Body & Blood of Santerian Catholicism (6/6/25)

A recent story from NYC documents two slaughtered chickens that were found on an Upper West Side median, following a recent similar case close by on Broadway and West 92nd Street. The NY Post reports that this “has activists worried they were killed in an animal sacrifice ritual.” Headless goats, chickens, and pigeons have also been found in Texas and Florida, respectively Galveston beach, a Tampa cemetery, Cape Coral, the Courtney Campbell Causeway - and other locations too.Most of these cases are tied directly or indirectly to Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religious practice that developed in Cuba during the 19th century. As a mixture of Yoruba religion from West Africa, Spiritism, and even Catholicism - like Voodoo -  it involves animal sacrifices. Contrary to popular belief or personally bias belief, the US SCOTUS ruled in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993) that certain animal sacrifices were legal. One opinion on the case reads: “Our review confirms that the laws in question were enacted by officials who did not understand, failed to perceive, or chose to ignore the fact that their official actions violated the Nation's essential commitment to religious freedom.”It’s also ironic that Catholicism, a universal religion of people who drink symbolic blood and eat symbolic flesh, is the partial basis of Santería - and Voodoo; both condemned by the largely Christian west. The Corpus Christi and Transubstantiation are based on the concept of sympathetic magic, that life itself is in the blood, and that this force belongs to God as per Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Drinking the blood bestows life, i.e., it is a medicinal remedy, though of a more spiritual variety. That is despite the Bible itself being filled with and overflowing with animal blood, from Genesis to Revelation, and the fact Christians, far more than any other group, are considered the largest consumers of pork alone, not to mention other meats. And unlike HALAL or KOSHER dietary rules, Christians have none for the slaughter of their meals. Around 100,000 cattle are slaughtered daily in the US for the luxury of meat, along with 25 million chickens and 350,000 pigs. The worst part, estimates are that approximately 1/4 of all US meat is wasted annually. What’s worse, religious animal sacrifice or gluttonous animal sacrifices that go to waste? Although Christians maintain the blood and flesh rituals, many distance themselves from the idea,...