Meatless Fridays Returns To Britain

From today, all Catholics in England and Wales who are healthy and free, and who have completed their fourteenth year but are not yet sixty, will be required by Church law to abstain from eating meat to fulfil their Friday penance. No longer do members of the Catholic Church in England and Wales get to choose their penance on Fridays, a freedom that was granted to them in 1984. From now on, to choose to eat meat on a Friday will be a sin, and in some instances will even be a mortal sin - despite what Fr Marcus Stock, Secretary of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, said recently, when he advised that "Failure to abstain from meat on a particular Friday ... would not constitute a sin" (see link at the bottom of this page).

During their plenary meeting in May, the Bishops of England and Wales resolved "to re-establish the practice of Friday penance [from 16 September, to mark the first anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the UK] in the lives of the faithful as a clear and distinctive mark of their own Catholic identity." One of the reasons for doing this was so that the whole Catholic community might be united in witnessing to their faith, with all Catholics sharing in the same Friday penance by abstaining from meat. It also appears that another reason for reinstating the traditional Friday abstinence is the fact that more and more young people now wish to re-connect with the ancient disciplines and traditions of their faith (see the Fr Stock link, above). Of course, since its very early days the Church has marked and commemorate our Lord's Passion and Death by keeping a simple Friday penance.

The 1983 Code of Canon Law (n1251 & 1253) grants Bishops' Conferences permission to determine the nature of Friday penance within their jurisdictions. Soon after this privilege was granted, many bishops in the English-speaking world decided to relax the requirement to abstain from meat as part of one's Friday penance. Sadly, as a result of this relaxation, many Catholics drifted away from engaging in any form of penitential act on Fridays, to the extent that some younger members of the Church have even become oblivious to the penitential nature of Fridays. But it remained a legal moral obligation on all Catholics, even in those nations that allowed for the eating of meat on Fridays, to perform some act of penitence and contrition on Fridays. All too often, though, many Catholics used the new freedom that came with the relaxation of the obligation to abstain from meat on Fridays as an opportunity to "indulge their flesh" (cf Gal 5:13), so to speak, and avoided doing anything out of the ordinary on these penitential days.

In the pre-Conciliar days, all Catholics knew that they had a moral obligation to mark Fridays by abstaining from eating meat. They also knew that if they deliberately chose to break this ecclesiastical law, they would have had to go to Confession - for they would, in all probability, have committed a mortal sin. Nowadays, though, it seems that many Catholics do not believe that disobedience to a Church precept is sinful or wrong - some even claim it's their right to be disobedient. But disobedience is a grave sin, it is the sin of Adam, it is the sin of pride - the mother of all deadly sins, and the Devil's own downfall. Why did Fr Marcus Stock, then, in an obscure reference to a 1967 document, declare in the recent, and on the whole relatively good article, "Catholic Witness - Friday Penance Q&A", that failure to observe the Friday abstinence was not "grave" enough a matter to constitute the committing of sin (let alone a mortal one)?

It is commonly known that three things must happen for a sin to be mortal. The first is that the sin must be "grave". Secondly, it must be committed with the person's "full knowledge". Thirdly, the sin must also be committed by someone able to give "deliberate consent" to the act. So, could failure to abstain from meat on Friday be a mortal sin in some instances? I would argue that, yes, it could.

In his 1966 post Vatican II Apostolic Constitution on Fast and Abstinence, called Paenitemini, Pope Paul VI "declared and established" that: "The days of penitence to be observed under obligation throughout the Church are all Fridays and Ash Wednesday ... Their substantial observance binds gravely" (II.1). In other words, the observance of the days of penitence is - even within the post-Conciliar Church - a grave matter. It stands to reason, then, that failure to abstain from meat on Friday - especially if it is done so in a spirit of rebellion or in an attempt to undermine the Church's teaching on penance - is also a grave matter. Our forefathers in the faith instinctively knew that it was a grave sin to deliberately consume meat on Fridays - it was disobedient rebellion. Nowadays, though, we have to resort to canon law or Ecclesiastical documents in order to highlight the simple fact that the obligation to observe the Friday penance "binds gravely".

Of course, for a sin to be mortal it must also be committed with full knowledge and with a completely free will. In other words, accidents or mistakes, or being forced to do something against one's will, would negate the gravity of the sin - meaning that it could no longer be counted as "mortal" or even, in some cases (such as complete insanity), as "sinful". A man or woman who somehow forgets it's a Friday and chomps into a beefburger would not, then, be committing a mortal sin - though it would, in all probability, be a venial one. Someone who is stuck at home, penniless and hungry, and who might only have a sausage to eat would also not be committing a mortal sin were s/he to eat that frankfurter on a day of penance. The same applies, for example, to a man or woman who might be in prison and who is forced to eat meat on a Friday - for they would not be acting freely in such a situation. But those Catholics who are obliged to keep the Friday penance and have full use of their faculties and are totally free but who deliberately eat a pork chop after going to the effort to double-check that it is a Friday would, in all probability, be committing a mortal sin. The gravity of the sin would not really lie in the eating of meat, as such, but in wilful disobedience to one's moral obligation to do penance and to the precepts of the Church established by Christ.

Many of us will be rejoicing today as the Friday penance is re-established in its proper form here in England and Wales. Our Bishops have done well to highlight the importance of penance and to encourage Catholics to act as one in their witness to Christ's supreme act of love, his Passion and Death. A common and united abstinence from meat on Fridays will help Catholics live in solidarity with one another, and will also encourage us to be united both with our Lord and with those who suffer from hunger. But be warned, those who deliberately choose to ignore their penitential obligation on Fridays might, as a result, have to seek out the Sacrament of Penance on Saturdays!

[Images: 1 No-Meat sign; source: Catholic Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Manchester, England. 2 A penitent confessing her sins; source: Catholic Spiritual Direction - this image, as far as I know, is originally from The Saint Andrew's Daily Missal (1945)]