This must be my week for apologetics.  A classmate of mine from high school who’s now a minister in a protestant church asked me:

Please explain to this Protestant preacher the idea of Abstinence (name?) - as in not eating meat on Friday. It seems like a great tradition and one that I would like to know more about. Thanks in advance for the info!

The most encouraging thing about the email?  “it seems like a great tradition.”  I am floored by the fact that this guy came to me framing his question in the positive rather than the negative and if you’ve read the very first post in this blog, you understand a bit about why based on the spiritual climate of my high school.

I just spent 2 hours on this response…when I got done I pasted into Word and realized its length.  Never let it be said I was brief when I could have been detailed.  As with all my apologetics, they are written for the outsider…that’s how you have to do it - explain everything, repeatedly give proofs for your claims, especially give proofs whenever you claim that the Church does not teach works-based salvation.  Many times in typing this I made a statement and then had to go back and explain it because in my Catholic framework, the statement I made needed no further explanation, whereas in the Protestant framework it would make no sense at all, or even worse, be misconstrued.

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One of my favorite things is apologetics…I appreciate your tone…all too often I am responding to someone openly hostile. A word of warning though…one Catholic teaching making sense to you can result in another one making sense to you…and another…and well, look at me. I say that with tongue in cheek of course. For me the first teaching I looked deeply into is the one on artificial contraception, and it grew from there.

Now, analyzing a particular Catholic teaching can be difficult because of the integrated nature of Catholic teaching; often, in order for something to make sense, there’s background sitting there that you have to have a basic idea of in order for it to make sense. I will try to work such things in where I can without getting tangential, which is quite easy to do. For example, when I’ll be referencing Catholic teaching, and specifically the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC); the Catechism is essentially the 600 page book on Catholic teaching - it lists in a general level of detail all the teachings of the Church which are based both on Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Tradition as referred to here is the teaching authority of the Church, beginning with Jesus, passed to Peter and the apostles, to their students, and so on forward through the centuries to this day; Tradition is how we ended up with the Canon, which was of course not assembled as we know it until a couple hundred years after Christ - were it not for Tradition, that is the teaching authority of the Catholic Church guided by the Holy Spirit, we’d have no idea which books should be in the New Testament, because Scripture itself doesn’t tell us which books belong in the Canon. Coming from a Protestant background, I was raised as you were, with a sola scriptura background, so I totally understand you likely disagree with this framework. I can go into detail on this topic further, but I wanted to give you a sort of heads-up that the Catholic Church considers both Scripture and Tradition with any teaching, and I will reference both here (and try to show the place where the two meet as much as possible.)

You know I am a computer nerd by trade and an educator by training; I am not a theologian by any means. Thus I have a batch of apologetics websites run by people who are theologians which I regularly refer to in order to make sure I am on track in what I say.

So to the question of abstinence from meat on Fridays. What I am going to do first here is shoot from the hip and give you my basic lay explanation of the teaching without any references - this is just me talking, explaining in my own words what it’s all about; I will get into some references to the Scriptures and the CCC next, as well as early Church fathers if I can find some. To start with, it grows out of the concept of fasting which of course is not unique to any of the world’s religions. All the faiths and even the pseudo-faith belief systems seem to believe that there are times when not eating (or for that matter, fasting from anything one might enjoy) is beneficial to the spirit. Catholicism especially refers to this as self-mortification - placing yourself in a position of suffering for a greater good or greater spiritual growth opportunity. Catholics are specifically obligated to fast on two days (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the two ends of the season of Lent; and fasting here is defined as one full meal on the day, with one or two smaller meals to maintain strength which together would not equal another full meal) and to abstain from meat every Friday. Back when the second Vatican council (aka Vatican II) happened, the Cardinals adjusted the teaching on meatless Fridays a bit; during Lent, the Catholic is obligated to abstain from meat each Friday, but during the rest of the year, the Catholic is called to abstain from something - meat or some other something they enjoy doing, or to perform act of charity over and above what they normally do, all in an attitude of penitence…I will come back to the penitence thing in a minute. So you’ll hear folks say, “Ever since Vatican II we only have to abstain from meat Fridays during Lent.” As you can tell, not exactly true. In the Catholic faith, every Friday is a penitential day, thus we are obligated to abstain from meat OR something else in an attitude of penitence. And as you no doubt know from your own learning, the whole point of fasting from anything is that whenever you feel that yearning for whatever it is you’re fasting from, that’s your reminder to focus on whatever it is you’re fasting for, to pray for strength and to remember that need that is causing you to fast in the first place.

So why are Fridays penitential days in the Catholic faith? You can probably guess this one - because the greatest day of penitence in Christendom is Good Friday - the day when because we were altogether insufficiently able to make reparation for our sins, God in the flesh chose to take them on himself and pay the price for them. Thus on Fridays we are called to remember Christ’s suffering for us, which in and of itself makes us penitent people, truly sorry for our sins and committed to trying to be more Christlike. And that leads to the next point: suffering. In the Catholic faith we have a concept of redemptive suffering; that is, that we should pray and seek for help from the Spirit to unite our relatively small sufferings (that is, big to us but small in comparison with the sufferings He endured) with the sufferings of Christ. How do we do that? Hardest thing in the world - by not complaining and grumbling through our sufferings but instead offering them up to God and asking Him to use our sufferings to make us more like Christ (something like “consider it pure joy…” whenever we are hit with suffering.) Now of course none of us ARE Christ so our offering of our sufferings won’t be perfect and we’ll fall into the pattern of complaining, etc…but nonetheless we are to make an effort to unite our sufferings with those of Christ. Self-mortification through abstaining or fasting is likely to generate a very small suffering - a hunger pang, or a really strong desire to order the steak when you’re out with friends on Friday night, but going with the fish instead; this is the same reason we traditionally give something up during the Lent season - so that we will feel that desire for whatever that thing is that we gave up, and take that deprivation as an opportunity to grow in Christlikeness (is that a word?) The Catholic Church encourages elective fasting whenever one feels led to, but believes self-mortification is important enough to growth in one’s relationship with Christ to obligate her members to do it on specific occasions. A Catholic who intentionally does not follow such obligations is in a state of sin; not because the Church is legalistic, but because the Church wants her members to have the spiritual growth opportunity that comes from self-mortification.

What this does NOT mean: The Catholic Church does NOT believe that by self-mortification a man can merit salvation, that he can obtain forgiveness for his sins by his own works. I want to make sure this is crystal clear. We’re talking here about sanctification by the working of the Holy Spirit through our willingness to unite ourselves to Christ and His sufferings, not justification which you and I both know is only available because of Christ’s suffering. CCC 1430 says: Jesus’ call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not aim first at outward works, “sackcloth and ashes,” fasting and mortification, but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion [my note: and that conversion is not by our own power but by the work of the Spirit in us]. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance.

Now after a long treatise on suffering and remembering Christ’s crucifixion, I should point out that the Church also spends a great deal of time on celebration and joy at Christ’s Resurrection; consider that Lent, the penitential season is 40 days, but that Easter, the celebratory season is 50 days (from the vigil of Easter late on Holy Saturday through Pentecost), and that outside these seasons, while we remember Good Friday every Friday, we also celebrate Easter every Sunday. To everything there is a season.

So now that we are past the basic lay-explanation of it, let’s get into a little more on the backgrounds for this practice. I’ll start with the Catechism, which is organized by paragraph numbers. You can access an online version here: http://www.kofc.org/publications/cis/catechism/index.cfm - in the search area you can input a paragraph number and it’ll take you straight to the text of that paragraph. I will cite a few paragraphs here, and give you excerpts, but by all means check out the full texts of them. You can also search by topic using the search area - so you could type in “fasting” for example and get even more than I am about to specifically talk about here.

CCC 1434 says: The interior penance of the Christian can be expressed in many and various ways. Scripture and the Fathers insist above all on three forms, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, which express conversion in relation to oneself, to God, and to others. Alongside the radical purification brought about by Baptism or martyrdom they cite as means of obtaining forgiveness of sins: effort at reconciliation with one’s neighbor, tears of repentance, concern for the salvation of one’s neighbor, the intercession of the saints, and the practice of charity “which covers a multitude of sins.” - the footnote to this part in quotation marks is 1 Peter 4:8.

CCC 2015: The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle. (see 2 Tim 4 - he talks about being poured out like a libation - self-sacrifice - mortification) Spiritual progress entails the ascesis and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes:

He who climbs never stops going from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end. He never stops desiring what he already knows. (this is a quote from St. Gregory.)

See - the idea here is that through suffering in a Christlike way we are made more like him - we are blessed as discussed in the beatitudes.

CCC 793 Christ unites us with his Passover: all his members must strive to resemble him, “until Christ be formed” [Gal 4:19] in them. “For this reason we . . . are taken up into the mysteries of his life, . . . associated with his sufferings as the body with its head, suffering with him, that with him we may be glorified.” [Phil 3:21 and Rom 8:17]

Phil 3:21 says who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Rome 8:16-17 says: The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

You can see the Scriptural case for being united to God and Christ through suffering.

CCC1521 specifically relates to the administration of the Sacrament of the Sick (popularly called the last rites) but it makes a powerful statement about suffering: Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.

Don’t take the word “participation” there to mean that the suffering person is participating in ’saving’ anyone at all, but rather than whole idea of uniting oneself to Christ (again not of one’s own power, but only by the grace of God and the work of the Spirit) through suffering. What I like here is that through redemptive suffering we turn original sin on its ear - we take something negative resulting from the fall of man and make it a positive spiritual growth opportunity by following Christ’s example in suffering.

You can see that in a lot of cases the CCC includes Scriptural footnotes, pointing back to the Scripture from which the teaching is at least in part drawn, as well as in some cases writings of the Saints. The link I provided you includes all the footnotes that my hardcopy Catechism includes, all clickable for your convenience. What I have presented here I found by searching for “fasting” and “suffering.” To be sure, there’s more there than what I have cited.

Why meat? There’s nothing doctrinal about the specific practice of not eating meat on Friday (though there is plenty doctrinal about redemptive suffering as I have shown.) Abstaining from meat on Friday is classified as a discipline, rather than a doctrine. A doctrine would have to make some sort of definitive statement like “meat is evil” - and obviously we can’t do that because the Bible tells us there is no longer clean and unclean; the discipline rather reflects that we are refraining from something good, not something evil. It’s meat because traditionally, when the discipline came to be, fish was quite common and cheap, meat was a delicacy and quite expensive. Thus, the discipline came about to say, “let’s avoid this thing that is enjoyable but a bit extravagant and instead have a modest but healthy meal to commemorate what Christ did for us on Good Friday.” Were it our present day and age that this discipline was coming about, can you imagine what we’d abstain from? Seeing as, at least on our side of the globe, fresh, safe produce is readily available, I could see the discipline calling us to refrain from both the flesh of animals and of fish. But, that is where tradition (note, that’s little “t” tradition) comes in - the traditional discipline stands because of its meaning, not because fish is still way cheaper than meat. Or put another way, the Catholic family who eats at Red Lobster on a Friday during Lent is totally missing the point of the discipline, because they just spent 3 times what they would have if they had baked a chicken at home. Hard to be penitential when you are loosening the belt a notch from eating too many shrimp.

Now in this explanation I have left out Scriptural backing for fasting because I know you already know about that as you have theological training; but as you can see, the discipline of abstinence grows out of the same instructions we get from Christ and the Apostles to fast and do penance. Hopefully here I have shed some light on where it came from and why - and most importantly, what benefit there is to doing it.