But the fact is, while much of theology is by its very nature rather abstract, this one is relatable: Large majorities of us have animal companions.

We all eat, and many of us even think, talk and even obsess over what we eat more than we do over, say, God. And how we treat animals has a lot to do with what we put in our bodies — and not just to eat.

In addition, the debate over nonhuman animals features some fireworks.

Catholic theologian John Berkman, a brave light in the darkness on this issue, has chosen to focus his work on animals despite threats from his bosses at the Catholic University of America that they would deny him tenure.

Berkman now teaches moral theology at Regis College at the University of Toronto, and under his direction graduate students (such as Allison Covey) are writing dissertations on animal theology.

There are other pioneering figures in this space: Andrew Linzey, to name one, and David Clough, another.

Clough, perhaps the most important voice in the field in the last decade, set the standard for theological scholarship with his 2018 two-volume book. Celia Deane-Drummond previously a moral theologian at the University of Notre Dame, has started the Laudato Si' Research Institute at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Recently, Deane-Drummond, Berkman and I collaborated on a special issue of the Journal of Moral Theology, the first-ever Catholic theology journal to devote an entire issue to nonhuman animals.

Since then, the Rev. Christopher Steck of Georgetown University published "All God's Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics," cementing the topic as absolutely essential to Catholic moral theology.

But it is the real-world, public work that is putting the issue of the treatment and dignity of animals in play.

Clough's Farm Forward project is really exciting and unparalleled.

A few months ago, I got a note from the Nonhuman Rights Project, asking if I'd be interested in helping organize an amicus brief from Catholic theologians in support of the project's legal attempts to free Happy the Elephant from captivity in the Bronx Zoo.

I was delighted, and the brief — signed by Berkman, Covey, Deane-Drummond, Steck and me — was published and sent to the New York Court of Appeals this past February.

In it, we made the general argument that, especially in the biblical tradition shared both by Jews and Christians, God's creation is not made for human beings.

On the contrary, in the first chapter of the Bible's first book, Genesis, God pronounces multiple aspects of creation "good" in themselves before human beings are even created.

Nearly all theologians now agree that the biblical dominion God has given human beings over creation is not a license to use and dominate, but rather a command to be caretakers and stewards.

We are akin to viceroys ruling on behalf of a sovereign and according to that sovereign's wishes. God, sovereign of the universe, reveals through Scripture a design for what theologians call a "peaceable kingdom," one that includes nonviolent relationships between human beings and nonhuman animals.

And then we applied that general argument to Happy, a 49-year-old pachyderm, who is not a thing for us to confine, use and put on display in a zoo (even in an attempt to produce a good outcome), but rather a particular kind of creature whom God made to flourish.

Happy cannot flourish as this kind of creature while captive in the Bronx Zoo.

She would be significantly better able to become the kind of creature God made her to be in a sanctuary.

Nonhuman animals like Happy have been created to fit into a particular place within the order of God's creation, an order that human beings are bound to respect.

While waiting for the legal process surrounding Happy's fate to unfold, I got an email from the chair of a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences asking for my views as a Catholic moral theologian on whether certain biomedical research being considered on nonhuman animals was morally acceptable.

In light of the terrible toll neurological diseases such as dementia have taken (a toll on which the pandemic has shone a spotlight), researchers are eager to find something, anything, that could lead to our defeating them.

But one significant proposal being put forward — growing human neurological tissue in nonhuman animals to better study the human disease model — goes a step too far.

In a virtual meeting with the National Academy of Sciences' committee, I argued that the leading voices in animal ethics today — religious and secular — reject the idea that nonhuman animals are mere tools.

With their own inherent value quite apart from whatever good might come from our use of them, animals ought to be treated as the kinds of creatures they are. No matter its benefits, research that grows cells in other animals is an obvious violation of our duties.

Whether certain animals have legal rights not to be confined in zoos or whether we will create neuro-hybrids of human and nonhuman animals are big enough issues on their own.

But in the end you may simply not care about other species.

Whether or not we treat animals as the kinds of creatures God made them to be may not be your thing.

The fate of humans, however, also depends on how we treat animals.

There is simply no way we will ever reverse global climate change without dismantling the massive factory-farms that treat animals as "protein units per square foot" rather than as animals with their own inherent dignity.

These farms are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change.

If we use them for food at all, humans' existence requires that we care for animals on smaller farms where they are permitted to live out their lives in accordance with God's plan.

So, yes, respecting God's plan for nonhuman animals is more relevant than it has ever been.

The very fate of our species depends on it.

• Carles C. Camosy has spent more than the last decade as a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

One of the most important critics of the agenda set out in the instrumentum laboris is German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, who has flatly announced that it "contradicts the binding teaching of the Church in decisive points and thus has to be qualified as heretical."

That, as they say in the business, is a strong statement.

One might expect that Cardinal Brandmüller would focus his criticism on the possible exceptional measures suggested in the working document to ordain elderly, indigenous married men in remote areas of the Amazon so the faithful there could go to Mass.

This is where most of the buzz in the unfolding debate has been focused, with traditionalists laying out the case that the ordination of married men, however exceptional, would be heretical in ways that the church's current practices — admitting married Episcopal clergy as converts to Catholicism or married priests in the Eastern Catholic Churches — are not.

But this is not where Brandmüller and others in his camp have voiced concern.

Disturbingly, their first target seems to be Catholic social doctrine.

"Clearly," Brandmüller writes in a letter that LifesSite News published in full, "there is an encroaching interference here by a synod of bishops into the purely secular affairs of the Brazilian state and society.

"What do ecology, economy, and politics have to do with the mandate and mission of the Church?

"More importantly: what professional expertise authorizes an ecclesial synod of bishops to express itself on such topics?"

This may sound like a reasonable concern until it is put in the context of the Vatican's true aims in the synod.

Put plainly, this synod will put the church on the side of the indigenous Amazon peoples.

In particular, it will put the church on the side of an integral ecology that respects both God's creation and its relationship with the flourishing of the indigenous Amazon peoples.

It will recognize, furthermore, that the church cannot be identified with the developed West alone and will honor the fact that, as Pope St. John Paul II insisted, Christ is present in indigenous peoples in a very special way.

Indeed, the working document insists that life in the Amazon is threatened by environmental destruction and exploitation and by the systematic violation of human rights.

In particular, it is threatened by the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples, such as the right to territory, to self-determination, to the demarcation of territories and to prior consultation and consent.

According to the communities participating in the synod, the threat to life comes from global economic and political interests, especially resource-extractive companies, often in collusion with, or tolerated by, local and national governments as well as traditional indigenous leaders.

The Amazon has great riches — both in its people and its resources — that these forces have taken, are taking, and mean to take in the future.

The synod's working document turns its critical attention to "insatiable vision of unlimited growth, of the idolatry of money, of a world disconnected from its roots and environment, of a culture of death."

The developed economic and political powers, of course, will not go down without a fight. But it is incumbent on the Catholic Church to remain faithful to our social doctrine by insisting on our religious duty to be on the side of the indigenous peoples in this conflict.

Bizarrely, Cardinal Brandmüller discards this mandate by suggesting that the questions the Synod document raises involve matters of professional expertise that the bishops do not have.

He even suggests that topics like "ecology, economy, and politics" have nothing to do with the mission and mandate of the church.

This suggestion, which is closer to heresy than anything in the instrumentum laboris, is totally inconsistent with nearly 130 years of Catholic social doctrine.

According to the Vatican's Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, this body of teaching is concerned with just and holy relationships in society — situations and problems regarding development, human work, economics, politics, human ecology, safeguarding the environment and more.

It is true that judgments made about specific public policies can only be informed by — not determined by — Catholic teaching.

Catholic social doctrine insists on the right to unionize and be paid a living wage, for instance, but how such unions are organized and what counts as a living wage in a particular social and economic context is not a matter that Catholic teaching can decide in the abstract.

But Catholic social doctrine demands that economic and political policies be designed with a preference for indigenous people over and against their powerful exploiters.

It demands that Western-style preferences for unlimited growth of capital, idolatry of money and exploitation of God's creation be resisted with an integral ecology that honors God's plan for vulnerable, embodied human beings and their relationship with the broader ecological world.

The specifics of how these goals are accomplished, of course, cannot be decided upon in the abstract.

The insight of those with expertise beyond bishops' knowledge should be listened to quite carefully for precisely this reason.

But as the instrumentum laboris makes clear, this synod has "the historic opportunity to differentiate itself clearly from the new colonizing powers by listening to the Amazon peoples."

Indigenous voices must speak first, and the Church must listen.

Catholic social doctrine demands no less.

• Charlie Camosy is a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, "Resisting Throwaway Culture." He is the father of four children, three of whom were adopted from Philippines.
• First publised in RNS. Republished with permission.