The Strange Religious Meaning of Pelicans

Did you know that there is a Catholic image of the Eucharist prominently featured on the state flag of Louisiana? It's on their state seal as well.

That's not that surprising since the state has a history of being settled by French Catholics and today the state ranks 9th out of 50 states in the size of its Catholic population. Here's a clue: If you go down to Louisiana to visit you can attend a New Orleans Pelicans basketball game. That's right the image on the flag and seal is a pelican. So what does a pelican have to do with the Eucharist?

Pelicans in Scripture 

The symbol of the pelican, like the lamb, expresses the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. But the word pelican is not found in the New Testament. In the few places pelicans are mentioned in the Old Testament they are associated with uncleanliness, judgment, death and lifelessness. 

In Psalm 102:6-7, when the psalmist wants to express his feelings of loneliness and desolation he chose to compare himself to a pelican. "I am like a pelican of the wilderness, like an owl among the ruins. I am sleepless, shivering in the cold, forlorn, and friendless, like a lonely bird on the rooftop

In Isaiah 34:11, the pelican inhabits the barren and cursed land of Edom after God’s judgment. The pelican finds itself in the midst of ruin and emptiness.  "But the pelican and the porcupine shall possess it; and the owl and the raven shall dwell in it; and He shall stretch over it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness." 

Similarly, while describing the destruction of Nineveh, Zephaniah 2:14 has the pelican as one of the remaining inhabitants of the devastated, God forsaken land. “Flocks will lie down in her midst, All animals that range in herds; Both the pelican and the hedgehog Will spend their nights in the tops of her pillars; Birds will sing in the window, Devastation will be on the threshold; For He has uncovered the cedar work.”

For people who lived in dry arid lands like the ancient Middle East, the pelican was probably a rare sight and thought of as exotic and foreign. It was associated with pagan, gentile lands. For this reason it was deemed unclean. But the biblical image of the pelican as barren and lifeless associated with devastation, desolation and loneliness are not words that fit the habitat of pelicans. In fact it’s quite the opposite.

Pelicans inhabit lands teeming with life. They are water birds found near lakes, rivers, marshes, coastal regions and estuaries where freshwater from rivers mixes with saltwater from the ocean, creates an environment rich in nutrients and perfect for an abundance of biological life. 

This pelican paradox of a bird that exudes life and at the same time a bird that symbolizes death is embraced by Christians. The Old Testament pelican association with isolation, judgment and death fits the image of Jesus on the cross. While he came to bring us an abundant kind of life, everlasting divine life,  it was made possible through pouring out his life blood for our sake. Jesus sounds like the biblical pelican when he prays Psalm 22 aloud from the cross. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.”

Pelicans in Christian Theology, Writing and Art

One of the earliest known sources for the pelican legend as a Christian symbol is the Physiologus,, an ancient Greek text written in Alexandria, Egypt, between the 2nd and 4th centuries. The Physiologus, like the medieval bestiaries that followed,  presented allegories relating animals and their behaviors to Jesus and Christianity. 

This is where the first legend of the pelican feeding her young is described: 

“The little pelicans strike their parents, and the parents, striking back, kill them. But on the third day the mother pelican strikes and opens her side and pours blood over her dead young. In this way they are revivified and made well. So Our Lord Jesus Christ says also through the prophet Isaiah: I have brought up children and exalted them, but they have despised me (Is 1:2). We struck God by serving the creature rather than the Creator. Therefore He deigned to ascend the cross, and when His side was pierced, blood and water gushed forth unto our salvation and eternal life.” 

This legend is not a perfect allegory for Christ feeding the Church the Eucharist. It states that the parents killed the young before reviving them. 

Another, more Catholic version of the legend, was that in time of famine, the mother pelican wounded herself, striking her breast with the beak to feed her young with her blood to prevent starvation. 

From these legends the Catholic Church refers to the pelican as ‘The Vulning Pelican’ (from the Latin vulnero, “to wound”), or ‘The Pelican in Her Piety’. Various works of art from pelican shaped tabernacles, to plaques attached to altars, to stained glass windows, to statues, to the vestmenst of the priest all feature some version of the pelican in a nest pecking its chest to extract the flesh and blood to feed to her babies as they eagerly wait below her with beaks wide open. Various medieval manuscripts feature the crucifixion scene and a pelican image. On one called, ‘Tree of Life’, from the De Lisle Psalter, England, 1310–39 has a Latin inscription above it in red that reads, Pellicanus dicor, pro pullis scindo mihi cor (“I am called a pelican, because I tear open my heart for my chicks”). 

Saint Augustine gave us some important insight into the pelican in his exposition on Psalm 102: 

I find, therefore, some one of Christ's body, a preacher of the word, sympathizing with the weak, seeking the gains of Christ, mindful of his Lord to come. Matthew 25:26 Let us see these three things from the office of His steward. Hath such a man come among those who are not Christians? He is a pelican in the wilderness. Hath he come among those who were Christians, and have relapsed? He is an owl in the ruined walls; for he forsakes not even the darkness of those who dwell in night, he wishes to gain even these. Hath he come among such as are Christians dwelling in a house, not as if they believed not, or as if they had let go what they had believed, but walking lukewarmly in what they believe? The sparrow cries unto them, not in the wilderness, because they are Christians; nor in the ruined walls, because they have not relapsed; but because they are within the roof; under the roof rather, because they are under the flesh. The sparrow above the flesh cries out, hushes not up the commandments of God, nor becomes carnal, so that he be subject to the roof. What ye hear in the ear, that preach ye on the housetops. Matthew 10:27 There are three birds and three places; and one man may represent the three birds, and three men may represent severally the three birds; and the three sorts of places, are three classes of men: yet the wilderness, the ruined walls, and the house-top, are but three classes of men. 

‘St. Augustine tried to explain this verse of the Psalm. Knowing that the pelican lives in Egypt, on the banks of the Nile, he identifies this image with that of a Christian: Christians who lived among pagans also felt as if in an isolated desert. St. Augustine does not talk about killing chicks, though, he only mentions that parents pelicans tear their chests to feed their hungry children.’ 1

Saint Thomas Aquinas,  wrote about the ‘pious pelican’ in his hymn “Adoro te devote,” emphasizing the connection to the Eucharist and the shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sins:

Like what tender tales tell of the Pelican

Bathe me, Jesus Lord, in what Thy Bosom ran

Blood that but one drop of has the power to win

All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

By the time Shakespear and Dante came along the pelican had already been established in the Church through art, liturgy and prayer as a eucharistic symbol of the Lord feeding us his own flesh and blood. Those great poets incorporated the pelican into their literary art as well.

The next time you see a pelican image in a Church or on the vestments of the priest, think of the words of our Lord, ““Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” -Jn 6:53.