Do any of the various Christian faiths have a hard-set limit as to much water can be made holy at once? Do any believe a priest can theoretically bless the Pacific Ocean in one shot? Do any feel the limiting factor is the amount of faith of the practitioner?
“Holy water” is not really anything special – it’s merely water that’s been prayed over and blessed by the priest to serve in an appropriate water-using ritual (whether that be Holy Baptism or crossing yourself with fingers dipped in it doesn’t matter).
The present Bishop of Albany (Episcopal), while rector of Christ Church, Morristown, once blessed the St. Lawrence River in order to conduct a baptism by immersion in it. (He was, as it happens, wearing swim trunks and a stole at the time, since he had to be in the water too to do the baptism.
Been reading Top Ten: The Forty-Niners?
Would the salt contect have any bearing on if the water were considered holy? Does it have to be fresh water?
I did read that some time ago but I don’t recall how holy water was mentioned. The question came to mind because ‘Constantine’ is on and there was shot of his apartment with the large containers of holy water.
Does the blessing ‘wear off’, is the blessing halted at the end of the ritual, or is the river still blessed? Or is it the particular volume of water that was blessed, and that water is now downstream, in the ocean, and diluted by all the other water?
What a great question! LOL
Good question! 
I’m inclined to think that the answer is directly related to what happens to Jesus when the communion elements are digested! 
Holy Shit!
Holy cow Batman!
Can diluted water be blessed? Pee, for example. Or heavy water. Or polluted water?
The mind boggles. And my mind doesn’t boggle easily.
And why doesn’t it taste like flesh? So that Christians aren’t cannibals nor vampires? Boggling indeed.
No, there are no rules on the scope of this sort of thing.
I’ve heard many a prayer blessing the entire world and its future well into eternity.
The result of the blessing, whether it be to create a volume of holy water or whatever, is not however guaranteed. Therein lies the rub. One could bless all the waters of the earth but its hard to show you’ve gained much in efficiency because it’s difficult to quanitify any efficacy at all.
I think a mass-quantity blesser is more likely to be seen as lazy rather than productive or great…
So theoretically you could trick a bunch of vampires into following you into the ocean, then BAM! whip out a priest and have him bless the ocean, dissolving them horribly?
Or maybe bless all the water vapor in the air and watch all the vampires burst into flame as soon as they crack the lids of their coffins the next night.
For us LDS priesthood holders, there are two times we do something religious with water: Baptism and Sacrament.
For Baptism, the only prayer that is said is for the individual being baptized. We don’t bless the water. We do, however, require a lot more water than those denominations which “sprinkle” instead of “dunk” as we’re “dunkers.”
There are two Sacrament prayers, one for the bread and one for the water. The prayer for the water is:
The words this water and it in the prayer specifically refer to the water on the Sacrament table. If it ever happens that we run out of that water before everyone who desires to partake, we would get some more and then say the Sacrament prayer again. My current ward has a nifty way of doing this. In addition to the water in little cups in the trays, we also have a teapot full of water. Right before we say the Sacrament prayer, we remove the cloth covering the water (the water trays and the waterpot), take the top off the waterpot and then say the prayer. If we run out of water in the little cups, the Aaronic Priesthood members who’re passing the water to the congregation will come back to the Sacrament table. The Priests or Elders (as the case may be) will put some more plastic cups from the supply in the table drawer into the trays and then just pour water from the waterpot, thus avoiding the necessity to say the prayer again.
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Revtim** wins the internets. Time for everyone to log off.
So a priest is standing with his friends on a windy pier, a gust comes in and the priest turns to face into the wind, whipping it out to take a whizz…
“A holy wind coming guys!”
Yep, there’s always an exception to every rule. Don’t piss into the wind, indeed!
To give a serious response to the question though:
In my understanding, “blessing” isn’t something that the priest does. Saying so is just a conversational shortcut. What the priest is doing is asking God to let him use the water in question to clean the person’s sin. So the water itself isn’t “blessed” in any way beyond the understanding that when next the priest uses the water to cleanse the person, that God will accept that person. God accepting the person is where the blessing occurs.
Given that it’s the person being blessed, and that the water is simply an agreed-upon symbol that God likes (similar to a sword being used in a knighting), the only important thing is that God has accepted the person. Neither the size nor quality of the water should be a mitigating nor relevant factor, most probably.
To use the example of knighting, in general a sword is used in the ceremony. If some circumstances led to it being that a king wanted to knight someone in the middle of the forest and didn’t have a sword, it’s entirely up to the king to decide whether he feels that a branch would be good enough given as knighting is a power of his station as king, granted solely by him, and by his sole decision. The quality of the branch doesn’t matter so long as the king wants to bestow his favor on the person, and the king views the vessel of transferal as being up to snuff for the occasion at hand.
So essentially, you always could ask God to accept the whole ocean for the ceremony, but it might be stupid to since God might think you’re making fun of him.
EDIT: And I just realised that I hit post 4000 with my “pissing into the wind” post 
I hear you can’t ever bless the same river twice, though.
“There are those who say you cannot even bless the same river once.” – St. Heraklitos
Sage Rat is generally correct – a “blessing” is something that is considered in theology to be God’s action; popular parlance uses “to bless” and “a blessing” for the shorthand usage of “to utter a prayer or a hortative direct address in which God is requested to bless someone or something.”
The key part of the Thanksgiving Over the Water in the Episcopal Baptism liturgy is a good example of the prayer form:
Typical of a hortative form, in which the blessing is requested from God but the person-to-be-blessed is the one addressed, is the Aaronic benediction shared by Judaism and Christianity.