ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses factory farms as obscured sites of desecration, within which bodies are mechanically broken and blood is methodically shed. The beings who are moved through these spaces are seen through a desensitizing economic lens, and are consumed as meat, deliberately sanitized of its association with grave desecration and concrete suffering. The patterns of violence that exist in hearts and minds are “reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.” In the section of his encyclical entitled “The Gaze of Jesus,” Pope Francis portrays the historical Jesus as an intimately “earthly” figure, engaged in what he terms a “tangible and loving relationship with the world.” The chapter argues that enhanced sensitivity to the sacramental nature of the world might animate a capacity to more perceive and more readily respond to the desecration of creation, as manifested in the deliberately concealed spaces of factory farms.
