Abstaining From Meat on Fridays… Outside of Lent?!

“We could renew the tradition of Friday abstinence from meat,” said Gudziak, the metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia. “A return to Friday abstinence would be good for the soul and for the planet, maybe for something else, uniting our devotion to the Lord and reverence for the Lord’s creation.”

At an annual meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, His Excellency, Archbishop Borys Gudziak, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, expressed an interest in reviving an ancient Catholic practice that is common in every country except the United States of America. 

Archbishop Gudziak floated the idea of bringing back abstinence from meat on Fridays! The archbishop supported his proposition by saying, “A return to Friday abstinence would be good for the soul and for the planet, maybe for something else, uniting our devotion to the Lord and reverence for the Lord’s creation.”

Meatless Fridays have been a practice since the early centuries of the Church. This comes in addition to the many other dietary practices that have come about naturally throughout Catholic history. As time continued, these naturally and willingly undertaken penances became codified and made obligatory. 

Many of these practices and seasonal proscriptions for fasting and/or abstinence have fallen out of observance over the years. Sometimes, pious traditions have just not been kept, other times, the Church deemed it necessary to loose or lessen the burden caused by such obligations. Yet while many of these practices have faded into disuse and relative obscurity, no meat on Fridays was almost always the default course of action for faithful Catholics and was similarly obligated by the Church.

The United States is a bit of a strange case, in that in 1966, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops loosed the obligation to abstain from meat on Fridays for all Catholics in the United States. 

To this day, all over the world and in all other countries, this rule still applies to Catholics seeking to keep all the prescribed penances assigned by their Bishop. This 1966 change didn’t totally eliminate the obligation to abstain from meat on Fridays; there remained some exceptions. Catholics still had to abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday, all Fridays in Lent, and Good Friday. Furthermore, fasting was still required on Ash Wednesday, and Good Friday.

Shortly before the change of 1966, the meatless Fridays observed by Catholics are credited as the reason for McDonalds introducing the Filet-O-Fish to their menu. In 1962, a McDonald’s franchisee in Cincinnati noted how, because of the large population of Catholics, he struggled to make any burger sales on Fridays. Despite skepticism from the franchise’ management at the time about adding a fish item to the menu, it worked and was a huge success. The Filet-O-Fish became a staple on the McDonald’s menu.

It is interesting to see a bishop making an effort to revive this ancient–and still, very much alive–obligatory practice of the Church in the United States.