Can owning a dog make you a better Catholic? Mine did.

[rug]

Emily Kahm
May 19, 2017

It started out with an inside joke. My spouse and I, with our advanced education in theology and religious studies, discovered that if you replaced “God” with “Dog” in a lot of Bible verses, they became startlingly apt commentary on our lives with our own newly adopted dog. “I am The Dog, Your Dog,” for example. “You shall have no other dogs before me…for I am a jealous Dog.” Our hound Bosco, named after St. Don Bosco (because we’re Catholic enough to name the dog for a saint but not Catholic enough to avoid possible biblical sacrilege) is notoriously antisocial around other pups.

Soon we were pairing pictures with verses and posting them on Facebook. From Joshua 1 : 9 we pulled “Do not fear nor be dismayed, for The Dog, your Dog, is with you wherever you go,” along with a shot of Bosco happily peeking through the shower curtain. Him staring lustfully at a ham on the counter was met with Jeremiah: “Thus says the Dog of hosts, the Dog of your house: Heap your burnt offerings upon your sacrifices; eat up the meat!” And my own favorite, from Micah:

What is good has been explained to you:
this is what The Dog asks of you:
only this, to act justly, to love tenderly,
and to walk humbly with Your Dog.

Accompanying it, a picture of Him, sniffing away, tethered to me by his knotted red leash. I have learned many a lesson in humility trying to drag that dog away from happily frolicking squirrels and apparently delicious-smelling bird carcasses.

I quickly found myself poring over the Psalms, reading them with greater intensity than I ever had in my adult life, searching for the wisdom of The Dog.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/05/19/can-owning-dog-make-you-better-catholic-mine-did