Published: May 26, 2011
The Ego vs. Meatless Fridays
We’re Supposed to Obey?
The following is from a May 24 essay by Elizabeth Scalia on the First Things website.
In her stupendous novel In This House of Brede, author Rumer Godden chronicles the pre- and post-Second-Vatican-Council journey of a successful English professional woman who becomes an enclosed Benedictine nun. When the novel’s main character, Philippa Talbot, is asked by a co-worker, “but will you be able to be obedient, a stiff-necked creature like you?” she responds rather naively, “I shall find it restful.”
For the most part, she does. After a lifetime of settling and deciding matters for others, Philippa takes a kind of refuge in obedience. The vow only becomes difficult for her when it encroaches on a private issue she has managed to hold in reserve, even while trying to make a gift of her whole self, to God.
I was reminded of that while reading about a surprising statement issued last week by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, announcing the intended restoration of the Friday Fast, or, as it is commonly called, “meatless Fridays.”
Every Friday is set aside by the Church as a special day of penance, for it is the day of the death of our Lord . . . The Bishops have decided to re-establish the practice that this should be fulfilled by abstaining from meat.
Wrapped as I am in nostalgia, I rejoiced to read this. My mother was such a dreadful cook that our Fridays, with or without meat, were as penitential as any other day of the week, but as a child I had always liked the cultural commonality that set Fridays aside and made them feel oddly, wonderfully safe and homey. In our working-class neighborhood the Sunday dinners might vary widely from roast beef to braciola, but on Fridays we were all taking cozily meatless meals. If my mother was heating up cans of tuna and cream of mushroom soup, my neighbors were having home-made pizza or scrambled eggs.
There was something comforting about these less-than-formal suppers where the modesty of the meal meant that food became incidental to the companionship and conversation which was brought to the fore. If company was coming, all the better—the sense of unity was broadened as our guest dug into the same simple fare as the rest of us.
Within a culture as poorly catechized as our own, though, most Catholics are not even aware that they have always been expected to sacrifice something of a Friday. For these people nostalgia alone may not be enough to re-establish obedience to the Friday Fast. I was a grown woman before a priest told me that the lifting of the Friday ban on meat was not—as I had come to think of it—the equivalent of a doctrinal tooth extraction that replaced something with nothing and left a gaping hole in my understanding. Who knew that the Council’s intent was to free the faithful to choose their own, more personally meaningful, sacrifice in remembrance of Good Friday?
Admittedly, some did know it, and after last week’s announcement, several rousing internet discussions quickly began on Facebook and elsewhere. Some sneered that meatless Fridays will make a poor sacrifice if everyone will simply “eat lobster and shrimp” instead of steak. Others decried this as a move to “re-infantilize” the faithful when the Council had meant “to treat us like adults.” One friend of mine emailed with flat incredulity, “we’re just supposed to obey?”
For the complete article, Click here.
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