Friday Meat-Abstinence Reconsidered
Jan 13, 2025

Friday Meat-Abstinence Reconsidered

A suggestion by an Eastern Rite bishop that Catholics in the United States once again give up eating meat on Fridays throughout the year has drawn interest from more than a dozen bishops in the country.

Several bishops told the Register they hope the U.S. bishops discuss the idea at their next gathering in June 2025.

But an early canvas suggests a renewed practice, if it occurs, might look different from the Church’s previous rule, which forbade Catholics from eating meat on almost all Fridays of the year under pain of mortal sin. Several bishops told the Register they don’t want to go that route.

“A voluntary return to an act of penance, for instance meatless Fridays, would be an opportunity for Catholics not only to demonstrate their shared commitment to care for God’s creation, but also reorient themselves to a spirit of self-sacrifice in gratitude for Jesus making the ultimate sacrifice for us on the cross that first Good Friday,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, told the Register by email through a spokesman.

He said he’s grateful for the suggestion and hopes “that it becomes widespread in its acceptance.”

The Register contacted representatives for more than 170 Latin Rite bishops who lead dioceses in the United States and several Eastern Rite bishops in the country.

Most didn’t respond; 41 declined comment.

But of those bishops who offered a reaction, 13 either said they support it or are open to the idea.

“It seems to me that a little more sacrifice and penance couldn’t hurt, because of the demands of the world today,” Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln, NE, told the Register. “I think we need more opportunities for sacrifice, not less.”

Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak, who leads the Archeparchy of Philadelphia Ukrainian Catholic Church, floated the idea as one of what he called “conversation starters” near the end of a 10-minute talk on November 13, during the last day of the fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, of which he is a member.

His first proposal offered ways for Catholic laypeople to keep the Sabbath in addition to attending Mass.

“A second suggestion,” Archbishop Gudziak said, looking up from his text and pausing, as if to prepare the way for what came next, “we could renew the tradition of Friday abstinence from meat.”

He noted that the Catholic bishops of England and Wales reinstated the Friday fast from meat there in 2011—27 years after they lifted it in 1984.

Catholics have practiced penance on Fridays since the early days of the Church, in remembrance of the suffering and death of Jesus on Good Friday.

Abstaining from meat on Friday was a long-standing practice during former centuries, one of many days of fasting (meaning not eating) and abstaining (meaning not eating certain foods).

The 1917 Code of Canon Law was the first to give the Friday rule a “juridic definition,” said David Long, an adjunct assistant professor of canon law at The Catholic University of America and dean of the university’s School of Professional Studies.

“The law of abstinence prohibits meat and soups made of meat but not of eggs, milk, and other condiments, even if taken from animals,” Canon 1250 said. Another provision, Canon 1252, limited the rule to Friday.

In February 1966, Pope Paul VI allowed national bishops’ conferences “to replace the observance of fast and abstinence with exercises of prayer and works of charity” in an apostolic constitution called Paenitemini, while keeping the no-meat rule for Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and Fridays during Lent.

In November of that same year—58 years ago—the U.S. bishops’ conference lifted the requirement that Catholics in this country not eat meat on Fridays, except during Lent and on Good Friday. At the time, the bishops said they hoped Catholics “will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”

The Holy See’s 1983 Code of Canon Law confirmed the U.S. bishops’ action.

“This is the current situation with respect to canon law: Abstinence is mandatory for the Fridays of Lent and encouraged for all other Fridays, but if people substitute other acts of charity or piety on Fridays for abstinence, they are not doing something sinful when they consume their favorite hamburger or pork chop,” Long told the Register, referring to all Fridays of the year that don’t fall on a feast day. “It is only when they do nothing in place of abstinence that they are running contrary to canon law.”

That last part is news to most Catholics.

Bishop Donald Hying, who leads the Diocese of Madison, WI, notes that what most Catholics heard back in the 1960s was that they didn’t have to avoid meat on Fridays anymore. Now, most Catholics aren’t even aware there ever was such a rule, or that they’re supposed to do something else on Fridays in its stead.

He said having “a Friday penitential practice” as a “common expectation” among Catholics would be helpful to their spiritual lives.

“I think it’d be a way of reminding people of Friday as a day to honor the passion of the Lord,” Bishop Hying told the Register.

It would also help with affirming Catholic identity, he said.

“It was one of those defining Catholic things,” Bishop Hying said. “You do need things that define you as a group: ‘This is Catholic; this is what we do.’”


–by Matthew McDonald

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National Catholic Register