Must we abstain from meat on Fridays?

As far as I remember, Friday abstinence, apart from Fridays in Lent (and Ash Wednesday), was suspended a few years back. This was done to help the poor cope with their inability to feed themselves adequately. I don’t recall this having been changed but some say Friday abstinence still applies. What is the position? P de Villiers

Although the Church is called to holiness, it knows that its members can and do sin. Matthew 13:24-30 shows that Jesus knew that the kingdom of heaven on earth would contain bad seed until the final harvest.

This is why the Church urges us to do voluntary penance for our sins. Sin is the contradiction of holiness and every member of the Church has to guard against sin and immediately repent and do acts of repentance for personal sins.

To regularise the required acts of penance, the Church for centuries has observed Fridays as days of penance. The faithful were forbidden to eat flesh meat or any soups or by-products of meat.

What was not sufficiently emphasised in this rather ritualistic weekly habit was the motive for abstinence, that is, the necessity of making reparation to God for sin, not only our own personal sins but for the sins of others too. By giving up eating meat on a Friday, people were expected to feel the inconvenience and deprivation of what was their normal daily food. Some obviously did. Others, maybe not.

In 1966 Pope Paul VI issued his apostolic constitution Paenitemini. Among other things, he authorised bishops’ conferences to modify the laws of fasting and abstinence in order to suit modern conditions and to provide some means of penitential expression other than fasting and abstinence, such as prayer and works of piety and charity.

Canon law still prohibits eating meat on Fridays but permits bishops’ conferences to prescribe other ways of doing penance. It adds that the law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year (cc1251-1253).

Our bishops have decided that in place of avoiding meat, we may abstain from alcohol or luxury foods or perform other forms of penance, especially acts of charity or exercises of piety.

So, on Fridays you may abstain from meat if you prefer, or you can voluntarily do something special such as attend Mass, say part of the rosary or visit or telephone the sick and lonely. It is up to you but your motive must spring from sorrow for sin and the conscious desire and effort to make reparation to God for all evil and sinfulness among the People of God.