Hounds & Heaven

Some 1,200 years ago lived a stout Bishop of Liege named Hubert. A mighty hunter was he, whose horn would sound right valiantly through the Forest of Ardennes. After his death Hubert was sainted; he had traditionally been converted on a Good Friday when, hunting, he saw a miraculous stag with a shining crucifix between its antlers. A patron of hunters, St. Hubert may be invoked in cases of hydrophobia.

In Europe it is now customary to bless the hounds before the season's first hunt, often on St. Hubert's feast-day, Nov. 3. Not many U. S. Hunts have adopted the practice. This autumn the Washington Riding & Hunt Club got as blesser Very Rev. George Carl Fitch Bratenahl, the tall, bespectacled, scholarly Episcopal dean who spends most of his time overseeing the building of Washington Cathedral (TIME, May 9). Dean Bratenahl put on full vestments, was photographed giving the Church's solemn benediction to the yapping, scrambling hounds. Prayed he: "Brethren, we are gathered here to ask the blessing of our Heavenly Father upon the Riding & Hunt Club and upon all living creatures belonging thereto. . . . Grant, we beseech Thee. O Almighty God, to these creatures of Thy bounty the shelter of Thy protection. . . ."

Was Dean Bratenahl debasing the cloth?

Was he making mockery of a solemn thing? A Cleveland churchman soon arose so to accuse him. In a Sunday sermon Rev. Howard Harper of Grace Episcopal Church, South, pointed out that the Anglican clergy first took up blessing the hounds because foxes were a menace to the countryside. "The fox is not a pest any longer," said Mr. Harper. "If a fox should cause a modern farmer trouble, the farmer would not assemble his friends and his neighbors, equip them with horns and red coats and ask them to ride to hounds in quest of the offending animal.

He would get rid of him by taking a potshot at him at the first opportunity.

"The hounds need no blessing. . . . These people are only playing. And the priest, too, is only playing. But he is playing with a solemn thing, his priestly power. His blessing becomes a mockery."

That hound-blessing might be a germ of virulent controversy seemed further apparent last week. In The Churchman (Episcopal) was a letter from one Eunice Barrows, who said: "Serious-minded people of today ... cannot have much respect for a clergyman who in his priestly robes goes into a cornfield to give the church's blessing on a hundred dogs who will .soon harry a poor, innocent animal into a death of torture."

Here the controversialists missed a point. The hounds Dean Bratenahl blessed scrambled off not after a fox but after a little scent bag in a drag hunt.

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