This is a good point – you are not in the US and the state of affairs in the US would not apply to you. The OP does appear to live in the US, meaning that abstinence from meat wouldn’t be required in any event.
Yes, of course, but the reason I’m talking about all this is not a childish “my rule is better than your rule”, but if you read carefully, the Opening Poster observes voluntarily the abstinence on Fridays as his own choice and is looking for some guiding rule on when to keep it and when not to. This is why people started bringing up rules from when Friday abstinence was obligatory in the States, which was before Vatican II, and I brought up the default rule that you have in place
unless the conference of bishops makes some adjustments. Why I brought all this stuff later on is that knowing that the general rule existed, I shouldn’t sit quiet when there was doubt or a contrary opinion. To sum up, the general rule is that solemnities trump abstinence, but feasts do not. The Second Day of Christmas is a feast, not a solemnity. Yes, I believe it should be made a law that the Second Day of Christmas trumps the Friday penance much like St Francis said, but while there are ample theological arguments that I sympathise with, the canon law seems clear.
However, all of this is counterintuitive to me, because it seems highly inappropriate to abstain from meat during the Christmas Octave…but it does appear that such abstinence would be legally required outside the US, in the absence of evidence that the entire Christmas Octave is celebrated as a solemnity.
Yes, that is why my bishop granted the dispensation as did many other bishops. Believe me, we’ve had a lot of confusion about various different octaves here, especially considering the rules have changed and people remembered the Christmas Octave trumping abstincence in the past. Yes, I too am utterly surprised that the Second Day of Christmas should be penitential, but if you look in the calendar, you’ll see it’s St Stephen’s, the first martyr’s, and the colour is red. So it’s not the same as the white-colour solemnity-rank First Day of Christmas.
Read post 21 in this thread…what does the text imply to you? The wording of the text is ambiguous to me, and I am unsure if it implies that the entire Octave is celebrated as a solemnity. (For example, only Christmas Day has an Evening Prayer 1, even though the text states that this is a property of solemnities. Also, if the solemnity of Christmas is 8 days long, then how could feasts, such as the ones listed here
cwo.com/~pentrack/catholic/romcal.html , occur during the octave?)
Hey, I’m saying the Second Day of Christmas is
not a solemnity. It not being a solemnity, it does not trump abstinence. And what I said, “by default Catholics can’t eat meat on Friday unless there’s a solemnity,” is basically canon 1251 in plain words. If it’s a solemnity, it doesn’t matter it’s Friday - the solemnity makes the Friday no longer a day of penance at all.
By contrast, the situation with non-Lenten Fridays in the US is more complicated. The bishops have made it so that abstinence from meat is not obligatory, but they have arguably not made a non-Lenten Friday a non-penitential day. One could even argue if it was proper (canon-law-wise) that they didn’t make it obligatory to offer some other form of penance and that they made it voluntary because it may be argued that canon 1253 only allows some precisioning and/or substitution, but not removal. However, I don’t want to go there.
And yes, #21 does make it look like a solemnity, but then would then be any feast within the Octave? Could there be a feast of St Stephen on a solemnity day? And yes, abstinence from meat on the Second Day of Christmas does sound counterintuitive, but that’s how it seems to be precisely because the day is not a solemnity.
) and you could eat ham, turkey, whatever today without any worries. 