Paws and worship

“If you need anything for cleaning up, it’s all over to the side,’’ Keith-Lucas tells the parishioners, waving a hand toward a table with spray bottles and paper towels.

Welcome to the Perfect Paws Pet Ministry, which marked its first anniversary this month. To celebrate, there’s cake and cookies for the humans, dog cupcakes and chewies for their pets. Folding chairs are set up in the parish hall — “it’s easier to clean,’’ explains the minister — and a few dozen people, two dozen dogs in tow, fill them.

The idea for the ministry had its roots in an annual “blessing of the animals’’ in a local park, which attracts dozens of celebrants. Keith-Lucas thought a regular service might be a good way to draw newcomers by celebrating all of God’s creatures and the human-animal bond.

“I think that relationship can be a way people experience God’s unconditional love, and they feel called to look beyond their needs and help another being, and that can help them grow spiritually,’’ she said.

But what about traditionalists who might say that church is no place for animals? After a local newspaper reported last year on the new service, some online commentators took issue. One accused Keith-Lucas of “making a mockery of Christ and his church … by turning the church into a dog pound.’’ Someone else called her “dogmatic.’’

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel Mission in East Boston, Sister Mary Bernadette said she believes a church service that includes animals is distracting.

“We go to church to worship God and raise our minds and hearts to God,’’ she said. “Now you put a kitty on my lap and I’m going to be very divided. God made the kitty, it is true, and as much as the animals can have a place in our life, when it comes to those moments where we are coming before God, humans can do that in a manner that animals can’t.’’

But others defend the service — some citing St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.