The Rite of Churching
A friend of mine gave birth this week to a baby boy. While I was at dinner this evening, we were discussing this, and one of my relatives described how after giving birth to a child in the 1960s she was asked if she would be churched.
‘Churching’ refers to a blessing that mothers were given following recovery from childbirth. After remaining at home for 4-6 weeks after giving birth, the woman would go to church where she would thank God for the safe delivery of her child and receive a blessing from the priest. Only married women were eligible for the blessing. They were to be appropriately dressed, and would carry a lighted candle. The priest would then mark the woman with the sign of the cross in holy water.
Churching is thought to derive from a Jewish purification rite, where the sin of childbirth was washed away. In the New Testament, Mary went to the temple to be purified following the birth of Jesus, a festival that is celebrated as Candlemas on February 2. Many people considered that childbirth made a woman unholy or unclean because it resulted from sexual activity; sexual abstinence and virginity being equated to holiness. People considered the purification rite, or rite of churching to be very important as it allowed the ‘unclean’ woman to re-enter the church in a ‘state of grace’.
As a result, superstitions associated with churching also arose. There was a superstition that it was bad luck for a woman who had not been churched to enter into any house other than her own; some say this was because she would be more susceptible to the fairies. In Ireland this bad luck could be avoided by pulling a piece of thatch or slate from a roof and wearing it on top of a new hat.
According to a Church of Ireland source from Sligo in 1829 ‘it is considered most dangerous and unlucky [among Roman Catholics] to touch meat that has been dressed by a mother who is not yet churched, or to be in the same house with her.’ The same source suggested that priest would expect to receive half a crown from the woman for the churching, an amount that for some might have been hard to afford; it also suggests that in some cases the baptism of a child was contingent on the mother having been churched. The article does contain some religious bias but other sources confirm that a payment was to be made to the priest for churching.
The rite of churching was not just restricted to Roman Catholics, being practiced by members of the Church of Ireland also. It was also common practice in England and other parts of Europe. In Ireland, Catholic women had to be churched up until Vatican II in 1962; my mother-in-law remembers her mother being churched during the 1950s.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
If Mary had to be cleansed because she gave birth to Jesus then we are all in deep shit.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
I’m pretty certain that there was no actual compulsion on women to be “churched” as late as 1962 and the 2nd Vatican Council!
Both my brother and I were born in the 1940s, and not only was my mother not churched, she would have found the suggestion that she should be extremely odd. I may be wrong, but I don’t think any of her sisters-in-law were churched either. I think that maybe by the 1950s it was just an old fashioned custom that some women followed and others did not. I’m not criticising women who were churched, of course, just making the point that I think the practice was not really common by 1962, and that it certainly wasn’t still a church requirement then.
April 21st, 2010 at 3:06 pm
My mum tells me that she got in to big trouble as she refused to be churched. It wasn’t compulsory but it was certainly the ‘done thing’ and would make you very much a topic of much scandalised gossip among your peers if it wasn’t done. I’m not sure whether that was for my birth or my sisters but I was born in 1975 and my sister in 1969 so certainly well after Vatican 2. This was in the west of Ireland.