Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all, though I won’t be eating Corned beef and cabbage. My traditions for this day growing up were more like pinching people who didn’t wear green or the occasional green milkshake at McDonalds. Of course growing up I had no idea who the heck St. Patrick’s was anyway. Multiculturalism I guess doesn’t extend to a former English slave who became a priest and then transformed Ireland from a Pagan culture. I mean obviously he wasn’t very PC.
Though at least now all of the news stories about Bishops providing dispensations to allow people in their flock to eat meat today will go away. The headlines in themselves were quite funny. My favorite misleading one was Bishops Bend Lenten Rule For St. Patrick’s Day. Other headlines were Churches won’t put kibosh on corned beef, Cardinal Says, ‘Let Them Eat Meat’, and Corned beef gets a dispensation. I would like to see the rite for Corned beef dispensation and exactly what did the bishop dispense Corned beef from? It is rather strange how much attention this story has gotten nationally from the press as GetReligion noted.
My own Bishop also provided a dispensation, but I will be keeping the normal Lenten abstinence. Mainly because I know my own weakness. I doubt if I would adequately substitute a better sacrifice or to abstain on another day of the week instead.
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We had our corned beef LAST NIGHT so we will not be eating meat today (Vigils for Feast Days begin the night BEFORE so you can consider it as having already begun).
How pathetic but typical in a culture that just can’t make the smallest sacrifices. Notice it’s always the same liberal Bishops doing these kinds of things. They make all kinds of allowances and mitigations for the whinning dissenters but boy do they slam anyone who wants to keep within tradition – just like our bish here in Orange County, CA ….
Aye, we had our corned beef and cabbage (well my wife at cabbage, I cannot stand it) last night. It will be a lunch-free day and then soup and stations for us tonight.
kclo,
I bow to your superior piety, and hope to become as holy as you when I grow up.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!
Meh. The dispensation was issued not only by more progressive bishops but also by conservatives like Gomez in San Antonio and DiNardo in Houston (who’s half-Irish). DiNardo, by the way, simply said that you can eat meat on Friday and shift the day of abstinence to Thursday or Saturday but did not lift it completely. And it’s been standard procedure to grant dispensation in most dioceses when St. Patrick’s Day falls on Friday.
By the way, what do you think happened in the old days of the 40-day abstinence and/or fast? St. Patrick’s Day has always fallen during Lent, and people would have been breaking the rules to eat corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day anyways…except that St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish has always been a feast day, in which case the fast and abstinance rules are dropped, like on Sundays.
I don’t see the problem here, especially if you simply move the day of abstinance to nother day for this week.
By the way, what do you think happened in the old days of the 40-day abstinence and/or fast?
I wasn’t around in the old days, having been born in 1973, but I would imagine that bishops probably issued limited dispensations back then for St. Patrick’s Day. I wouldn’t imagine that it was as big a deal then, as Catholic skipped out on meat every single Friday of the year.
Nowadays, we’re only absolutely required to abstain from flesh meat on the Fridays of Lent, and we can’t even manage that. Granted, we’re supposed to do penitential acts on every single Friday of the year, but when was the last time you heard a pastor preach on that?
My parish church, St. Patrick in Columbus, Ohio, had its big bash in honor of our glorious patron last night, so as to avoid any conflict.
I would not consider my own ordinary to be a progressive or a liberal (Lefevrists might) – yet he granted the dispensation – making it clear that it was intended for those who were actually celebrating St. Patrick’s day. I think the U.S. Bishops made the mistake long ago when they watered down the practice of abstinence for Fridays outside Lent, but I also think that as Catholics we have a longstanding tradition of observing fasts AND feasts and that if a particular culture (and here we could make the crucial argument opposing the dispensation for this particular feast) is observing a special feast (eg. St. Patrick FOR THE IRISH) then the dispensation seems acceptable.
My diocese was also granted a dispensation, but I also chose to keep to the norms and abstain. Christ did not eat anything for 40 days in the desert, and our lent is already far too easy compared to His sufferings and those of the early Church. Even if it is the feastday of one of my favorite saints, I know that abstaining from even corned beef is the right thing.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Abstaining from corned beef and cabbage isn’t a hardship for me… blech! If I HAD eaten/choked it down, I would have considered it an authentic Lenten suffering.
Teresa,
Same here. I think it’s just an excuse to get around abstinence. Who wants to deal with stringy old corned beef, when you can drink green beer??? Maybe that should be the fast, eh?
I’m an Irish American. However, I’ve always been annoyed that many Irish Americans love to go to the pubs, tide one or two on while singing the great Irish oppression songs… yet never darken a church door. “They tried to wipe out the Catholic Irish!” they’d wail. To which I’ve pointed out that they’re doing a better job of it through their apathy.
I’ve made a similar argument to my Jewish friends who spoke of pograms, while eating a chili dog and unable to name their local temple.
I think Teresa hit the nail squarely on its head.
I ate fish on Wednesday so that I could celebrate my birthday taking advantage of the dispensation. I have always appreciated the dispensation being granted on my birthday, especially when the Bishop doesn’t specify Corned beef since I really don’t like that. I substituted steak.