Lex Anteinternet: Happy Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fastnachtsdienstag.

Lex Anteinternet: Happy Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, Car...: Holy Ghost in Denver.  While you cannot see it in this photograph, opposite this wall is a row of confessionals.  Confessions are heard duri...

Happy Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fastnachtsdienstag.

Holy Ghost in Denver.  While you cannot see it in this photograph, opposite this wall is a row of confessionals.  Confessions are heard during Mass.

Shrove Tuesday.

Shrove derives from "shrive", which means to give absolution. So, while I don't know how many parishes offer confession the day prior to Ash Wednesday, that's what it refers to.

It's also called Shrovetide, the evening before the Shrove, which makes more sense, really, reflecting the penitential nature of Lent.

Pancake Day.

It's also Pancake Day in England and strongly English countries, for the custom of eating pancakes on this day.  Pancakes use a fair amount of fat in them and this was part of the Lenten practice of abstaining from fat during Lent.  It's also therefore one of the odd little ways where England's history as a once deeply Catholic nation is retained.

In Ireland the day is known as Máirt Inide, from the Latin initium (Jejūniī), "beginning of Lent".  It's still associated heavily with pancakes.  That's sort of indicative of Ireland's history of being heavily impacted by the English.

Of some interest here, potentially, the Anglican Church retains confession, but not the requirement that its members annual confess, like Catholics have.  Catholicism is now outstripping Anglicanism in actual practice in the UK.  It's often noted that Catholicism has declined in Ireland, a prediction that the Church made at the time of the Anglo Irish War when it did not want to become involved in the Irish government and was forced to against its will, but the Irish remain very heavily Catholic.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1937.

Mardi Gras.

Of course, it's also Mardi Gras, or "Fat Tuesday", from the custom at one time of trying to use up all the fats in the house on this day, in French speaking countries. Contrary to American belief, Mardi Gras is in fact not unique to New Orleans but occurs everywhere that French speaking people are located.

Knights of Revelry parade down Royal Street in Mobile during the 2010 Mardi Gras season, By Carol M. Highsmith - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.05396.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11990882

American Mardi Gras, or rather American New Orleans Mardi Gras, has become heavily Americanized which means, like all American holidays, it's associated with booze.  It is always a big party wherever it occurs, but the weird boozy topless event is an American thing, not a real French thing or culturally French.

Carnival in Rome, 1650.

Carnival and Fastnachtsdienstag

Carnival, from the Medieval Latin carne vale, "farewell meat",  is the same holiday in other Romance Language speaking countries.  The same sort of linguistic intent is found in the German name for the day, Fastnachtsdienstag.  The latter reflects the fact that European Lutherans observe Lent, but in the same fashion as the Anglicans.  It's not associated with the same Canon Law that it is with Catholics, but the observance remains.

We've actually touched on all of this, fwiw, before.

All of these days reflected a period when the Lenten fast was much more severe than it currently is.  People were using up fats as they wouldn't keep for the forty days of Lent.  Now, in the Latin Rite, there's no restriction on using fats at all, the obligation to fast is just on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, when the obligation to abstain from meat also exist, during Lent.  All the Friday's of Lent are meatless for Catholics.

In the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church the fasting rules are much more strict.  Starting on Pure Monday, yesterday,   As Catholic News Service explains it:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In the eyes of Latin-rite Catholics, the extent of Eastern Catholics’ Lenten fasting and abstinence is perceived as particularly strict.

The traditional Byzantine fast for Great Lent includes one meal a day from Monday to Friday, and abstinence from all animal products, including meat, fish with backbones, dairy products and eggs, as well as oil and wine for the entire period of Lent. Shellfish are permitted.

Fasting and abstinence are maintained on Saturdays, Sundays and on the eve of special feast days, although loosened to permit the use of oil and wine. On important feast days, such as the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, fish may be eaten.

“Oil and wine were restricted because, in the past, they were stored in animal skin,” explained Mother Theodora, the “hegumena” or abbess of the Byzantine Catholic Christ the Bridegroom Monastery in Burton, Ohio. “Though this is no longer the case, the tradition continues.”

There are varying degrees of fasting, from stricter to more lenient, depending on one’s work and state of health. Monks and nuns will often submit to the most strict fasting.

Holy Week is not considered part of Great Lent but “an additional, more intense time of fasting and prayer,” said Mother Theodora.

However, Eastern Catholics don’t plunge into fasting and abstinence cold turkey. “Meatfare” and “Cheesefare” weeks help them enter into the Great Fast gradually. By Meatfare Sunday, one week before the start of Lent, Eastern Catholics will have emptied their refrigerators and pantries of meat products. By Cheesefare Sunday, they will have cleared out all of their egg and dairy products, ready to enter into the Great Fast that evening, after Forgiveness Vespers.

In an effort to keep Eastern Christians faithful, yet creative, in the kitchen, cookbooks with fast-friendly recipes have been published.

By Laura Ieraci, Catholic News Service.  The rules for the Eastern Orthodox are similar, although I'm never certain of the degree to which the Orthodox are required to observe them.  Orthodox churches using the "Old Calendar" start Lent this year on February 23.

With all this, Catholics in the US enter Annual Question Time and the time of slightly difficult observances, the latter taking note of the fact that unlike some past times in the country, we're not likely to get killed or anything, so its nothing like it used to be.  Rather, as the US is not only heavily Protestant, but Puritan, Lenten practices baffle non Catholics.

Puritans disapproved of pretty much everything, including observing Christmas as a special day, so Lent was way beyond the Pale for them.  English culture, on the other hand, loved sports, so when the English dumped the Calvinist, which they did as soon as they could, their love of sports came roaring back. American culture has been impacted by English culture in every way, so Americans love sports but don't understand the Apostolic Faiths very well, in many instances, and in fact sometimes fail to realize that their own branches of Christianity are fairly recent innovations not reflecting the original Apostolic faith.

So for Lent, including its beginning, and its end in Holy Week, Americans just don't really have any observations, other than using Mardi Gras, like St. Patrick's Day, as an excuse to drink.  They way it shows up for Catholics, however, is that things that are fairly easy to observe in Catholic countries, like Holy Week or Ash Wednesday, are a lot tougher to do in the US, and of course, you'll be getting a lot of questions if you are Catholic about "why do you do that" and "why can't you . . .".

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.