What country are you from? Because the Episicopal Conference of the different countries can set their own guidelines based upon the Universal Church’s norms. In the United States the Catholic bishops issued the following pastoral letter:
]PASTORAL STATEMENT ON PENANCE AND ABSTINENCE - November 18, 1966
“Christ Died for Our Salvation on Friday”
19. Changing circumstances, including economic, dietary, and social elements, have made some of our people feel that the renunciation of the eating of meat is not always and for everyone the most effective means of practicing penance. Meat was once an exceptional form of food: now it is commonplace.
- Accordingly, since the spirit of penance primarily suggests that we discipline ourselves in that which we enjoy most, to many in our day abstinence from meat no longer implies penance, while renunciation of other things would be more penitential.
- For these and related reasons, the Catholic bishops of the United States, far from downgrading the traditional pentinential observance of Friday, and motivated precisely by the desire to give the spirit of penance greater vitality, especially on Fridays, the day that Jesus died, urge our Catholic people henceforth to be guided by the following norms.
- Friday itself remains a special day of pentinential observance throughtout the year, a time when those who seek perfection will be mindful of their personal sins and the sins of mankind which they are called upon to help expiate in union with Christ Crucified.
- Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday by *freely *making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortificiation in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.
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- Among the works of voluntaryself-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. Our expectation is based on the following considerations:
a. We shall thus freely and out of love for Christ Crucified show our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity to Christ and His Church.
b. We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in this world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate, personal abstinence from meat, more especially because *no longer required by law,*will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish.
- Every Catholic Christian understands that the fast and abstinence regulations admit of change, unlike the commandments and precepts of that unchanging divine moral law which the the church must today and always defend as immutable. That said, we emphasize that our people are henceforth *free from the obligation traditionally binding under pain of sin in what pertains to Friday observance, expect as noted above for Lent.*We stress this so that “no” scrupulosity will enter into examinations of conscience, confessions, or personal decisions on this point.
- Perhaps we should warn that those who decide to keep the Friday abstinence for reasons of personal piety and special love that they *may not pass judgment on tnhose who elect to substitute other pentinential observances.*Friday, please God will acquire among us other forms of pentinential witness which may become as much a part of the devout way of life in the the as Friday abstinence from meat…
- It would bring great glory to God and good to souls if Fridays found our people doing volunteer work in hospitals, visiting the sick, serving the needs of the aged and the lonely, instructing the young in the Faith, participating as Christians in community affairs, and meeting our obligations to our families, our friends, our neighbors, and our community including our parishes, with a special zeal born of the desire to add merit of penance to the other virtues exercised in good works born of living faith.
- In summary, let it not be said that by this action, implementing the spirit of renewal coming out of the Council, we have abolished Friday, repudiated the holy traditions of our fathers, or diminished the insistence of the Church on the fact of sin and the need for penance. Rather, let it be proved by the spirit in which we enter upon prayer and penance, not excluding fast and abstinence freely chosen, that these present decisions and recommendations of this conference of bishops will herald a new birth of loving faith and more profound pentinential conversion, by both of which we become one with Christ, mature sons of God, and servants of God’s people.
Finally I’m done. I don’t type as fast as others. Sorry
