The Cats Who Bore the Cross

Every October, the internet fills with warnings: “Keep your black cats inside. Pagans might harm them for Halloween.” It’s an old accusation, recycled year after year, and completely unfounded. The historical record shows that the real persecution of cats came not from pagans, but from the religious. The Church and its faithful turned the cat from a household guardian into a symbol of the Devil. Their crusade against these animals left a tragic trail of fur, fire, and fear that still lingers today.

When the Church Declared War on Cats

In the thirteenth century, Christian Europe was rampant with suspicion. Heresy hunts, inquisitions, and crusades were not only about theology; they were about control over bodies, beliefs, and even animals. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued the papal bull Vox in Rama, condemning heretical sects who were said to kiss a black cat’s backside during their ceremonies. The text may sound absurd now, but its effects were lethal.

Following Gregory’s decree, cats, especially black ones, were massacred across Europe. Chroniclers in France, Flanders, and Germany describe public rituals where cats were burned alive on midsummer bonfires or tossed from bell towers as the crowds laughed and cheered. In Metz, France, citizens stuffed live cats into sacks and hurled them into flames as part of the city’s Corpus Christi festivities. In Ypres, the custom of throwing cats from the belfry persisted well into the seventeenth century. It wasn’t abolished until the 1800s, when horrified animal welfare advocates finally intervened.

These were not pagan rituals. They were Catholic and civic, sanctioned by priests and mayors alike — the same institutions that condemned paganism as barbaric.

Pagans and the Sacred Cat

Before Christianity, cats were sacred throughout much of the pagan world. In ancient Egypt, the goddess Bastet was both fierce and maternal, a protector of home and hearth. Norse mythology gave us Freyja, the goddess of love and magic, who rode in a chariot pulled by two giant cats. In Celtic regions, cats were guardians of the Otherworld and companions to women with spiritual power.

The transition from reverence to revulsion says much about the Church’s broader struggle against the old religions. In demonizing the cat, Christianity also demonized the feminine — the independent, sensual, mysterious forces of nature that cats embodied. To destroy the cat was to symbolically conquer the remnants of the Goddess.

The Great Cat Massacre and the Christian Carnival

Centuries later, this hostility toward cats evolved into social satire. One of the most famous examples comes from eighteenth-century Paris, recounted in Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. Apprentices in a printer’s shop, frustrated with their masters’ cruelty, staged a mock trial and execution of the family’s beloved cats. They hung them from the shop’s beams, beating drums and chanting like priests.

Darnton interpreted the event as a grotesque parody of Christian rituals and a “massacre” not born from paganism, but from the moral theater of a Christian world where cruelty and sanctity danced hand in hand. These ceremonies mirrored the cat-burnings of earlier centuries: public, performative, and sanctioned by laughter. In Christian Europe, killing cats had become a kind of communal entertainment and a dark inversion of the pagan festivals that once honored them.

Faith, Pestilence, and a Deadly Irony

By the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, Europe’s feline population had been decimated by centuries of persecution. The Church’s war on cats created the perfect conditions for rats to thrive, which were the very creatures that carried plague-infested fleas. Some historians argue that this moral panic indirectly magnified one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. The “enemies of Christ” were, in fact, humanity’s best defense against disease.

In London, where cats were also culled in the name of religious purity, plague records spiked. In the countryside, where farmers often ignored such decrees and allowed barn cats to roam freely, mortality was measurably lower. Nature, as always, had its own quiet logic.

From Samhain Fires to Halloween Myths

The notion that “pagans kill cats on Halloween” has no basis in pre-Christian European religion. The Celtic festival of Samhain — the ancestor of modern Halloween — was about honoring the dead, not sacrificing the living. The fires lit on Samhain Eve were meant to guide spirits, not to harm animals. Early Church chroniclers, viewing these customs through suspicion, often projected their own fears of witchcraft and devilry onto them.

As witch trials spread through early modern Europe, the cat became a central figure in demonology. Black cats were said to be witches’ familiars — not because pagans believed so, but because inquisitors imagined it. And so the myth took root, repeated for centuries until even modern animal shelters began to believe that black cats were in danger each October.

Reclaiming the Cat as Guardian of the Hearth

To correct the record is to restore a piece of dignity not only to cats but to the people once blamed for their suffering. Pagans, herbalists, and wise women saw in the cat a reflection of their own spirit: independent, perceptive, and unafraid of the dark. It was Christianity that hunted both.

When we honor cats today by feeding a stray, lighting a candle for a lost companion, or posting pictures of our furry friends on Halloween, we are, in a small way, undoing that long inheritance of cruelty. We are remembering that not all fires were lit by pagans, and not all monsters wore horns.

So the next time someone tells you to keep your cat safe from witches, tell them the truth: witches loved their cats. It was everyday citizens who burned them.

Sources

Pope Gregory IX, Vox in Rama (1233)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984)

Katharine M. Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2001)

Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2006)

E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Cornell University Press, 1976)

Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Penn State Press, 2003)

William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996)