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Abstinence from Meat... on Every Friday of the Whole Year?

Q. In conversation with a friend, she mentioned that we may not eat meat on Friday.  I thought that Vatican II changed that, and now we may eat meat on Friday. What’s the truth here?

N., in Christ,

            It's like this. There are two canons in Canon Law which read:

"Can. 1250. The Penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.

"Can. 1251. Abstinence from eating meat or some other food according to the precepts of the conference of bishops is to be observed on every Friday of the year unless a Friday occurs on a day listed as a solemnity. Abstinence and fasting, however, are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday."

            The next canons thereafter state things like abstinence starts on one's 14th birthday, fasting starts at 18 (exactly at midnight at the end of the day of the said birthday, to be exact).

            In America, our Bishops have changed the custom, so that we no longer practice what the universal Church practices. They say they did so to promote more “vitality” in our penitential lives; this was obviously a huge prudential error, for no where in the world do Catholics at large do less penance than in the USA. This and many other changes have conspired only to the general collapse of Catholicism in our beloved country: empty seminaries, broken families, abusive liturgy, preaching full of dissent, almost no new religious vocations, catechesis with no content, and the list goes on. The long list of scandals from among the clergy, including Bishops, stands out like the tip of an iceberg of the crisis of the clergy in our nation.

But prudent or not, we need to obey our Bishops in all things except sin, and we ought to pray for them. Therefore, we need to ask, what have the local bishops in the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) stated on the matter of abstinence?

            The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) used to be called the "National Conference of Catholic Bishops," or NCCB. In a document, "Pastoral Statement On Penance and Abstinence," (November 18, 1966), the NCCB stated regarding the Fridays EXCEPT THOSE DURING LENT (where abstinence and fasting still apply):

            "… the Catholic bishops of the United States, far from downgrading the traditional penitential observance of Friday, and motivated precisely by the desire to give the spirit of penance greater vitality, especially on Fridays, the day that Jesus died, urge our Catholic people henceforth to be guided by the following norms:

            "1. Friday itself remains a special day of penitential observance throughout the year, a time when those who seek perfection will be mindful of their personal sins and the sins of mankind which they are called upon to help expiate in union with Christ Crucified;

            "2. Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday be freely making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ;

            "3. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law. Our expectation is based on the following considerations;

               "a. We shall thus freely and out of love for Christ Crucified show our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity in Christ and his Church.

               "b. We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in the world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate, personal abstinence from meat, more especially because no longer required by law, will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish."

            Some could argue that this law no longer has any force, since it was promulgated previous to the new Code of Canon Law (or CIC), and the CIC basically replaced the previous set of laws and canons in the Church.

            In my opinion, this is a typical American thing, full of ambiguity, false assumptions, and mediocrity. Nonetheless, it is the apparent law of the land.

            There are some who pit “obedience” against “free acts.” Abstaining from meat could be seen as “obedience,” and making up my own creative penance would be more “free.” Yet the sacrifice of one’s judgment on the matter and fast the way the Church wants one to fast is a great sacrifice, bordering on perfection. It is the Church that teaches us how to do penance, we cannot be our own teachers on this matter, for it deals with matters revealed in scripture and tradition.

Jesus was obedient to the Father until death, death on the cross; in no way was this obedience an inhibition to his free act of love. Obedience is meritorious when it is done freely.

            And, silly as the bishops were then, this is the conundrum: they say that they want us to not abstain from meat out of obedience but out of love; yet the very document which states that requires that we obey it. It is as if they stress that obedience is not important (yet it is: Jesus saved the world by his obedience), but then expect all to obey them in the same breath. (Honestly, we need clergy who can think logically.) Let's pray for the bishops of our own day an for those of the future, that they might enjoy an improved intellectual talent than we saw in 1966, and return the Church to fasting, abstinence, discipline, orthodoxy, Latin, sacred liturgy, Gregorian Chant, substantial catechesis, and vocational renewal.

            Anyway, let's just all love, and show our love by our obedience. This means abstaining from meat; it is not matter of sin or strict obedience; what is a matter of sin or strict obedience is that we do some penance on Fridays, abstinence by preference or any other instead, and that we do so in repentance for our own sins and to make satisfaction for the sins of others.

            One last point: see how complicated the Bishops made it? The result is that the average Catholic, who doesn't spend his time combing NCCB promulgations from the '60's and organizing theological symposia to discern how to practice it all, has completely abandoned the practice of Friday Penance. May God bring our bishops to have the wisdom and courage to govern more wisely and more efficaciously.