As a priest, one is called to bless all kinds of things, food, houses, rosaries, statues, etc., there’s even a blessing for spacecrafts in “A Manual for Priests of the American Church”! And while you’ll find a blessing for livestock and cattle, what you won’t find is a blessing for pets. The tradition of blessing the animals that sustain us and work for us is ancient but the notion that we should bless our pets is a rather recent development. Should we be making such a big deal about our pets? Should we be blessing them? The way I figure it, if we bless our homes and the stuff that fills them, we might as well bless the living things that we share the homes with.

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