If You Have Something Blessed By The Pope

[Bennn]

I don't like it either. Looks like 'worming' your way around the laws of the Church to me.

Pax Domini,
Ben

[Luigi]

When I was in Rome a couple of years ago, we went to St. Peter's for the Wednesday Angelus during which, of course, the Pope blesses the audience. It was a rather warm day, but there were several guys wearing these sort of James Bond-looking black trenchcoats... I couldn't figure out why exactly, but I thought maybe it was a Roman style or something. Then when the Pope got ready to bless the audience, these guys all opened up there trenchcoats like they were exposing themselves or something! Turns out they had pinned rosaries, holy cards, medals, and other religious items all over the inside of their coats and opened up the coats to receive as much papal blessing as possible; then they went to walking around and selling these blessed-by-the-Pope items to the tourists.

If you go to Rome yourself, keep an eye out for them.

[Luigi]

The question of blessed items came up for me a while back. Friend X left his rosary in the chapel, Friend Y picked it up to return it to him, but Friend C reported he had seen Y pick up X's rosary, implying that Y was stealing X's rosary - it was innocent merry mayhem, but a non-Catholic friend said, "Doesn't stealing a rosary rub the magic off of it?" I explained there's no magic on it in the first place although some people do get their rosaries blessed. But it got me to thinking... (and you know how dangerous that is....)

What is a blessing? Is the blessing of a person different from the blessing of a thing? What's the purpose of a blessing? I know there are standard formulae that often incorporate "may" - May God bless you and keep you, may He make His face to shine upon you and so forth. I have some Pentecostal friends who talk about blessings as if they're "positive vibes from God" or something - like plus marks or spiritual pay that God deposits into your judgment account. Others talk about blessings as "something good God did for me" (helped me find an affordable & reliable car). Some even respond to "How are you?" with "I'm blessed of the Lord" meaning God is taking good care of me.

The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that a blessing (of a thing, in my original conception) is a sort of dedication; a blessed item is dedicated to a particular use. For instance, you could use a rosary to tie things together or whatever, but when we bless a rosary, it is set aside for a particular spiritual purpose. So you buy a rosary, and you intend to pray the rosary - that's typical. What difference does blessing it make? Well, it makes us know more clearly & officially that this rosary is set aside for the particular purpose, we sort of offered it to God to say "Do what you want to with this, use this (almost like a tool, a tool for making holiness) to do your work on Earth."

It seems to me that the general blessing at the end of Mass (maybe no all the special blessings with "may" in them) is pretty much the same thing - the priest is dedicating us almost like tools of God's will. And when we receive the blessing (crossing ourselves and saying amen), we're accepting/agreeing to the dedication of ourselves as tools of holiness.

All of which leads back to the question of "Can a blessed item be sold?" Well, if the person who buys the thing hasn't personally asked the preist/bishop/pope to dedicate this thing as a spiritual tool, then I guess the "dedicatedness" - the blessing - is no longer associated with the thing itself.

Thoughts? Comments? Clarifications? (Take notes, you guys, this WILL be on the final exam!)