The Rev. Janet Regina Hyland envisioned a world where people and animals were treated with equal respect. Hyland, 63, who died Oct. 9, worked with prisoners in Texas, migrant families in Southwest Florida and animal rights groups throughout the country to help improve the lives of the struggling and the voiceless.
“She was always involved in social justice causes,” said her sister, Jean Burns of Sarasota.
Hyland’s 2000 book, God’s Covenant with Animals, offered a biblical interpretation for compassion toward animals and became popular with animal-rights activists nationwide. A vegetarian for more than three decades, Hyland became active in Sarasota in Defense of Animals after she and her sister moved to Sarasota in 1985.
“She truly was an activist,” said Sumner Matthes, vice president of the animal rights organization. “If we were going to conduct a demonstration and we needed people to wave signs, she would do whatever was needed.”
Born Nov. 30, 1943, Hyland was raised a Roman Catholic and served in the Air Force as a young woman. She worked for the diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Virginian, while living in Virginia, and later moved to Texas, where she took part in prison ministry through the Assemblies of God, an evangelical Protestant church.
She also studied theology and was ordained a nondenominational minister in 1984. She founded Viatoris Ministries in Sarasota as part of the International Ministerial Fellowship, an association of independent Christian ministries, and for many years published “Humane Religion” every other month and wrote many of its articles on human rights, animal rights and women’s equality.
She was often known by her middle name or, in the publishing world, by her initials. She was scheduled to take part in an international vegetarian conference in San Francisco in September when she learned she had an advanced stage of breast cancer.
