheated I feel by the Christian perspective on animals in heaven. I’m not a christian regardless but I’d definitely be more on board if they let donkeys in to heaven:
When I must come to you, O my God, I pray
It be some dusty-roaded holiday,
And even as in my travels here below,
I beg to choose by what road I shall go
To Paradise, where the clear stars shine by day.
I'll take my walking-stick and go my way,
And to my friends the donkeys I shall say,
"I am Francis Jammes, and I'm going to Paradise,
For there is no hell in the land of the loving God."
And I'll say to them: "Come, sweet friends of the blue skies,
Poor creatures who with a flap of the ears or a nod
Of the head shake off the buffets, the bees, the flies . . ."
Let me come with these donkeys, Lord, into your land,
These beasts who bow their heads so gently, and stand
With their small feet joined together in a fashion
Utterly gentle, asking your compassion.
I shall arrive, followed by their thousands of ears,
Followed by those with baskets at their flanks,
By those who lug the carts of mountebanks
Or loads of feather-dusters and kitchen-wares,
By those with humps of battered water-cans,
By bottle-shaped she-asses who halt and stumble,
By those tricked out in little pantaloons
To cover their wet, blue galls where flies assemble
In whirling swarms, making a drunken hum.
Dear God, let it be with these donkeys that I come,
And let it be that angels lead us in peace
To leafy streams where cherries tremble in air,
Sleek as the laughing flesh of girls; and there
In that haven of souls let it be that, leaning above
Your divine waters, I shall resemble these donkeys,
Whose humble and sweet poverty will appear
Clear in the clearness of your eternal love.
“I shall arrive, followed by their thousands of ears” , that’ll be me I reckon, but not donkeys, rather a rolling sea of Jack Russell Terriers all bounding towards our mutual Maker.
There’s never a satisfying answer when you google theological questions. I like that about the bible, so massive and contradictory and metaphorical or not metaphorical that it’s unsummarisable, it’s immune to the google ai one sentence over-simplification.
Following on from catholic.com I’m clicking more and more dubious links to try and get a picture of what christians think of animals. Turns out the bible is weirdly anti-dog but lots of people on r/christianity on Reddit say that’s just because dogs were dangerous wild animals back in the day but one incensed commenter says:
“its a metaphors end of story
you want an excuse to not believe
The Lord has done everything to help me support my dogs health.
are you smoking something?
A day is coming when all will be held to account to what we did, right and wrong.
And in loving God and others rightly.”
I love the angry objectiveness of this comment. All the confidence of someone posting on an Internet forum combined with catholic certainty. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sure that something is a metaphor. But this anger is borne of the same thing I’m feeling: I don’t like that the bible is mean about dogs so I don’t believe in the bible; they don’t like that the bible is mean about dogs so the mention of dogs must be a metaphor.
I’m thinking about elephants because I’m at the circus. There are no elephants here. Elephants wouldn’t be very happy in this environment just as Hanno probably wasn’t very happy parading around the Vatican. The animals here are very happy, I checked. I won’t give too many spoilers for the circus but I am playing all my saxophones so I stand in a sea of silver and gold which is what I wanted.