The BalletCats (who also enjoy the patronage of St Vitus) have directed me to apologise for my shameful & utterly unacceptable lateness by sharing Heaney’s version of Pangur Bán with you 
Catholics have Saints for everything - one of my absolute favourites is St Notburga, from a wee village in Austria, whose portfolio includes chickens & leisure time.
Did you mean the early modern trend for thinking cats = witches’ familiars when you said “tense history” @AppleButter? Because that wasn’t limited to cats: hares were heavily under suspicion; [black] dogs* (usually hounds) were not “just” Grim-type omen-things; & in East Anglia, mice became particularly common after Hopkins’ ascendency (small & easily hidden). The frontispiece of Hopkins’ 1647 The Discovery of Witches is a lovely example of how it was understood that a familiar could be any animal. Even tiny horses that literally do not exist, but hey. WIIIIIIIITCH! Obviously my examples relate to the English witch trials (England as distinct from elsewhere in UK) & thus the Protestant Church (specifically, the Church of England) but the Catholic Church really wasn’t going a bundle on “well cats are secretly totally demons” either.
Black cats are traditionally bringers of good luck in Britain & Ireland: Europe you get a patchwork-complex picture, which will doubtless have tipped the scales in the US to their being unlucky. In Italy hearing a cat sneeze is considered lucky - if the church had got into a whole “evil cats!” thing, that belief couldn’t have endured. In purely practical terms, the Catholic Church needed cats (& was very aware of this). Ian Paisley Sr himself couldn’t better some of the absolute shite that gets published online about the Catholic Church** including - crucially & relevantly - all the nonsense about Gregory IX & C13 Catholics engaging in cat slaughter on such a scale they in fact caused the development of the Black Death.
I’m not meaning you’ve some kind of sectarian agenda AppleButter am just reflecting on how efficiently History, as a discipline, can be disrupted. [Near-]infinite information always at your fingertips sounds too good to be true, & of course it is, with “alternate facts” (as opposed to endless reinterpretations of actual known information) trying to elbow their way in; & if you’ve received the information about Gregory IX in good faith it feels like a cruel thing for someone to have done to you (you-you & more-generally people-you both) as well as the “simple” sectarianism involved. Particularly vicious bit of Bad History.
- Prince Rupert’s poodle, Boy, was deliberately shot at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644 - a not-insignificant number of the Parliamentarian side believed he had supernatural powers. There were claims Boy could find treasure, catch bullets in his mouth, and issue prophecies.
** Because apparently the genuine & very serious issues aren’t enough?
