20 October 2011

ALL creatures great and small, even humans, were invited to the first ever animal service held at St Giles Church, Oxford in October.

The event was held at the nearest Sunday to the feast of St Francis of Assisi, in line with other churches across the world that hold similar services.The Revd Dr Paula Clifford said: “It went really well. We had a bigger congregation for this service in the afternoon than we had in the morning. It shows the Church cares about things that ordinary people care about, like animals. We mainly had cats and dogs and we followed RSPCA guidelines, which state you should put dogs on one side of the church and cats on the other.

“I have a friend who lives in Sao Paulo in Brazil and she holds a service like this every year. For the people there, many of them living in a box in a very poor but very big city, having a pet is a way of improving your quality of life beyond what we might immediately think of here.”