Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah
1993 United States Supreme Court case
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that an ordinance passed in Hialeah, Florida, forbidding the unnecessary killing of "an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption", was unconstitutional.
Background
Santería is an Afro-Cuban religion developed as a syncretism of Roman Catholicism and Yoruba religion by Yoruba people brought as slaves from Yorubaland to Cuba by the Atlantic slave trade. Adherents can fulfill their destiny through the aid of beings known as orishas, who subsist off blood from animal sacrifice. Animals, usually chickens, killed during ritual slaughter are then cooked and eaten by the celebrants, except during death and healing rituals, where sick energy is believed to have passed into the sacrifice. Santeria has been subject to widespread persecution in Cuba, so it is traditionally practiced in secret, employing saint symbolism.
The Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc., is a Florida nonprofit organized in 1973 by Ernesto Pichardo, who was an Italero-level priest in the Santeria faith. The Lucumí language is used in the Santeria liturgy and Babalú-Ayé is the spirit of wrath and disease. In April 1987, the Church leased a property at 173 W. 5th Street, Hialeah, in Miami-Dade County, Florida and announced its intention to use the site to openly practice the faith.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah” is 1993 United States Supreme Court case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Church, Lukumi and Babalu, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5116930. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1973 and 1987.
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