Year-Round Friday Abstinence Is Required (Not Just in Lent!)
As Catholics, we are still bound to either abstain from meat or do some other act of penance each Friday of the entire year. Abstinence should always be what we choose to do since this underscored Christian culture for nearly 2,000 years, mandatory Friday abstinence having originated during the time of the Apostles. As such, the 1983 Code of Canon Law decrees:
Can. 1251: Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. (emphasis added)
The Need for Penance
Penance is required to atone for our sins and the sins of others (including souls in Purgatory). Our Lord said and insisted, by repeating Himself: “Unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Lk 13:3,5).[1]
Sadly, many Catholics today never hear about the need to do penance. Friday abstinence is a prime example of this sad reality. Not eating meat is a relatively simple penance, but it does set Catholics apart. And it reminds us – every Friday – that Christ died on a Friday to save us from our sins.
Note too that the current Code of Canon Law states that every Friday is a day of penance (cf. Canon 1250).[2] It also asserts that Christians are to be united in some common observance of penance (cf. Canon 1249). If you don’t abstain on Friday, then you should be able to cite the document where your local bishop offers an alternative food[3] or penance to substitute, as stated in Canon 1251. And then you have to keep that penance. In many cases, such documents don’t even exist. However, abstaining from meat on Friday is a penance valid throughout the universal Church.
Canon Law binds all Catholics under pain of sin. So every Catholic is obligated to keep the minimum disciplines established in Canon Law. But each one of us can individually choose to do more penance than the required minimum (which today is so very little). In fact, we do well to heed Our Lady’s summons at Lourdes to “Penance! Penance! Penance!” This exact same warning – “penance” thrice repeated – was also called out by the Angel in the vision of the Third Secret of Fatima.
Those who wish to heed Our Lady’s call for penance will find a helpful resource in The Fatima Center’s calendar. It is a unique spiritual resource which indicates the penances which were expected of all Catholics in 1917. For example, every Friday illustrates the fish to indicate the requirement for abstinence. So why is the symbol of a fish used, and what about the Friday after Thanksgiving?
Why Is Fish Allowed?
Today many people wonder why Catholics eat fish (abstaining from meat) as a penance. This goes back to the era of Christ when fish was all too common and other forms of meat were much harder to come by. In the very early Church, not even fish was eaten on days of abstinence until around the 6th century. (In some times and places, Catholics were required to abstain from all animal products on days of penance. This would have been more common in a monastery. Over the centuries, many of these regulations on penance have been lessened.)
The bottom line is that we must do penance on certain days of the year, and the Church observes a common penance in the form of abstinence as a means of unity among its members. We are all in it together.
This can also have a powerful impact upon secular culture. There are some regions where restaurants feature “fish specials” every Friday. Unbelievers may ask, “Why?” This presents a great opportunity to evangelize. Anyone can respond: “It is because Jesus Christ died on a Friday and so it is customary for Christians to do penance by not eating meat. This has such a profound influence upon society that we have kept this custom to this day.”
Catholics do not abstain from meat on Fridays because the meat is unclean or evil. It is the act of disobedience which is evil since the Church has the authority to require us to abstain from meat at set times. As Fr. Michael Müller remarks in his Familiar Explanation of Christian Doctrine from 1874: “It is not the food, but the disobedience that defiles a man.” To eat meat on a forbidden day unintentionally, for instance, is no sin. As the Scriptures affirm it is not what goes into one’s mouth that defiles a man but that disobedience which comes from the soul (cf. Matthew 15:11).
Yet, even with such a distinction, the Church has historically been wise to change disciplines only very slowly and carefully. The custom of fasting and abstinence goes back to the very apostles themselves. As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once remarked, “It is a long-established principle of the Church never to completely drop from her public worship any ceremony, object or prayer which once occupied a place in that worship.”
Did Pope Pius XII Grant a “Thanksgiving” Dispensation?
No “turkey indult” exists in the form many believe, even though many Catholics who use the 1962 Missal claim a dispensation from meat on the Friday after Thanksgiving. They cite Pope Pius XII as the source of this dispensation.
A dispensation from meat on the day after Thanksgiving was granted in 1957. It came in the form of quinquennial faculties given to local ordinaries to dispense from abstinence on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, as stated by Bouscaren in the Canon Law Digest. As their name implies, quinquennial faculties were granted for five years, after which time they needed to be renewed.
These faculties were renewed in 1962 but not afterward. Some maintained there was then no longer any need to renew the quinquennial faculties because of the publication of Pope Paul VI’s 1966 Apostolic Constitution, Paenitemini. In addition, and more importantly, the [U.S.] National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) issued a document in November 1966. Their decree made abstinence on all Fridays throughout the year “especially recommended” but not obligatory.[4] Thus, the privileges expired.
Before 1962, the bishops in the United States did not generally dispense from Friday abstinence on the Friday after Thanksgiving. However, after the renewal in 1962, more bishops began to exercise this. It may be argued that some bishops may have invoked the ability to dispense abstinence for the Friday after Thanksgiving due to faculties granted to local ordinaries as early as 1931, but no concrete examples confirm this.
The only proof of these “turkey indults” comes from 1962 and after. In 1963, the Bishop of Little Rock, Arkansas, made use of these privileges and dispensed the faithful from mandatory abstinence from meat on the Friday after Thanksgiving:
“By reason of special faculties, His Excellency, the Most Reverend Bishop, grants herewith the following dispensations: from the Law of Fast on the Feast of St. Joseph, Tuesday, March 19; from the Law of Abstinence on Friday, November 29, (day after Thanksgiving) and from the Laws of Fast and Abstinence on Saturday, December 7, Vigil of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.”
Such a dispensation from the law of abstinence was not permanently part of Church law by virtue of it being the Friday after Thanksgiving. While bishops or priests will today dispense from meat on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Pope Pius XII did not permanently dispense meat on that day for American Catholics, as many frequently allege.[5] The aforementioned privileges granted in 1957 have expired.
Shared Days of Penance Matter
Should Catholics eat meat on the Friday after Thanksgiving without the dispensation of a bishop or a priest? No.
Is it good for Catholics to abstain from meat on the Friday after Thanksgiving as a form of penance? Yes. This can gain supernatural merit, atone for sins, and help the sanctification of souls. Such compelling reasons certainly outweigh indulging a desire to eat “turkey leftovers.”
Rather than always trying to get out of required penance, we should be happy that we can have shared days of penance. What is even more concerning than losing these traditions and connections with our forefathers is that the Church appears to no longer teach that days of communal penance are more efficacious than mere private penances.
The tendency to encourage private fasting and penances and reduce Church-wide fasting to only Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is deplorable. Accordingly, Dom Guéranger writes in his article on Ember Wednesday for September (contained in his 15-volume series, The Liturgical Year):
“We have already spoken of the necessity of private penance for the Christian who is at all desirous to make progress in the path of salvation. But in this, as in all spiritual exercises, a private work of devotion has neither the merit nor the efficacy of one that is done in company with the Church, and in communion with her public act; for the Church, as bride of Christ, communicates an exceptional worth and power to works of penance done, in her name, in the unity of the social body.”[6]
He continues by quoting the following passage from Pope St. Leo the Great:
“God has sanctioned this privilege, that what is celebrated in virtue of a public law is more sacred than that which depends on a private regulation. The exercise of self-restraint which an individual Christian practices by his own will is for the advantage of that single member; but a fast undertaken by the Church at large includes everyone in the general purification. God’s people never are so powerful as when the hearts of all the faithful join together in the unity of holy obedience, and when, in the Christian camp, one and the same preparation is made by all, and one and the same bulwark protects all…”
ENDNOTES:
[1] The Douay Rheims Bible mentions “penance” 66 times. Some modern translations of the Bible have systematically eliminated the word “penance” from Sacred Scripture. It is good to memorize this verse (Luke 13:3) so that you can quickly spot check any Bible. Similar verses to spot check are Isaias 7:14, which should use the word virgin, and Genesis 3:15, which should say “she shall crush.”
Modern Bibles frequently replace “penance” with “repent” or “convert.” This reveals a clear agenda; because a faithful Catholic may think, I don’t need to convert; I am already Catholic. Or he may think, I repent because I go to Confession. Yet, when it comes to penance, this is something all of us need to do. The great saints, who we don’t think needed conversion or repentance, never ceased doing penance. And their penances are far greater than our own. In fact, this is one of the reasons they achieved such great sanctity in this life.
[2] The 1983 Code says every Friday except Solemnities. The older 1917 Code was more specific in saying every Friday unless it was a day of precept (Holy Day of Obligation). The logic was sound: If we must attend Mass under pain of mortal sin, then we are not obligated to fast or abstain. The new Code uses the term “solemnity” but there are various feast days classified liturgically as solemnities which are not days of precept (e.g. Epiphany, St. Joseph, the Annunciation, Corpus Christi, etc.). There is no pious logic behind foregoing penance when we are not bound to attend Mass. This is another example of how the call for penance has been greatly reduced.
[3] It has been said that the Code of Canon Law was adjusted in this manner to accommodate Christians in Africa, Asia, and other locations where meat is not regularly included in most meals. In such a case, not eating meat would simply be the norm and not a penance. In such situations, another kind of food should be given up so that penance is being performed. This exception was then sadly used by modernists to destroy the custom of Friday abstinence throughout the Church. (This is yet another example of a ‘time bomb’ which was built into the so-called ‘reforms’ which followed Vatican II.)
[4] Even a reading of this 1966 decree indicates that abstinence from meat on Friday is the preferred and privileged form of penance. That document states: “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 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” (#24).
Interestingly, one should note the conflict between the 1983 universal Code of Canon Law and this episcopal decree. Canon Law states that in order to not abstain from meat, the bishops should substitute another food. The bishop’s document does not however provide such an option. As ‘substitutes’ it mentions refraining from alcoholic drink or performing corporal works of mercy.
[5] Editor’s Note: This has always only been an indult, not an obligation. It is still a Friday though, so Catholics are obliged to do penance.
[6] Dom Guéranger, The Liturgical Year: Time After Pentecost: Volume II (Burns & Oates, 1909), p. 388.