Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Ash Wednesday

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Ash Wednesday: I may have never covered a bronc in rodeo, but I never missed a mark-out and I never turned-out. Turn-out is when you've signed up for a...

A Lenten Plea for the Working Man.

I used to go to daily Mass, save for Saturdays.

I no longer do, as the Mass I went to, daily, was cancelled.

In every Parish which is served by an attendant pastor, there is daily Mass.  Locally, there are three parishes, and they all have a daily mass.  Their schedules are:

Downtown:

6:30 a.m.

East:

9:00

West:

9:00.

And that's why I don't go to daily Mass.

9:00 a.m is a time guaranteed to wipe out any working person from attendance.  If you have a job, you are not making it.

6:30 a.m. is pretty early in the morning.

Now, it could be argued that, well, anyone could make that. 

Not hardly.  Again, if you work, that means that you pretty much have to be prepared to go to your office by about 6:00 a.m.  It's 5:35 a.m. as I start writing this, and I'm still trying to wake up from not getting enough sleep the night before, drinking my coffee.

Today, I have to shave, shower, put on my lawyer costume and head out the door prepared to take on the plethora of other people's problems I deal with every day.  I'm not going to be able to do that, and make a 6:30 a.m. Mass.

I could make a noon Mass, and that's the daily Mass I used to attend.

I certainly wasn't alone, there were always others there. By and large, they were people who walked up from their offices or drove there.  Working people who came on their lunch hour, skipping lunch,.

Indeed, I often notice, as I sometimes drive by when its getting out, that early morning attendees downtown have a sort of social schedule built into attendance at that Mass.  Not all of them, by any means, but some.

And that's 100% okay.

What I mean is that I see them walking from Mass to a nearby café. They probably do that all the time.  I don't have time, however, to engage in that sort of activity in the morning, and I probably wouldn't go to a café in the morning much if I did.  I point that out, however, as the people who hiked up at noon were giving their lunches up, in some cases, just to be there.  They were dedicated.

I fear, sometimes, that it's easy to forget the working folks.  They don't say much, they just go to their jobs and back, and come on in on Sunday.  They aren't retired, so they don't have time to get to a 9:00, and frankly a lot of them couldn't easily make a 6:30.

Noon worked great.

Lex Anteinternet: Pancake Day.

Lex Anteinternet: Pancake Day.:  

Pancake Day.

 Amongst other things, the Tuesday before Latin Rite Lent is called Pancake Day.

They can be sweet, and they use up fats, so they helped prepare for Lenten fasting in this fashion.

Ash Wednesday 2022. A day of fasting and prayer for Peace.

Today, March 2, 2022, is Ash Wednesday for this year.

The Pope has also asked for it to be a day of fasting for peace, with the war in Ukraine in mind.

St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church. Belfield, North Dakota

Belfield, North Dakota has a population of 800 people and four Catholic Churches, which says something about the nature of this region of the United States.  One of those four, St. John's, is a Ukrainian Catholic Church.

We featured a Ukrainian Catholic Church here for the first time yesterday.  Here we are doing it for a second time in the same region, and in fact at a location that's only a few miles down the highway from the one we featured yesterday.

In parts of the United States we've featured before, such as East Texas, seeing something like this in regards to Baptist churches wouldn't be unusual.  Here we're seeing a much different cultural history at work, and a very interesting one at that.

November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Smelt being eaten by members of Congress and their guests.

On this day the Latin Rite Catholic Bishops of the United States relaxed the rule on abstaining from meat on Fridays throughout the year.  This followed a Papal direction in 1962 that the Friday penitential requirement be adopted to local conditions, reflecting  a move by the Church focused on that goal. The same move resulted in the vernacular replacing Latin in the Mass at about the same time.

In the case of the Catholic Bishops of the United States the removal has created some confusion.  Fridays retain their penitential character and Catholics are urged to substitute something for abstaining from meat but few do.  Indeed, there's debate on whether there's any requirement to do and the fine, orthodox, Catholic apologist maintains there is not.  Some others maintain there very much is, with those holding that view tending towards the Catholic Trad community.

To the surprise of American "Roman" Catholics, the rule was not done away with globally and it remains a matter of Church law in many other localities in the world.  It also remains one, of course, during Lent.

There are a lot of rumors in the Protestant world about this practice, a lot of which are frankly absurd.  Old anti Catholic myths regarding fish on Fridays were one of the things that I still heard in school when I was a teen, usually centered around some completely bogus economic theory.  The actual basic reason for the practice is that it was a remaining Latin Rite penitential practice of which there had once been many, but which had dwindled down to just a few in the Latin Rite over time.  In the Eastern Rite and the Orthodox Churches, however, they remain numerous and occur throughout the year.

Indeed, the practice in the Eastern Rite and Orthodox Churches is instructive in that their fasts often extend beyond abstaining from meat and to other things.  During Great Lent, for example, they ultimately extend to oils, dairy and alcohol.  

The reason for abstention from meat (there was never any requirement that people actually eat fish) reflected the logistical economy of an earlier time.  Today fish is readily available on the table no matter where you are, but in earlier times this wasn't so.  Abstention from meat limited diets and protein sources other than fish were regarded, and frankly usually still are, as more celebratory.  People like fish, of course, but not too many people are going to sit down to a big Thanksgiving dinner of flounder.  The goal wasn't to starve people, but to focus on penance while still sustaining their needs.  Limiting food to the plain, and fish for most people, if available, was plain, emphasized that.

As with a lot of things, over time in Protestant countries this practice tended to mark Catholics and also became subject to silly myths.  Even now, over fifty years after the practice was relaxed in the United States, you'll occasionally find somebody who will insult Catholics with a derogatory nickname from the era related to fish.  Likewise, like a lot of dietary practices that have long ceased, people born far too late to really experience "fish on Fridays" will claim they did.

Ironically, of course, fish has gone from a less favored food even fifty years ago to a dietary and culturally prized one.  It's one of the odd ways in which the religious practices of Catholics, to include fasting, has come back around as a secular health practice.  And as Catholic orthodoxy has returned as the Baby Boomers wane, fish on Fridays has been reintroduced voluntarily among some orthodox or simply observant Catholics, even where they are not required to do it.