Pope Francis is cheating.

In previous attempts to restore honor to Catholicism (if such honor ever existed) and to bring the Church into the 21st century (or into the 20th, at least), Francis has said that gays “have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian community” and declared that evolution and the Big Bang are not at odds with faith. But now he’s shamelessly courting a much broader, more passionate constituency: dog owners.

The New York Times reports that Francis, while consoling a “distraught little boy whose dog had died,” told him “Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” The Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals saw his remarks “as a repudiation of conservative Roman Catholic theology that says animals cannot go to heaven because they have no souls.” (The article does not consider the possibility that no creature has a soul because the soul is a fiction of the human imagination.)

This news has brought much relief to dog owners who worry that when their pet dies, it is simply dead. Countless authors, meanwhile, are celebrating the Pope’s confirmation of what they’ve believed all along—authors of books such as Dog Heaven, Even Bad Dogs Go to Heaven, Biblical Proof Animals Do Go To Heaven, Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates, and pretty much everything Jack Wintz has ever written.

I could not find a single book on Amazon that acknowledges that if dogs can go to heaven, then they can go to hell, too. (Here are a few candidates.) Nor has anyone considered the practical ramifications of dogs in the afterlife; I suppose there’s not much of an audience for a title such as Stepping on Dog Shit for Eternity. But dog-loving Christians who believe in heaven should consider such ramifications—above all, how dogs would be treated by humans in heaven.