Why punish the butcher?
I have noted with considerable interest, and more than just a modicum of dismay, that the Catholic hierarchy in the England and Wales has decided to re-introduce the practice of not eating meat on Fridays.
Now, I grew up in a post-war household where this practice was zealously observed. Two things worried me at the time. One was that I actually preferred fish and chips to fried steak and therefore wondered what was so penitential about what I was doing. Secondly, I could never quite fathom why the Church chose to punish butchers. Just what had butchers done way back in history to deserve being singled out for what was effectively a weekly boycott by Catholics?
Why not dairy farmers or greengrocers? I would have thoroughly enjoyed abstaining from vegetables on Fridays because when I was a kid things like broccoli and cabbage were instruments of the devil.
And what about puddings? Most of them were pure self-indulgence anyway with no real nutritional value. In fact, all a pudding seemed to do was give everyone in the family under the age of five a sugar rush of such intensity that it made parents have evil thoughts, mostly about inflicting bodily harm on their progeny with the sharp end of a slipper.
The bishops of England and Wales say they wish to re-establish the practice of Friday penance in the lives of the faithful as a “clear and distinctive mark of their own Catholic identity”. This is to come into effect from Friday September 16 when Catholics in Britain will mark the first anniversary of Pope Benedict’s visit to their country. This really quite strange because I seem to remember that the pope’s visit was an overwhelmingly joyous occasion in which papal nay-sayers were put firmly in their place as virtually the whole country, not just Catholics, went into welcoming raptures very rarely seen in the British Isles these days.
It really is quite odd that this momentous event is now to be celebrated by boycotting butchers and re-establishing a practice that, in my opinion, serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Penance, in this modern day and age, is not nearly as important as it used to be in the Middle Ages when most people actually didn’t have anything to give up and could really just manage to dress in sackcloth and wail pitifully. And then came penance in the form of a post-confession recital of three Hail Marys or saying the rosary if you’d been a really naughty fellow.
This was something else I didn’t understand. Why use one of the most wonderful prayers in Catholicism as a form of punishment? The Hail Mary should be a prayer of joy, not of penance, surely. To youngsters, of course, penance and punishment are the same thing.
I believe that there are so many other things Catholics can do to express their Catholicism.
Maybe they can do so in the same way that was suggested by several local priests this past Easter when they called for parishioners to move away from observing Lent by giving up things like chocolates, sweets and other indulgences and rather try and show a daily act of kindness towards their fellow human beings and those less fortunate than themselves.
I would like to think that it would be far better to celebrate our Catholicism, celebrate the life and death of Christ, by individually or collectively performing acts of kindness to others. From small acts of kindness, such as a simple smile, to greater acts of kindness by feeding, clothing and helping to provide housing for the poor.
I cannot see how on earth a poor family, living in a freezing cold and leaky shack in a smog-engulfed township, is going to benefit by me deciding not to have a sausage for supper. I cannot see how an aged, lonely and dying pensioner is going to find any sort of solace just because I decided to switch my pork chop for a fish finger on Fridays. I am sure that this lonely person would gain enormous comfort from a visit by a kindly neighbour, or even of a complete stranger, never mind if that visitor was munching on a stick of biltong that Friday.
I know that I might well incur the wrath of Catholic traditionalists who think that giving up meat on a Friday is sacrosanct and that saying three Hail Marys after confession will make some sort of difference other than a personal feeling of inner peace and well-being. But I firmly believe that there is so much suffering in the world today that we can no longer justify self-indulgent penance.
Quite apart from which, punishing butchers is just plain unChristian.
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