Friday Abstinence

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With a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, Jesus fed thousands. It was a sign of how he would himself become the Bread of Life, true life for those who believe in him.

 

We cannot become literally other Christs. We can be transformed by his life and be instruments of his life for others. Just as he accomplished salvation through his supreme sacrifice on the cross, we can fulfill our Christian mission through sacrifice. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, fast and care for the poor as types of sacrifice.

 

Maybe we separate these three activities into distinct functions. Jesus drew them together in feeding the multitude. He took the meager food of the apostles, prayed over it and distributed it to the poor. On Calvary, after a day with no food or drink, he gave his life for us sinners, all the while praying to his Father.

 

We can do the same in a very simple way. I am inviting the Catholic people of the Diocese of Steubenville to resume the practice of abstaining from meat on all Fridays throughout the year, but with a twist. I am asking that this be not only a penitential practice but also an experience of prayer and service. This can happen by connecting abstinence with our witness to the sacredness of human life.

Here's a link to the catechetical materials the diocese is providing.

One of the very best pieces I've ever read on the Friday abstinence is by historian Eamon Duffy. It forms a chapter in his book Faith of our Fathers,.  and a portion of that chapter was reprinted in First Things. It's really worth a read.

Catholics shared that rhythm with most of the world's great religious traditions, a fact which ought to have suggested that there was something essential about fasting not only for our specific identities as Catholic Christians, but as religious beingshuman beings. But since 1967 what was once a truly corporate observance, reminding us of the passion of Christ, of our own spiritual poverty and, even more concretely, of the material poverty of most of the human race, reminding us what it was like to be hungry, has become another individual consumer choice, like going on a diet. Though we pay liturgical lip-service to the old dialectic, and still nominally observe Lent, in practice all our time now has become "ordinary time," and there is nothing in this respect to distinguish Catholics from anyone else.

Yet religious communities depend on the differentiation provided by such shared observances to sustain their identities. The long and noble pilgrimage of Israel through a multitude of cultures and times, without a temple, without a priesthood, has been possible, at least in part, because of the unifying and sustaining effect of their dietary laws. The Jews knew who they were because of what they did and did not eat. Christian fasting and abstinence did not, of course, spring from a ritual distinction between clean and unclean meats, but it was just as deeply embedded in theological conviction as the older dispensation. Its abandonment was not therefore a simple change in devotional habit, but the signal of a radical discontinuity in the tradition and a decisive shift in theological perception.

The theological and practical shift represented by this abandonment of an ancient part of the tradition was not merely a matter of theological emphasis, and more, too, than a question of whether ascetical exercises like fasting are good for the character. What was also at stake was the Church's prophetic integrity: its claim to solidarity with the poor. Considered from this perspective, compulsory fasting and abstinence, practiced regularly, routinely, and in common, was a recognition by the Church that identification with the poor and hungry, with those who know themselves to be needy before God because they were needy among men, is not an option for Catholics, but a necessary and definitive sign of their redemption, as essential in its way as attendance at Mass. The Church has always linked personal asceticism and the search for holiness with this demand for mercy and justice to the poor; the Lenten trilogy of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is both fundamental and structural. By making fasting and abstinence optional, the Church forfeited one of its most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a private devotional gesture, the action of the specially pious, and the prophetic witness of the whole community--the matter-of-fact witness, repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy.

What was striking about the instructions issued by the English bishops in abolishing compulsory Friday abstinence in 1967 was the total absence of any attempt to explain the power and meaning of the traditional observances. The American bishops did much better: while also making the matter optional, they offered a powerful and sympathetic discussion of the religious reasons for the old observance and urged American Catholics to continue the practice as a gesture of solidarity with, and gratitude for, the passion of Christ, as an act of fidelity to the Christian past, and to help "preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world." In total contrast, the English bishops recited the problems and inconveniences surrounding abstinence. Many people, they pointed out, have their main meal at work, in a canteen; social events are often arranged for Fridays; abstinence therefore put Catholics in an awkward position. As the bishops wrote: "While an alternative dish is often available, it is questioned whether it is advisable in our mixed society for a Catholic to appear singular in this matter. Non-Catholics know and accept that we do not eat meat on Fridays, but often they do not understand why we do not, and in consequence regard us as odd."

This misses the point. The whole rationale of symbolic gestures requires that they disrupt and disturb the secular order. Their power to witness--not only to others but to ourselves--comes precisely from their awkwardness. The abolition of such observances strikes at the heart of tradition, the distinctive language of belief. Catholic value cannot be sustained without its proper symbolic expression. Spiritual needs are expressed in physical needs. People can know the fundamental neediness which is the foundation of faith only if they feel our involvement with those who fast because they have nothing to eat.

But none of those arguments prevailed, or were even explored. The bishops saw in the plight of the hungry not a reason for communal fasting as a gesture of solidarity and a call to justice and charity, but a demonstration of the emptiness of any such gesture. Many Catholics, they wrote, "have begun to ask themselves if going without meat on Friday is penance enough. Some find it no penance at all. Meanwhile in Asia, Africa, and South America many Catholics have to go without meat not only on Fridays but every day. Millions are starving or at least underfed. The bishops have therefore decided that the best way of carrying out our Lord's command to do penance is for each of us to choose our own way of self-denial every Friday."

Although this element of Catholic practice and culture had disappeared before I was religiously cognizant - having been born in 1960 - and not having been raised in a heavily Catholic cultural mileu anyway (my mother was a faithful Catholic, but my formative environment was secular 1970's suburbia) - my reading and observation indicates to me that like so much of what happened in the American church (although Duffy is talking about the English) before the Council was untethered from its origins - people did things, and while many incorporated these practices into a deeper spirituality...not everyone did. Michael Liccione remembers:

I remember from my childhood the first, almost ecstatic Friday evening steak-grillings in my Catholic neighborhood when he made the no-meat rule optional outside Lent and a few other special days.

Not exactly the fruit of sound catechesis on "Why we're not eating meat on Friday."

But that's the way it goes - practices get encrusted with force of habit and practically empty legalism..and so in order to retrieve the meaning and good fruit, perhaps we have to lose them for a while...just so we can see clearly again.