By Solaris.
September 2026.
A Catholic may avoid animal products out of concern for animals, whether or not she calls herself a “vegan Catholic.” This article asks what changes when that combination becomes a public name. Its hypothesis is that, where audiences recognize the name as an identity, some may judge whether the person’s commitments fit together rather than consider her reasons for the practice. Lacan helps explain how a name can stand for a person; Bourdieu helps explain how observers read social differences into visible choices. These accounts identify possible mechanisms, not evidence that the shift has occurred. Discussion that remains focused on animal ethics, Catholic teaching or abstinence would limit the claim.
Keywords: veganism, Catholicism, moral practice, public identity, identification, distinction
A Practice Before It Has a Public Name
Suppose a Catholic at a parish gathering chooses a plant-based meal. The choice is hypothetical; no particular person or parish is at issue. She may have decided that, where she can eat without using animals, she ought to do so. Someone beside her may take the same meal because it looks good. The plates tell us little about either person’s reasons. Even if she explains hers, agreement is not required for the choice to be sincere. She can regard avoiding animal products as an ethical duty for herself without claiming that Catholic teaching imposes it on everyone at the table.
The terms matter here. A vegetarian does not eat animal flesh but may eat eggs or dairy products. A vegan avoids animal products in food and, as far as practicable, in other goods too. At supper, those commitments can look identical: both people might pass over the same dish. Their reasons need not be identical, and a single meal cannot establish either person’s wider practice. Still, a Catholic who avoids animal products may be making a considered judgment about what she owes animals. To describe that judgment is different from saying that the Church requires veganism. It is possible to take an ethical concern seriously without making it a rule of religious membership.
Animals are already a subject of Catholic ethical discussion. Martin M. Lintner’s “Just Good Enough to Eat? Animals in Theological Ethics Approaches,” published in the 2023 volume of AUC Theologica, describes approaches in Catholic moral theology that seek to recognise animals’ intrinsic value (their worth apart from their usefulness to humans). He says these approaches call for more humane treatment, while differing in their arguments (Lintner, 2023, p. 1). The differences leave room for questions a person might bring to an ordinary meal: whether an animal’s value places limits on its use, how the conditions in which animals live bear on a decision to eat them, and whether religious duty asks for restraint even where it does not prescribe a particular diet. Those are questions about conduct. They do not depend on anybody identifying the person asking them as a vegan.
Kurt Remele’s “All God’s Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics” appeared in the Journal of Animal Ethics on April 1, 2024 (Remele, 2024). Its title makes clear that animal ethics can be posed within a Catholic theological framework. The material available here does not establish which dietary conclusions Remele reaches, so it cannot settle the parishioner’s decision for her. Nor must that decision wait for a settled answer to every theological question. She may find the reasons for avoiding animal products sufficient to guide her own conduct while recognising that another Catholic weighs the matter differently.
At the gathering, however, her explanation may be heard in more than one way. Others could discuss the treatment of animals that prompted it. They could instead discuss what kind of Catholic calls herself vegan, or whether her commitments seem to fit together. The narrower question of this article is whether giving the practice a public name changes which of those conversations people have.
What Changes When the Practice Gets a Name
A name can change what people notice about the same meal. If the parishioner says she avoids animal products, someone at the table might ask why. Her answer could concern the treatment of animals, and the conversation could stay with that reason: what she thinks people owe animals, and whether avoiding animal products follows from it. If, instead, she introduces herself as a “vegan Catholic,” the words place her dietary practice beside her religious commitment before she has explained either one. A listener might then ask whether veganism fits Catholicism. That is a different conversation, though the food on her plate has not changed.
The difference lies in what is being assessed. A coherence judgment asks whether someone’s stated commitments appear to fit together. It does not, by itself, decide whether either commitment is well justified. A person might think the parishioner has good reasons to avoid animal products yet be uncertain how she understands her Catholic faith. Another might see no apparent conflict between the two commitments while remaining unconvinced by her reasons for changing her diet. These judgments can overlap in ordinary talk, but separating them matters here. Otherwise, any question about religion and food would look like evidence that people have stopped considering the treatment of animals.
Nor does a question about Catholic dietary practice necessarily amount to a judgment about this woman’s consistency. On March 1, 2022, the Catholic news outlet ACI Prensa published an article titled ¿Cómo pueden vivir la abstinencia en Cuaresma los que nunca comen carne? Its title asks how people who never eat meat can observe Lenten abstinence (Prensa, 2022a). That is a question about what an existing dietary practice means on a particular religious occasion. It need not imply that the person practising it has contradictory beliefs. On July 17, 2017, U.S. Catholic published For some Catholics, a vegetarian diet goes hand in hand with faith (Catholic, 2017). That title presents faith and diet as compatible for some Catholics. Neither title tells us what listeners would say to a parishioner calling herself a vegan Catholic. Together, they indicate that an audience could ask about the relation between food and faith without treating it as a test the person must pass.
For the proposed shift to occur, two things must happen. The audience must encounter the combined label, rather than learn only that the parishioner has declined a dish containing animal products. It must also recognise “vegan Catholic” as describing a kind of person. Without that recognition, the phrase may prompt a request for clarification, or it may pass without comment. Recognition does not require agreement. Someone can understand the label well enough to question it. But the question must actually move towards the fit between her commitments before it counts as the kind of coherence judgment at issue.
This leaves a substantial difference between a plausible mechanism and an observed pattern. If listeners recognise “vegan Catholic” as a combined identity, they may assess the fit between its commitments instead of asking why she avoids animal products. The claim would gain support if listeners given that label raised coherence questions more often, and discussed her reasons less often, than listeners given the same explanation without it. If both groups discussed her reasons just as often, the proposed displacement would not hold.
Identification: When a Name Stands for a Person
A public biography has little room for a life. It selects a few activities, gives them names and invites strangers to recognise the person through those names. That ordinary process is one sense of identification: a description becomes a way of knowing who someone is. The description may be accurate while still leaving most of her conduct unexplained.
Consider a hypothetical biography for a woman who organises volunteers at a community arts centre. It mentions her work, her Catholic faith and her veganism. A reader interested in the centre might pass over the last two details. Another might remember her as a “vegan Catholic” and, on seeing her name again, recall that phrase before recalling what she does there. The biography says nothing about why she avoids animal products, how she understands Catholic teaching or whether she regards the combination as unusual. Yet the two words offer a compact account of her. A reader might wonder what sort of person holds both commitments rather than ask what reasons she has for either one.
Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalytic theorist, helps explain how a few words could acquire that force. In Rae’s 2019 chapter Lacan and the Symbolic Function of Evil, published in Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition, Lacan’s account of meaning draws on Saussurean linguistics, which studies how signs acquire meaning through their relations to one another, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which examines unconscious processes. Rae describes three “registers” in that account: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. These distinguish aspects of human experience, rather than separate places in which people live. The imaginary concerns images of oneself and others. The symbolic concerns the names and relations through which a person becomes intelligible to others; a term takes its meaning partly from its relations to other terms (Rae, 2019). What the woman does cannot be reduced to the words under which readers recognise her.
The biography makes the gap plain. “Vegan” may accurately describe a settled practice, and “Catholic” may accurately describe a religious affiliation. Neither word tells the reader about every decision through which she lives those commitments. Putting them together does not supply her own explanation of their relation. Once the phrase is memorable, however, a reader may treat later details as clues to its meaning. If the biography describes her arranging refreshments for an event, that task might be read as an expression of the identity assigned to her. Presented without the label, the same task might attract no such interpretation. Identification here is the movement from recognising a description to expecting it to tell us something about the person as a whole.
This does not make the label false. Rae describes meaning as arising from relations between signifiers—words or other signs—rather than from a word considered in isolation (Rae, 2019). The further move is this article’s inference: a reader who recognises both “vegan” and “Catholic” may interpret their pairing, then read later biographical details as signs of consistency or tension. That judgment about her character would go beyond what the biography establishes. Rae’s account offers a way to understand such a reading, not evidence that biography readers make it.
Lacan’s distinction should not be pressed into a claim about the woman’s hidden, authentic self. Rae describes the real, the third register, as what cannot be fully captured in the symbolic order; it offers no means of discovering what this particular woman privately intends (Rae, 2019). Nor can a theory of identification tell us how often readers judge her character instead of considering her reasons for avoiding animal products. A public name may guide their interpretation of actions for which it supplies no reasons. But readers at the arts centre may hear “vegan Catholic” differently from readers elsewhere; the relation between the two words alone cannot tell us what either group will make of it.
Distinction: What a Choice Signals in Its Setting
The same food choice may be unremarkable at one table and conspicuous at another. Lutz’s review of work on food and space describes culinary practices in relation to how people obtain, prepare and eat food within a region (Lutz, 2019, p. 3). It helps explain distinction: the social meaning a meal may acquire when people notice how it differs from the alternatives available to them. The setting matters, though it tells us neither why someone chose the meal nor what others made of it.
Consider the parish gathering again. If everyone is served a familiar meatless dish, taking a portion may attract little attention. If the table instead offers an option specially labelled “vegan,” choosing it might seem more deliberate. These are possible arrangements, not reports of a parish meal. Even in this imagined setting, the label has no fixed meaning. A neighbour might hear an ethical commitment in it; another might associate it with an unfamiliar style of eating. Someone who knows the chooser well may understand it chiefly as a practical request to the kitchen. Seeing her plate tells none of them her motive.
Bruno Lutz’s “Distinción alimentaria y clases sociales” reviews a book on food, culture and space (Lutz, 2019, pp. 1–2). Its discussion of El Bajío as a culinary region connects dishes and ingredients with shared ways of obtaining, preparing and eating food (Lutz, 2019, p. 3). A separate label might therefore look helpful, unfamiliar or pointed, depending on local food practices. Lutz’s review gives us no account of how parish guests would respond.
Availability matters as much as familiarity. In a paper on Toronto, Jahiu examines “vegan food deserts”—areas where vegan food is difficult to obtain—using a mixed-methods approach, which combines different kinds of evidence and includes patrons’ Google reviews. The reported results suggest a vegan retail landscape that caters to affluent consumers while barriers persist for visible minority residents (Jahiu, 2024a). Toronto retail is not a parish table. To assess access at the gathering, one would need to know who supplies its food, what suitable ingredients cost locally, what the parish can spend and what guests can obtain for themselves. A labelled option alone cannot establish the chooser’s resources.
Social expectations also shape what guests notice. If they are expected to accept what is offered without discussion, requesting a separate meal could draw attention, even when the request is necessary to eat. Where hosts routinely ask about dietary requirements, it may scarcely register. Neither response reveals an intention to display a difference. Nor does the absence of a special request show that the guest has relaxed an ethical commitment: the shared dish might already meet it. What a guest actually thinks would require more than an account of the meal’s conventions.
This differs from identification, the process by which a name such as “vegan Catholic” comes to stand for a person and invites judgments about whether her commitments fit together. Distinction concerns the meanings an audience attaches to a visible practice in light of the food, resources and conventions around it. The processes may meet when a labelled meal makes a public name more salient. They may also pull apart: someone can recognise the name while finding the meal entirely ordinary, or notice the separate meal without knowing what the chooser calls herself. Neither account establishes that observers stop considering the ethical issue. To find out whether discussion at a parish moves away from animals and towards the chooser’s social standing, one would need to hear what people say, rather than infer it from what she eats.
The Alternative Reading and the Test
The strongest alternative begins with an attentive listener. Hearing “vegan Catholic,” she might ask what the speaker thinks animals can suffer, whether her faith bears on that judgment, and how she understands abstinence if she never eats meat. The combined name could give her a reason to ask more, not less. Such a conversation might still include a question about consistency. What matters is where the listener goes from there: towards the claims behind the diet, or towards whether the person fits a recognisable type.
Neither theory considered so far rules out that listener. Lacan’s account of how names help make a person recognisable does not say that a name prevents inquiry into what she believes. Bourdieu’s account of how a choice acquires social meaning likewise leaves room for someone to ask why the choice was made. At a parish meal, a guest might first take a separate dish as a sign that its recipient belongs to a particular social group, then listen carefully to her account of animal suffering. Attention to identity need not replace attention to reasons.
The titles also leave room for substantive questions: U.S. Catholic presents diet and faith as compatible for some (Catholic, 2017), while ACI Prensa asks how someone who never eats meat might observe Lenten abstinence (Prensa, 2022a). Remele identifies animal ethics as a subject for Catholic theological argument (Remele, 2024). A combined label might therefore prompt inquiry into reasons and practice rather than displace it.
To test that possibility, researchers could recruit adults who attend parish meals and ask each to respond to the same fictional parishioner. A separate preliminary check would establish which participants understand “vegan Catholic” to combine Catholic faith with avoiding animal products. Among those participants, randomly give half an account introducing her by that label and half the same account without the combined description. Both versions would say that she avoids animal products because she believes their production harms animals and that she regards this as a personal commitment, not a Catholic dietary requirement. Ask what participants would say to her and what they think of her account. No such comparison has been carried out here.
Classify responses as coherence-only if they assess whether her commitments fit but do not address her reasons; reasons-only if they address animal treatment, a religious basis for her decision or the application of abstinence without assessing her consistency; mixed if they do both; and neither if they do neither. A question about Catholicism is not automatically a coherence judgment. Report each category’s share in both groups, and count mixed responses as engaging with reasons, not as evidence that reasons were displaced.
Before collecting responses, set the predicted contrast: among participants who understood the label, the labelled version would produce at least ten percentage points more coherence-only responses and at least ten points fewer responses engaging with reasons, including mixed ones. If discussion centred on reasons were at least as frequent with the label as without it, the strong alternative—that the name prompts inquiry rather than displacing it—would prevail. The comparison could establish an audience pattern in this setting; the examples and titles alone cannot.
References
Catholic, U. (2017). For some Catholics, a vegetarian diet goes hand in hand with faith - U.S. Catholic. U.S. Catholic. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiqAFBVV95cUxOYlVjdXVUdmJyV0tJcTkxbFBFdmhjMkZ1Zi1SYU55clN6Vnlsd2ZRcVpvNDhEY3p6Wi1qMzVWRWtUaUpNWVdoU3c3cjg3VkxTMlNuVEI0d0lWbjZqODVud0xHUzc4SnFWTjV6UndwZUhDSmhRMk4tTjRrQU9sMjB1Sl84RzNXTzRuTXlJemdNTXgtRXdTSVVLSW5DNGdtcnNab2lxTlcxQWQ?oc=5
Jahiu, L. (2024a). Vegan Food Deserts: Between Inaccessibility, Identity, and Gentrification. https://doi.org/10.32920/26060701
Lintner, M. M. (2023). Just Good Enough to Eat? Animals in Theological Ethics Approaches. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Theologica. https://doi.org/10.14712/23363398.2023.12
Lutz, B. H. (2019). Distinción alimentaria y clases sociales. Estudios Sociales. Revista de Alimentación Contemporánea y Desarrollo Regional. https://doi.org/10.24836/es.v29i54.779
Prensa, A. (2022a). ¿Cómo pueden vivir la abstinencia en Cuaresma los que nunca comen carne? - ACI Prensa. ACI Prensa. https://news.google.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?oc=5
Rae, G. (2019). Lacan and the Symbolic Function of Evil. Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474445320.003.0011
Remele, K. (2024). All God's Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics. Journal of Animal Ethics. https://doi.org/10.5406/21601267.14.1.11
Cover image: US Navy 091116-N-4938S-014 Operations Specialist 2nd Class Tia L. Myers, assigned to the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), sorts food into categories for distribution at the St. Vincent De Paul Cathol, U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice J. Scott St.C, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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