# Bells

**Campane**

**Known today as.** Church bells blessed by the bishop in a rite popularly, and wrongly, called their “baptism.”

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

Their ringing “is so hateful and hostile to demons that storms stirred up by them are either kept from breaking, or, once broken, are stilled, or turned aside” (Treatise Two; note LXXIII).

## What does modern science say?

Blessed bells were rung against storms, but bell towers, being the highest points, drew lightning: a book published by Fischer in Munich in 1784 reported that in thirty-three years lightning had struck 386 church towers and killed 103 bell-ringers. The blessing of bells continues.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the “baptism” of bells “merely popular and metaphorical,” a phrase “tolerated, but … never been formally recognized by the Church.” In the rite the bishop “mixes salt with water, reciting prayers of exorcism analogous to those always used in the preparation of holy water, but making special reference to the bell and to the evil influences of the air—the phantoms, the storms, the lightning—which threaten the peace of devout Christians.” The bell is washed inside and out, anointed “with the oil of the sick in seven places” outside and “with chrism in four places” within, named for a saint, and the thurible with incense and myrrh is placed under it “so that the smoke arising may fill its cavity.” The ritual “agrees with that in use in Carlovingian times … dating probably as far back as the pontificate of Egbert of York in the middle of the eighth century.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Epiphany.” newadvent.org/cathen/05504c.htm
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Bells.” newadvent.org/cathen/02418b.htm

---

*Bells.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/bells

Historical description, not medical advice.