Dead bird falls from heaven

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Dead animals are often the only animals I find to contribute to Sunday's Camera Critters meme.

This pretty bird  was freshly-dead  when I walked through the eucalyptus grove in the wadi.
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Over the last few days the media has been buzzing about what some people thought was a hint from Pope Francis that animals die and maybe go to heaven.
It turns out that one paper ran an article about Francis but with a headline that actually quoted Pope Paul VI who once in the 1960s or 70s told a boy grieving for his pet, "Heaven is open to all creatures."
But at a recent audience Francis only said, while speaking of the afterlife, "Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us."

You can read the explanation in this CNN article or in the wide-reaching article in the New York Times, which today made the corrections.
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My own Jewish religion hardly knows what to say about what happens to people after death.
But sometimes the rabbis refer to "the next world" or "the world-to-come" as Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden, and that certainly can conjure up images of animals roaming around, no?
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Do you ever ponder this question?
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UPDATE Dec. 15:  Catholic News Service today tries to clarify this and gives more ideas about animal heaven.
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