That was a very cogent insight into what this must be.
There is no justification for God, Christ, or the Apostles ever having “blessed” an item, rather, only people can be blessed by God and all we can do is ask God to do so. It appears the Catholic church tacitly agrees with this.
However, they use the term “blessing” for this “reminder”—it seems to be a very poor borrowing of a term which leads to an easy misrepresentation for at least all non-Catholics, and I would bet many Catholics, too.
The Catholic church should rename the “blessing” the more appropriate “reminder” you say it is.
Catholics do Apologetics too.
But it has nothing to do with being sorry. : )
CM, you’re charitable in your interpretation of what I said, but that’s not really what I mean. “Bless” is actually a good word. The Greek is “eulogia,” meaning “speak well.” The idea is that the priest is praying that the object become a means of blessing a person, in turn. And it’s not at all unbiblical. To the contrary, St. Paul writes, “This cup of blessing, which we bless...” If you were inclined to argue in favor of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, you could argue that he meant to bless Christ, the contents of the cup. You can’t even go halfway as Luther did to consubstantiation and argue that the contents carry Christ. If you don’t go all the way to transubstantiation, than you must acknowledge that inanimate objects are being blessed.
But you’re not wrong at all. Here there is a little difference between the word translated as “bless” in the New Testament, and the word translated as “bless” in the Old Testament. The Old Testament word for “bless,” is Barrack (no fooling — I just discovered this!), meaning, “to bring one to his (its) knees.” So you certainly could argue that you would never Barrack-bless an inanimate object.