Catholics do not believe that dogs go to Heaven, because they have no souls, or at least that was the thinking when I was a kid. This was the source of The Great And Permanent Schism between my father and myself. Bottom line: I want to go where they go. I don’t think it would be worthwhile going anywhere else.
I pointed out to him Ecclesiastes 3, verses 18-21, and especially 21. He had no explanation for these words, other than to say that it was “Old Testament”.
That doesn’t at all speak for all Catholics. Paul Johnson believes at best there’s not a clear answer; and St. Francis would be hard pressed to buy into your “certainty”. There are plenty who don’t limit the Lord and what parts of His creation are rewarded eternally.
You obviously do not understand what the Book of Ecclesiastes is about and what was in Solomon’s mind as he wrote it. Otherwise you would not think you had a good point. As for the your father, he was just as Biblically illiterate as you.
Animals have no souls, what Solomon wrote was what men believed not God. Ecclesiastes is wisdom from man’s perspective while the book of Proverbs is wisdom from God’s perspective.
That is why Solomon wrote, the way he did in the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon’s many wives turned his heart away from God and instead he began following false god’s. It was in Solomon’s old age that he wrote Ecclesiastes, and he wrote it while looking at wisdom from a man’s point of view.
In his younger days when he still followed God, he wrote the book of Proverbs, and thus the contrast of opinion between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.