A priest of my acquaintance has recently acquired a new dog, a Rottweilerish mongrel with a rather uncertain temper. (The animal has none of the refinement of His Feline Eminence Cardinal Pushkin up the Hagley Road.)
He calls it Francis or, when stroking it or wobbling its dewlaps, Santo Padre.
Are these canonical offences?
When one hears Father calling his new pet by name, should one doff ones biretta? Or bow the head as one does ad nomen Summi Pontificis in the Te igitur?
More dogs tomorrow. If you like, you can call these the Dog Days. The already drafted post on Hesiod which you all await will eventually follow, probably on September 5.
Tomorrow, Concelebration in the Roman Colleges (3).
My favorite story about the naming of animals comes from Germany in the 1930s. The head of the Nazis in Wuerzburg faced major opposition from the Catholic bishop and his clergy. He named his daughter Geilana, after the woman responsible for the death of Killian, the bishop who evangelized Franconia, and his dog Killian. It was not a positive set of circumstances.
ReplyDeleteA small group of apartment complex friends met at the nearby Catholic church (university parish run by Dominicans) for a blessing of animals. German Shepherd with Atheist, Pit Bull with Jew, Old English Sheepdog with Baptist, Malinois, Hound, and Border Collie/Blue Heeler with the Catholic (well, those Catholics...).
ReplyDeleteEveryone standing in a quiet circle.
At the mention of "In the name of..." - ALL the dogs sat of their own volition.
Closer to Oxford, the great medieval historian KB McFarlane called one of his cats Stubbs. And I am told that the cats ruled the roost for McFarlane's pupils just as Stubbs then dominated the Oxford history syllabus.
ReplyDeleteYour post eminds me of this joke, Father:
ReplyDeleteA CLERGYMAN'S LETTER TO HIS BISHOP:
"Sometime ago I wrote to inform you that one of our boys who was Confirmed in January took his Confirmation gift money and bought a collared lizard which he named Bishop in your honour. A little later he bought a smaller lizard and named it Rector in my honour. I thought you would be interested to know that I recently learned that the Bishop ate the Rector."
From Church Humour by Judson K. Cornelius, p68
https://goo.gl/GazfQk