Having read this thread and having seen these shoes for sale, I wanted to discuss the issue of Holy Water and other magical items a little more generally & didn’t want to hijack the other thread.
The Problem, as I see it, with any magical item, Holy Water being one, is that if you say it has special powers, you immediately have the problem of dealing with the real world. People will want to see the magic trick.
To keep from having to perform the trick, access to magic items is always limited. Nobody but the Bishop gets to touch the artifact or the water only stays Holy for a week after being blessed or whatever limiting feature you can imagine. There’s a Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia to which access is very limited, indeed. The linked article says that this Ark is a false one, which rather feeds into my main point.
If it were the real Ark, you’d think it would be available for examination.
So, the hierarchy independently over many years, use physical objects to inspire the faithful and keep the objects away from the faithful lest the faithful learn more about the objects… and then, in these modern times, you get people trying to gain access to the lower hanging fruit and (by doing so) revealing what a peculiar arrangement it has all been from the start.
People start spraying Holy Water from crop dusters and injecting Holy Water into shoes. People say that the concept of Holy Objects is being cheapened by such events. Defenders say that such things do no harm. Non-believers say that they would treat being sprayed by Holy Water as assault. You have nobody, anywhere, with any evidence that the magic worked for anyone. It is, as far as I can tell, essentially Marketing. People are trying to sell a product and are using magical thinking to push the pallets out the door. In this way, I see it as a sibling of the whole GMO or Organic Food phenomena. It’s just more magical thinking with even less doctrine behind it.
If the magic doesn’t work for everyone, it isn’t magic in my book. You can keep your $2000 shoes.
There’s a bucket of it at the front door of every Roman Catholic church for dippin’ your fingers in. The water itself is blessed via prayer; no shards of the One True Cross or other artifacts required.
Are claims being made about the water in this context?
If the answer is no, there’s no need to restrict access.
If the answer is yes, well, I’d love to hear the details.
If the answer is that no explicit claims have been made, but the church officials wouldn’t be overly concerned if the parishioners chose on their own to believe that the water is magical… Well, this seems to me to be most likely.
It is my guess - and it is just a guess - is that the Catholics have an emotional attachment to the water as an aesthetic of the church. Just as the pews aren’t chairs, the Holy Water in an official Church Fluid Containment Vessel isn’t water in a bucket.
And, it is this emotional attachment that some people are exploiting.
It’s holy water. What claims are you looking for? The only “supernatural” claims I’ve ever heard about holy water pertain to fighting demons and the undead and I doubt the Church is super worried about someone testing those.
In any event, you’re the one who started a thread about and mentioned how it was restricted and only bishops were able to access it so no one can evaluate it. It’s not restricted and you can evaluate it all you want.
Not really a bucket. Most holy water fonts I’ve encountered in church were shallow vessels mounted by the entrances for churchgoers to dip their fingers in and make the Sign of the Cross as they enter.
An excellent question. I, too, am curious. If it has no special powers, what, then, is the allure? Obviously, someone thinks it’s special stuff.
As I said in an earlier post, if there are claims, those claims may be investigated, precisely, as you indicate, some Holy Water is available for investigation. And, thus, we are right back to what those claims might actually be, so we can get on with it. If we carefully construct a narrative in which an item is special or magical but without making any specific claims, we remove the possibility of investigation and - in my view - reveal that what we’re really talking about is sentimentality.
For example, and I don’t want to write a whole treatise here, but, for example Lourdes. They’re careful to say that it’s not officially endorsed by the church, because of exactly what I have been on about in the above posts.
The bookshelves constructed by my grandfather aren’t particularly well constructed or made from any particularly rare materials, but they do mean a great deal more to me than they ever would to you. They’re sentimental, not magical. There are no claims & no divine origin.
If someone starts dropping bookshelves from airplanes onto crowds of people, I am no legal scholar, but, yes, I think that would probably be illegal, I don’t care how sentimental the bookshelves might be.
As far as I know, the Catholic Church makes no claims that holy water has any special properties. It is a “sacramental”, that is, something intended to remind people of their devotion.
Instead of focusing on holy water, you should address cases where the church really does claim supernatural occurrences. Get a consecrated Host and have it tested for Christ’s DNA.
went to Catholic school for a few years in the 60s. They told us if we ever saw someone who might be dying (in a car wreck for example) To use any water nearby even if it was dirty to baptize the person. Don’t know if they still teach that.
You’d think a church trying to appeal to rational, smart people in the 21st century would minimize the amount of “Just turn your brain off and don’t question our magic objects”.
As an Assistant (to the) Minister, I serve Communion at our church. So glad it’s a rational church and I don’t have to believe that the water literally turns into blood.
I mean, no DNA test needed. A quick check for hemoglobin and the scam’s all over, right?
We’ve had a Catholic church sharing our church while their cathedral’s being renovated (wasn’t sufficiently over-the-top). They do a study group on Sunday nights, and I’ve caught bits of it. The presentation on Holy Water (and other Blessed Items) was jaw-droppingly crazy. It was equal parts Unbelievable Magic and Wishful Thinking.
If you can get a Bishop to consecrate a juice glass, a sip from that will take the place of any vitamins or pain-relievers you’re taking (or other meds? Could get dangerous…). Seriously, they discussed many formerly-mundane objects, from Blessed Boots to Holy Ball-Point Pens.
(The pen was intimated to help with prosperity…“Yo, padre, I gots this wallet what’s usually empty…”)
In my Catholic high school, my Religion teacher, Brother William, said that certainly, if you tested the bread and wine scientifically, they would still appear to be bread and wine. Nevertheless, during the Transubstantiation, they did literally turn into the body and blood of Christ. How do you explain that discrepancy? You can’t explain it; it’s a miracle!
Staying out of most of this ------ note that the shoes are filled with holy water from the River Jordan and not Holy Water. Holy Water, blessed and used for ceremonial purposes in a few different Christian churches, really doesn’t carry much in the way of power other than being central to some particular moment. Small HW holy water, be it from the Jordan or Ganges ----- mileage varies. The Jordan is special to Christians because that is where tradition claims John baptized Jesus but I don’t know many denominations that really look to it for anything special; there are other springs and sites for that. Now the Hindu on the other hand, with seven holy rivers each holding special significance ------- a lot of chances for shoe sales there. And mix in some of Uncle Bob’s ashes and now we’re talking walking!
