Fasting on Fridays

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AngelaBarbara said:
Question…Is chicken considered "flesh meat’? Does “fish” include seafood like shrimp or lobster, which are considered “luxuries” today?
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The Latin (Roman) Church uses “carne-vale” as rule. It means (loosely) “meat-goodbye”, and generally points to the flesh of warm-blooded animals. Snakes are fair game, whales are not. The exact rules have fluctuated over the years and are now kind of a matter of arcane trivia than magesterial proclamations. But you can basically stick to the warm/cold blooded test as a guide.

Eggs are fair game-- while they’ll be warm blooded chickens one day, they don’t actually have any blood yet. Bugs are also acceptable fare. Bon appetite!
 
To the original question: I keep the Friday abstinence and abstain all of lent. No fasting during the year except for Ember days when someone reminds me.

I have thought about adding Wednesdays as a day of abstinence as well, but haven’t started that yet.
 
We abstain from meat on Fridays as well, this started in earnest last Lent and has continued. It gives us reasons to talk to the kids about church traditions and to think up different things to eat…
 
mullenpm said:
On another thread I read a poster say that the meatless meal must be “simple.” I have never heard that nor learned it as a child so I believe that is a personal choice of the poster and should not have been forward as truth (unless, of course, a legitimate source can be given).
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If you are referring to my comment earlier in this thread, I did not claim that the meal MUST be simple, I said I CHOSE to keep it simple in order to keep with the spirit of the exercise, so please don’t put words in other people’s mouths, OK? I would hazard a guess that you were simply taught not to eat meat on Friday but not the reasons why. FYI, going without meat is supposed to a discipline to remember Christ’s sacrifice. To me, going out and spending $100 on a gourmet fish dinner at a five-star restaurant is hardly in keeping with that. If you’re going to do that, you might as well just be honest with yourself and with God that you’re not following the discipline, and eat whatever you want. Just my opinion. Your mileage may vary and what* you* eat on Fridays is between you and God - of course.
 
ibkc said:
FYI, going without meat is supposed to a discipline to remember Christ’s sacrifice. To me, going out and spending $100 on a gourmet fish dinner at a five-star restaurant is hardly in keeping with that.
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It should be noted that while giving up meat is, conceptually, a penetential task-- St. Peter himself was a fisherman. The Vatican City is also on the Italian penninsula… a long swatch of land stretching out to a fish-rich sea. Catholic Europe has a nice coastline as well.

Fish was an omnipresent reality for pretty much all of Church history, so it’s not like it was some crazy sacrifice for Christians to undertake.

Enjoy your dinner.
 
ibkc, I did say “on another thread” so I was not referring to anything you might have said on this thread. Sorry you misread what I said.

Please do not assume that I was not taught the reason for fasting. In my day, long before V2 we were given excellent training by the good holy nuns on all aspects of our Catholic religion.

I don’t know many people who could afford to go to a restaurant for a pricey gourmet dinner on a Friday evening. In my family we have a fish dinner; PBJ is saved for lunches.
:blessyou:
 
I don’t eat meat on Fridays; if I do, I do another form of penance, but preferably I avoid eating meat as much as possible.
 
The Code of Canon Law (#1253) states that bishops’ conferences can substitute other forms of penance for the traditional abstinence; it does not say that they can dispense with the requirement altogether.

Moreover, the bishops did not say that that they were eliminating the requirement altogether, they said rather “we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, **as the sole prescribed means **of observing Friday”. And they suggest “other forms of penitential witness”, some absurdly weak, but still more than nothing.

So now other penances can be substituted. Mr. Akin says that if the bishops wanted to create an obligation for Friday penance they would have explicitly said so. But the requirement does not come from them, it comes from Rome.
AngelaBarbara said:
It’s not required here in the United States. See here for source and commentary:

jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2004/07/since_tomorrow_.html

But it is “urged” to make Friday a day of self-denial and mortification.

If you go to the cited page, please be sure to read the whole thing, as the bit pertaining to US Catholics is in the middle of the page.
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I abstain from meat on all Fridays throughout the year, except if Christmas falls on a Friday:) . Though it is true what has been said about the U.S.; people are allowed to eat meat on Friday provided that they do some other penitential act, but I still prefer to abstain from meat as a penance throughout the year.

My wife’s family in Singapore follows much the same rules of abstinence as I do, but my family in America does not. However, I tend to be more of a traditionalist compared to most of my family.
 
Question: is it sinful if you do not do a penance on a Friday? Also is Wednesday a penitential day?
 
Mels said:
Question: is it sinful if you do not do a penance on a Friday? Also is Wednesday a penitential day?
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As far as sin goes: intent is everything. If you eat cheeseburgers on Friday because you forgot, then you’re fine. If you do it because “ain’t nobody gonna tell you what to do!” then it’s probably sinful.

Wednesday is a penitential day for many religious orders, arising as a day of reparation on the day that Judas sold out Jesus. Many laymen adopt it as a penitential day because they try to live a secular life modeled after a religious one. It is not required.
 
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