Animals

40.5 «Listen, Child. You said: ‘Remember to sanctify feast days. Not only for yourself, but also for your son and your daughter, your servant and your maidservant, even for your horse it is said that they must not work on Sabbaths’. Now tell me: if a hen lays an egg on a Sabbath or a sheep lambs on a Sabbath, will it be legal to use the fruit of its womb, or will it be considered as an opprobrium?»

«I know that many rabbis, Shammai is the last of them and is still alive, say that an egg laid on a Sabbath is against the precept. But I think that there is a difference between man and animals or whoever fulfils a natural act, such as giving birth. If I compel a horse to work I am responsible for its sin, because I force it to work with a whip. But if a hen lays an egg which has matured in its ovary or a sheep lambs a little one on a Sabbath, because it is ready to be born, no, such a deed is not a sin, neither is the egg laid or the lamb born on a Sabbath a sin in the eyes of God.»

«But why, if every kind of work is a sin on Sabbaths?»

«Because to conceive and give birth correspond to the will of the Creator and comply with the laws which He gave to every creature. Now, the hen does nothing but obey the law according to which after so many hours of growth an egg is complete and ready to be laid, and the sheep also obeys the laws laid by Him Who created everything, according to which laws twice a year when springtime is on the meadows in bloom, and when the trees in the forest lose their leaves and men muffle themselves up because of the intense cold, sheep should mate so that later they may give milk, meat and nourishing cheese in the opposite seasons of the year, that is in the months when the toil for the crops is harder or the bleakness is more painful because of frostbite. If therefore a sheep, when its time is up, gives birth to a little lamb, oh! the little lamb can certainly be sacred also on an altar, because it is the fruit of the obedience to the Creator.»

• Animals
• Conception - Childbirth - Begetting
• Decalogue
• Roosters and hens
• Sabbath
• Schiammaï - Chammaï (great doctor of Israel)
• Sunday rest
• You will sanctify the feasts

Man is not an animal without reason, that attacks and its prey. Man has reason and a soul. With his reason he must behave as a man. With his soul he must behave as a saint. He who behaves differently, lowers himself below animals; he stoops down to embrace demons because a soul becomes wicked with the sin of wrath.

• Anger - Irascibility
• Animals
• Demons
• Holiness
• Man - God's creature
• Man - King of Creation
• Reason
• Sin
• Soul
• Words of wisdom

«(...) It is very difficult to do what I have understood. You can… because You are holy. But… I am a man, young and full of life…»

«I have come for men, Judas. Not for the angels. They do not need a teacher. They see God. They live in His Paradise. They are not unaware of the passions of men, because the Intelligence, which is their Life, makes them acquainted with everything, also those who are not guardians of men. But, spiritual as they are, they can have but one sin, as one of them had, and he drew to his side those who were weaker in charity: pride, the arrow that disfigured Lucifer, the most beautiful of the archangels, and turned him into the horrifying monster of the Abyss. I have not come for the angels, who, after Lucifer’s fall, are horrified even at the shadow of a proud thought. But I have come for men. To make angels of men.

Man was the perfection of creation. He had the spirit of the angel and the full beauty of the animal, complete in all its animal and moral parts. There was no creature equal to him. He was the king of the earth, as God is the King of Heaven, and one day, when he would have fallen asleep for the last time on the earth, he would have become king with the Father in Heaven. Satan tore the wings off the angel-man and he replaced them with the claws of a beast and with intense yearning for filth, and lured him into becoming a being which is better described as a man-demon, rather than simply a man. I want to eradicate the disfigurement worked by Satan, as well as the corrupted craving of the contaminated flesh. I want to give back to man his wings, and make him king once again, co-heir of the Father and of the Celestial Kingdom. I know that man, if he is willing, can do what I say, to become once again king and angel. I would not tell you things you could not do. I am not one of the rhetors who preach impossible doctrines.»

• Angels
• Animals
• Incarnation
• Lucifer - Satan
• Man - God's creature
• Man - King of Creation

74.1 It is an early bright summer morning. The sky seems painted with strokes of a pink brush by little thin clouds looking like strips of frayed gauze, dropped on a smooth turquoise carpet. The air is full of the songs of birds, exhilarated by the bright light… Sparrows, blackbirds, redbreasts whistle, chirp, brawl over a stem, a worm, a twig which they want to take to their nests, or eat, or use as a roost. Swallows dart from the sky down to the little stream to wet their snow white breasts, the tops of which are rust coloured, and after receiving the freshness of the water and catching a little fly still asleep on a little stem, they dart straight up into the sky as fast as the flash of a burnished blade, chattering joyfully.

Two blue-headed wagtails, dressed in pale ash-grey silk, are walking gracefully, like two little dames, along the bank of the stream, holding their long tails adorned with little velvet black spots well up, they look at themselves in the water, and, satisfied with their beautiful looks, they carry on walking, while a blackbird, a real little rogue of the wood, scoffs at them, whistling at them with his long yellow beak. In the thick foliage of a wild apple-tree growing all alone near the ruins, a nightingale is calling her mate insistently, and she becomes silent only when she sees him coming with a long caterpillar wriggling in the grip of his thin beak. Two city pigeons, which have probably escaped from a dovecot and have chosen a free dwelling place in the crevices of a ruined tower, give vent to their love effusion by cooing in such a way that the male seems to be endeavouring to seduce the modest female.

Jesus, with arms crossed, looks at all the happy little creatures and smiles.

• Animals
• Birds
• Jesus Christ and animals

Bones? What are they? A proof of the power of God Who made man with dust. But nothing else. Also animals have bones. But the skeletons of all animals are not so perfect as a man’s skeleton. Only man, the king of creation, has an upright position, as a king over his subjects, and his face looks forwards and upwards without having to twist his neck; man looks upwards, towards the Abode of the Father. But they are still bones. Dust that will return to dust. The eternal Bounty has decided to assemble them again on the eternal Day to give even a greater joy to the blessed souls. Just imagine: not only will the souls be reunited and will love one another as and even more than they did on the earth, but they will rejoice also seeing one another with the same features they had on the earth: dear curly-haired children, like yours, Elias, fathers and mothers with loving hearts and faces like yours Levi and Joseph. Indeed, in your case Joseph, it will be the day when at last you will see the faces for which you feel nostalgia. There are no more orphans, no widows among the just, up there…

• Animals
• Man - God's creature
• Man - King of Creation
• Theory of evolution

«What is the soul?»

«It is what makes a god of man and not an animal. Vice and sin kill it, and once it is killed, man becomes a repulsive animal.

• Animals
• Sin
• Soul
• Vice

«Here Christ prepared for His mission.»

«But there is nothing here!»

«You are quite right, there is nothing.»

«Who were You with?»

«With My soul and with the Father.»

«Ah! You stayed only for a few hours!»

«No, Judas. Not a few hours. Many days…»

«But who served You? Where did You sleep?»

«My servants were the wild asses that came to sleep in their caves, where I also had taken shelter. My maidservants were the eagles that said to Me with their harsh cries: “It’s daylight” and they flew away to attack their prey. My friends were the little hares that came up almost to My feet, gnawing at the wild herbs. My food and My drink were the same food and drink of the wild flower: the night dew and the sunshine. Nothing else.»

• Jesus Christ and animals

• Animals
• Birds
• Charity
• Cruelty
• Malice - Maliciousness
• Preaching Jesus Christ to children
• Preaching of Jesus Christ
• Providence

• Animals
• Disorder
• Horses
• Restlessness - Preoccupation

• Animals
• Soul