READING, Pa. – Alvernia University is putting the spotlight on dogs, cats, and other four-legged friends.<\/p>\n
The catholic Franciscan school in Reading held a “blessing of the animals” on the quad today.<\/p>\n
Students, staff, and other members of the community were invited to bring their pets on campus to get blessed.<\/p>\n
The ceremony honors Saint Francis of Assisi — Alvernia’s patron saint — who is also the patron saint of animals.<\/p>\n
One of the sisters tells us Saint Francis celebrated all creation as holy.<\/p>\n
“…and by identifying creation in a relational way, we’re not stewards; we’re there to care for and care with creation, and Francis emphasized that,\u201d said sister Marie Cacciatore.<\/p>\n
The event comes ahead of the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis’ Feast Day, which is celebrated every year on October 4th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – Alvernia University is putting the spotlight on dogs, cats, and other four-legged friends. The catholic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":["post-298029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}