The Catholic Church and Black Cats

Superstition blamed for killing thousands of black cats in Italy
A leading animal rights group has estimated that 60,000 black cats are killed every year by Italians who believe that they bring bad luck.

The Worldview blog has posted an article about this and how the catholic church in the past has ordered the killing of black cats. The source of the story is credited to the telegraph.co.uk

Does anyone know where we could find offical Catholic Church documents that show they did order the killing of black cats?

Here is the link to the Worldview post:
Worldview

I am glad my kitty isn't black.

I can't imagine the church being so superstitious as to kill cats by color.

Gosh!

I don't know if the Church ever had an official policy of killilng black cats, but during the Middle Ages, black cats were suspected of being witch's familiars. This was during the Inquisition, when witches were burned and also black cats were killed. Because of killing all the cats, the Black Plague became much worse, since the cats had been killing the rats who carried the plague.

It was cats in general that were considered to be witches' familiars... not just the black ones. There's some passages from books on witches (written in the 1600's or so... ) that suggests you can become invisible by boiling down a black cat and checking its bones for the ones that make you invisible.

But as to its being a Catholic cause, Mr. Croce is wrong. He may be a bit off in the numbers reported, but I do know that here in America the people at animal rights groups say black cats are at risk near Halloween.

(original story is here: www.telegraph.co.uk.../news/2007/08/26/wcat126.xml )

The Church's negative stance on cats directly contributed to the spread of the Black Plague and other diseases. Cats are quite good at getting rid of vermin and even today places where cats are killed (sometimes for food) end up having trouble with pests like rats and mice.

(I see Forestlady beat me to the punch with that tidbit of info.)

[edit on 3-9-2007 by Byrd]

I saw something on the news the other day about the black cat killings. It's very sad.I have four cats. My biggest and friendliest by far is my black one. He's a real smasher. He's only one and a half yrs old but he's bigger than my other adult cats already. He sits about 18" tall and he's about 3ft long inc. tail. I'm very proud of him.[IMG]http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z53/wigit_photo/SV205895.jpg[/IM G]

Aww this is horrible!

My black male cat dissapeared a few years back, never to be found, I figured it was a conspiracy against him. He was the smartest(walked on a leash) cat ever, but they(who ever it was) had to take him away!