I gather that the Blessing of the Animals is a tradition that started with the Catholic Church (presumably inspired by St. Francis of Assisi) but now is ubiquitous. In fact, today the animals are going to be blessed at the Rockefeller Chapel (a nondenominational outfit) at the University of Chicago. Here’s an announcement of the event that I found hilarious. Whoever put this together had a sense of humor.
Note that the haloed cat is “Modo”, a genuine moggie who is listed as chapel staff at the organization’s website:
Now I hate to be the skunk in the woodpile here, but really, although this is lighthearted and stuff, what is it supposed to convey? If it’s a joke, then it’s a joke at the expense of religion. But I think that, to some extent, it’s not a joke. Why would people schlep their cats, dogs, and hamsters to the church where, I understand preachers often lay hands on them for the blessing. Is there some implication that blessed animals will have a better fate? And how is that supposed to work, given that, at least for Catholics, animals don’t have souls and can’t go to heaven. Or do liberal churches now think that we’ll be reunited with Mittens in the hereafter?
I doubt I’ll go to the blessing, because my delight at seeing lots of cats would be tempered by the ludicrousness of the whole idea (plus the sight of d*gs getting blessed!). And if you think that I’m being too curmudgeonly, consider that there is also a Blessing of the Backpacks at the University of Chicago. Backpacks, of course, don’t have souls. Perhaps this is simply a way of wishing the students “good luck,” but then why drag in God and the trappings of religion to do that? If they’re not serious about such blessings having an effect, why confer them? Does it not make a mockery of the whole ritual of “blessing”?
~
As I have always understood it, the blessing of animals and objects is supposed to bestow protection on them. Also, in the Russian Orthodox Church, icons, crucifixes and medals (they usually are engraved portraits of saints and of guardian angels – usually the Archangel Michael) consecrate these objects.
As for blessing animals, I believe it originated in Spain where even goats and donkeys are brought into churches to be blessed, in stark contrast with the throwing of goats and donkeys off the top of church towers in some Spanish villages. Go figure…
It’s intended sincerely, but it’s a gimmick nonetheless. Anything to get superstitious bums in pews.
(That’s bum as in derriere)
One ought to start a protest. Why aren’t rabbits invited? Does God hate rabbits? Hamsters? Goldfish? Pythons?
This was the topic of an episode of the Vicar of Dibley, /watch?v=wK_hKnOLZJY
For those of you who live outside of the British TV broadcast footprint, it’s a sitcom about a female vicar in a small village which managed to be really funny and not at all pious.
There’s also a Brit sit-com about a rc priest at a small village church. Extremely funny . Can’t remember the name. Something like Oh! God.
Dax
Bless Me Father might be the one you are thinking of.
There’s always Father Ted too. A blessing of the animals on that show would have been great. (I do seem to recall an episode with a large number of rabbits in it.)
Do you mean “Oh, Brother!” with Derek Nimmo? It was on TV prior to ’71 (in Australia) when I was very young and I haven’t seen it since, but apparently there was a sequel series “Oh, Father!”
We live in W.Canada but have the entire series of “The Vicar of Dibley” on DVD. Once or twice a year my wife and I will agree that we need a
Dibley Fix – you are quite correct – it is not at all pious – in fact it succeeds in taking a lot of piss from the Church of England.
I usually like the little sequence at the end of each episode where the Vicar (Dawn French) tells an outrageously off-colour double-meaning joke and her clueless housekeeper completely fails to ‘get’ it.
… and I’ve just spent the last half hour clicking on every Dibley episode on Youtube and dragging the time slider to a minute from the end…. I can’t believe they used the Invisible Man joke…
The community in which I reside has “blessings” of this sort all year long, all of them performed by some sect of Catholic or Greek or Russian Orthodox nutjobs. They have days to bless motorcycles, cars, boats, baskets of food, even lakes and rivers! The local newspaper is always eager to publish the dates and locations of these events as though they were momentous, annual, must-attend events!
Lunatics, all of ’em.
This may work if the blessing makes the owners of the cats feel better about themselves, or if they take better care of their blessed cats.
I think you (=JAC) are in a unique position here to test whether the blessing can benefit your cats: Split the sample of your own cats into two subsamples, have one subsample blessed, and the other subsample sham-blessed (e.g., by taking them to Rockefeller Church and going through all motions without actual blessing). The dependent variables could be, say, longevity or health of the cats in the next few years, combined with regular questionnaires of the owner how he feels about each cat.
The same experiment could also be done with backpacks to test whether having a soul, or not having a soul, makes a difference.
I think the sample size would be too small.
One of my creationist colleagues accused me of not having an open mind so I agreed to read one of his apologetics books.
It was Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator. In it I learned that animals do in fact have souls but they don’t get to go to heaven when the animal dies. There was a passage from the bible given as evidence.
While the book was mostly a waste of time it was interesting to see how the other side thinks or maybe doesn’t think.
Especially irksome was after getting through it, my religious colleague admitted that he hadn’t even finished the book!
It is all just marketing hooplah. It’s probably no more silly (also no less silly) than the hooplah from auto-dealers, departments stores and the like.
So many Rockefeller conspiracy theories would be explained if a cat is in control. So clearly, the blessings are an attempt to bring more members into the conspiracy 😉
And now wait for Alex Jones to parrot something similar to that but so far removed as to be impossible to trace it back to me.
According to Wikipedia this originated in Florence Italy at a 1930s convention of ecologists (to be observed near the day of St. Francis), but since then the observance has spread beyond Catholicism even to some branches of Judaism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Animal_Day
Heck even some Unitarians are doing it
http://www.uua.org/worship/holidays/174655.shtml
and normally the only Christian holidays Unitarians observe are Christmas and Easter.
At other times of the year, Buddhists have animal blessings, but heck for traditional Buddhists unlike Catholics cats, dogs, etc. really !*can*! go to heaven. (As an avowed secular Buddhist atheist, I must aver I do not myself believe in reincarnation.)
http://secularbuddhism.org/2013/05/29/a-secular-evaluation-of-rebirth/
There’s an interesting example of right-wing double standards on this. This really started in modern but mainstream Roman Catholicism, but apparently when the ultra-liberal New York Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine does it, it’s a sign of how wacky New Agey and probably Satanically possessed they are!! (J the D cathedral has longgg been a target of right wingers due to their ordination of gays. When the Emperor of Japan gave them a Shinto shrine and the cathedral put it in their museum, the rumor went around for years they had placed the Shinto shrine under their altar in the main sanctuary.)
For “Evidence” that the blessing of animals proves that J the D cathdral is Satanic, see http://vigilantcitizen.com/sinistersites/sinister-sites-st-john-the-divine-cathedral/
Luke 3:6 – And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
Animals are flesh too, are they not?
Knowing that this happens in Chicago makes me feel better about what happens here in Ecuador. My town, Banos, has “holy springwater” and so bus drivers and taxi drivers (and of courser regular drivers) come here in great numbers from all over the country to get their motors blessed. The priest comes out with a plastic pail of water (like he was going to mop a floor) and goes down the line of vehicles and unceremoniously splashes a bit of holy water on the motor (the hood is always lifted). For his efforts the priest receives a small tip from each driver. Many of these people are dirt poor and coming here meant a considerable sacrifice. It saddens me every time I see it. I thought gullibility here was due to widespread lack of education, but seeing as nearly the same thing happens on a university campus in Chicago, I have to re-evaluate this.
The worst part of the blessing of vehicles here is that it seems to embolden drivers of blessed busses to drive like maniacs.
I’ve always found these events silly, but l also found talking your pets to see Santa equally silly (but at least you pay a small which goes to a pet charity). Disclaimer: I have Santa pitches but this happened against my will against my will when my pets were staying with my parents when I was on vacation.
This all makes sense when you remember most people have a Super (opposite of Bright) worldview – it’s a demon-haunted world! There are demons all around influencing things. To bless an animal or a thing is to ward off the influence of demons.
The Catholic church in my hometown in Alabama holds a pet blessing ceremony every year, too. I’ve never attended, but from what I’ve read about it, it sounds mostly like a “get together and talk about Jesus and pets…and bring your pet” type of social event. But that could also be because most of my hometown is Southern Baptist, not Catholic, and they know that animals are obviously not going to heaven.
I must confess that I lay hands on my pets multiple times per day, and believe it to be effective for the well-being of all involved.
Amen
“animals don’t have souls and can’t go to heaven”
It seems obvious to me that cats have exactly the same chance of getting into heaven that people do: their souls are equally well developed.
The religious never run out of ways to spread the nonsense of their faiths.
You are over analyzing this kind of event. From an ex-Catholic who has taken dogs to a blessing for my mother (who was very much a Catholic). It is asking a blessing for the animals. Perhaps that is silly and useless. It is also a recognition of the dignity of the living things under our care, something that isn’t so silly.
Do the fleas on the dogs and cats get inadvertently blessed during the procedure as well?? If so, they must be jumping for joy.
+1
Good one!
Gee, guess the nematodes are getting blessed, too. And the heartworms…
I’m an atheist, but one of the few religious traditions I feel good about is the blessing of the animals. St Francis and Dorothy Day are two of the only religious people I have any respect for. When I was a girl, my family used to take our Momma Cat to San Francisco for the blessing, along with any kittens she might have had at that point. She ended up having 6 litters of kittens and living to age 25. I know it means nothing to the animals, but I remember how Momma Cat used to purr at the Franciscans he did the blessing–something she rarely did, so I guess she felt their love of her and her babies.
Why confer the blessings? They bring people together into the Church, and reinforce the Church’s role as a center of their life, and they probably ask for donations. Anything that will increase traffic into the Church will probably be done.
Do they have a “blessing of the altar boys” day too?
In my corner of Old Europe, the blessing of animals is usually tied to the cult of Saint Anthony (patron saint of domestic animals, livestock, and agriculture), and is traditionally performed only in churches dedicated to that saint, usually in January on the saint’s day. It often involves sheep, donkeys, and other farm animals, not just cats and dogs. As far as I know it isn’t really tied to Saint Francis, patron saint of wolves, birds, and more generally animals and nature. I am sure it is a tradition that goes way back, meant to insure a divine blessing on one’s livestock and crops, and only recently became the marketing-driven “cute animal parade in church” adopted by many faiths – a sure way to lure kids into churches.
Catholics will of course bless anything, no soul necessary, and for example it is/was very common to have a house blessed by a priest after construction or major renovation. I also know of a major motorcycle-blessing event held on a Swiss mountain pass every year.
“Catholics will of course bless anything, no soul necessary, and for example it is/was very common to have a house blessed by a priest after construction or major renovation.”
In the Russian Orthodox tradition, blessing of the house or apartment is also practiced, whether it is a newly built house or an old house, when someone or a family moves in, or after there has been a tragedy of some sort in the home (in which case it is for driving out negative influences or negative spirits).
At Easter, one brings one’s paskha (traditional fresh cheese desert made of fresh cheese, butter, cream, egg yolks, sugar and with some raisins, and molded in a pyramid-like shape), one’s koulitch (a sweet and rich cake that tastes a lot like panettone but is much heavier and denser) and the eggs one has dyed, to the Church on the Saturday before Easter, and they are blessed by the priest before the midnight mass begins. The XB is cyrillic for kh and v, Khristos Voskrese, meaning Christ is Risen.
http://shop.itroika.com/images/Image/Image/paques-russe1.jpg
http://i038.radikal.ru/0804/74/5d411a675a59.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/kx7wr8q
http://imageshack.us/a/img163/6563/i2l2.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img163/6563/i2l2.jpg
The Easter midnight mass begins at about 11 p.m. and lasts for three hours, after which everyone goes home to a huge feast comprising all the foods that were not eaten during 40 days of Lent (all animal foods, sugar, etc.), and vodka flows generously!
Here in Geneva where I live, the church is packed for the Easter midnight mass, mostly by non-Russian tourists and plenty of atheists too – they come for the sheer beauty of the choral music and the beauty and intensity of the ritual itself which has a fantastic atmosphere.
Examples of the beauty of the Russian Orthodox choral music, from YouTube:
watch?v=pD4wyKOAd0w
watch?v=b990vm6PUGk
watch?v=ymD0Gtru0XY
watch?v=p3iYnHx8P0s
watch?v=kSxk8Nyc8LU
I have never heard of blessing of animals in the Russian Orthodox Church.
“Bless me Cheeses, please!”
Why confer the blessings? My theory, which is mine, is that they are like the cymbalist in the orchestra…
He’s standing there with cymbals in his hands, and however inappropriate it might be, it’s the only thing he’s trained to do.
Here in Taiwan some people follow the Buddhist tradition of releasing captive animals into the wild, usually fish or birds. This has resulted in a huge demand for wild animals, captured in ways that destroy much of the natural population, which are then released to their deaths in inappropriate environments. To their credit,mainstream Buddhist organizations are campaigning against the practice.
The latest was some idiot trying to improve his Karma by releasing some highly-poisonous snakes on a popular near-urban hiking trail.
I believe they used to bless ships and railway engines too. But then, as everybody knows, steam locomotives had souls…
Some years ago I lost a few decades off my life fighting the local diocese over their plans to take my (atheist) daughter’s HS Spanish class to a bullfight during their trip to Spain. (The diocese won.)
I the process I discovered that the church has tap danced all around the issue of bullfighting, from a 1500’s papal bull against it to the modern position that it’s moral as long a priests don’t do it.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03051a.htm
So, we bless the animals right up until we torture them to death…
Oh, and BTW–one of the arguments used against me was that I just was culturally “sophisticated” enough…