# Holy water

**Acqua benedetta**

**Known today as.** Water blessed by a priest, usually with exorcized salt mixed in.

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

For cleansing places and people, driving out demons, and curing illness, with a long catalogue of miracles; blessed against storms and hail; sprinkled on the bath, the house, and the sick (Treatise Two).

## What does modern science say?

Still in daily Catholic use. The salt-and-water rite Canale gives survived in the *Rituale Romanum* until the reforms after the Second Vatican Council; the blessing of water remains in the present *Book of Blessings* (1984). Studies of the water in church stoups find it rich in bacteria from the dipping of hands, and some churches have gone to dispensers; the blessing in the present *Book of Blessings* drops the exorcism of the salt that Canale’s rite kept.

## What lore surrounds it?

It was thrown on witches to make them confess and poured on the threshold against them, sprinkled on the hail-cloud by the priest in the Alps, and drunk by the sick; the Orthodox bless the waters of rivers at Theophany, and the faithful carry the water home for the year. The stoup at the church door is the Roman *cantharus* of the atrium turned to a sacramental.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The *Apostolic Constitutions*.** Of the fourth century already give a prayer for the blessing of water and oil for health and for the driving out of demons; the *Liber Pontificalis* ascribes the mixing of salt into it to Pope Alexander I, in the second century, which is legend.

**The Easter water.** Water blessed at the Vigil, with the paschal candle plunged into it, was carried home in bottles and sprinkled on the fields, the beasts, and the beds, and kept against storms through the year.

**The Reformers.** Rejected it as superstition: Luther kept a blessing of water but mocked its use against devils, and the English stoups were smashed in the 1540s, so that the holy water of Canale’s book marks a line between the confessions.

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) admits that “the use of holy water in the earliest days of the Christian Era is attested by documents of only comparatively late date,” and gives the fourth-century blessing of Serapion of Thmuis: “Grant unto these creatures the power to heal; may all fevers, every evil spirit, and all maladies be put to flight by him who either drinks these beverages or is anointed with them.” Baptismal water was thought incorrupt, and “scarcely had baptism been administered, when the people would crown around with all sorts of vessels and take away the water, some keeping it carefully in their homes whilst others watered their fields, vineyards, and gardens with it.” Pope Leo IV ordered every priest to bless water each Sunday, and Hincmar of Reims let the people “carry some away in clean vessels so as to sprinkle their houses, fields, vineyards, and cattle, and the provender with which these last are fed, as also to throw over their own food.”

## Sources

- *Apostolic Constitutions* VIII.29.
- Kirschner, A. K. T., et al. (2012). “Holy springs and holy water: underestimated sources of illness?” *Journal of Water and Health* 10.
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Water, Holy.” newadvent.org/cathen/07432a.htm

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

Historical description, not medical advice.