usccb.org/lent/2008/Penance_and_Abstinence.pdf
**Christ Died for
Our Salvation
on Friday **
- Gratefully remembering this, Catholic peoples from time
immemorial have set apart Friday for special penitential
observance by which they gladly suffer with Christ that they
may one day be glorified with Him. This is the heart of the
tradition of abstinence from meat on Friday where that
tradition has been observed in the holy Catholic Church.
- 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 penitential 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 penitential observance
throughout 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 mortification in prayerful remembrance of the
passion of Jesus Christ.
- 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. 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 the 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 Church must today and always defend
as immutable. This said, we emphasize that our people are
henceforth free from the obligation traditionally binding
under pain of sin in what pertains to Friday abstinence,
except 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 those who decide to keep the
Friday abstinence for reasons of personal piety and special
love that they must not pass judgment on those who elect to
substitute other penitential observances. Friday, please God,
will acquire among us other forms of penitential witness which
may become as much a part of the devout way of life in the future
as Friday abstinence from meat. In this connection we have
foremost in mind the modern need for self-discipline in the use of
stimulants and for a renewed emphasis on the virtue of
temperance, especially in the use of alcoholic beverages.
- 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 the 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 penitential conversion, by both of which we
become one with Christ, mature sons of God, and servants of
God’s people.
