In What Makes us Catholic, Thomas Groome recounts a Jewish friend’s simple, direct, and satisfying explanation of his adherence to kosher rules: “It reminds me to bring my faith into every aspect of my life, even decisions about what to eat.” I would say the same about “fish friday”: Choosing fish—or pineapple pizza, or pasta and sauce, or anything else from the meat-free menu—for one day a week isn’t a heroic sacrifice, but in a small, manageable way, cabining one’s food choices discharges the obligation of Friday penance in a traditional way that focusses our attention on the need to put God at the center of even the routine trivia of our lives. I do it, and, in the spirit of reproposing tradition, if you don’t,  please consider joining me.

Now, some Catholics think that “Vatican II” did away with all that kind of stuff, and some younger Catholics are unaware that fridays are penitential days at all, let alone that abstinence from meat is the normative method of discharging that obligation. ¹ If that’s you, please read on—this post is for you.

The colloquialism “Fish Friday” is actually a misnomer; tradition didn’t encourage fish on Friday so much as it proscribed meat. No one seems to know when Catholics began to abstain from meat on fridays, ² but whenever its precise origin, when Vatican II ended, abstinence from meat was still the traditional Friday penance required by law and custom, as it had been for centuries, and the council fathers never dreamed of changing that.

Pope Paul VI, however, was a dreamer. In his February 1966 Apostolic Constitution on Fast and Abstinence, he authorized episcopal conferences to substitute alternative forms of penance in lieu of abstinence from eating meat except during lent, and the US bishops responded a few months later in their November 1966 Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence. The latter is particularly worth your time, especially its  introduction and paragraphs 18 through 28; I won’t quote it all, but here’s a flavor:

Changing circumstances … have made some of our people feel that the renunciation of the eating of meat is not always and for everyone the most effective means of practicing penance. … [S]ince the spirit of penance primarily suggests that we discipline ourselves in that which we enjoy most, to many in our day abstinence from meat no longer implies penance, while renunciation of other things would be more penitential. …

[F]ar from downgrading the traditional penitential observance of Friday, and motivated precisely by  the desire to give the spirit of penance greater vitality, especially on Fridays, … [we] urge our Catholic people … [to remember that] Friday … remains a special day of penitential observance throughout the year … [and] should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday by freely making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.

Our bishops intended to create flexibility in the manner of penance: If your pleasure is a martini at the end of the day rather than a steak, abstaining from the latter on Fridays may be a suboptimal penance, and if you’re a vegetarian, it may be no penance at all! ³ The problem is that when things become optional in theory they often end up undone in practice, and in the postconciliar chaos, Friday abstention came to be seen as optional; a generation later, it’s rarely seen at all.

Against this backdrop, I want to underline three points that must weigh on our consciences today:

(1) The Code of Canon Law still obliges Friday penance, throughout the year. “Abstinence from eating meat or another food according to the prescriptions of the conference of bishops is to be observed on Fridays throughout the year unless they are solemnities.” 1983 CIC 1251.

(2) The 1966 Pastoral Statement didn’t make Friday penance optional, it merely allowed  diversity of form—to substitute more personally penitential alternatives to abstinence from meat.

(3) Abstaining from meat remains the default Friday penitential practice, even in the United States. The Pastoral Statement says:

Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.

Although there’s much to say about the nexus between Fish Friday and Catholic Identity, this post won’t explore the wisdom of the decisions that made abstinence optional; we’ll get into that another day. No, here’s the major point that I want to convey to you today:

Abstinence from meat is the time-honored, traditional, and default expression of a Friday penance that is mandatory for Catholics.

If you take nothing else away from this entry, take that.

Apropos, the blog Te Deum Laudamus reported today that Fr. Eduard Perrone has challenged his parishioners “to do one act of penance every week during the year 2012–an act in addition to any penitential acts which may already be one’s practice or which the season (viz., Lent) may dictate.” Fr. Perrone likely assumes that his audience is already observing a Friday penance; he means one more. But if you aren’t, may I ask you to consider Perrone’s challenge as a personal challenge to do so? And may I furthermore propose—assuming that you’re not a vegetarian—that you do so by abstaining from meat? Abstention is, as we’ve seen, the traditional and normative Friday penance in the Latin Church, and there are other good reasons too, not least in that it builds a sense of identity, provides opportunities for witness, and that it supplies a weekly echo of the formal penances of Lent and of Good Friday. ⁴

Abstention is a practice that has been partially forgotten for a few years, but was the praiseworthy practice of our forerunners in faith. May we, therefore, like Groome’s friend, go and bring our faith into every aspect of our life, even our decisions about what to eat.

The core of this post is pure speculation. I have to say that up front, but it’s speculation based on what I think are fairly sound premises.  One thing that’s clear is that our current liturgical perch, with the Roman Rite divided between the “ordinary” form (the novus ordo or, in Gamber’s phrase, the ritus modernus) and the “extraordinary” form (the usus antiquior, TLM, Tridentine Mass, whatever term one prefers), is temporary. Somewhere down the line, we should expect a reunified Roman Rite; Kurt Cardinal Koch has said it; Raymond Cardinal Burke  told us so just the other week. And we can infer a little about the shape of that rite, too: It will draw some elements from the usus antiquior. We know that because the Holy Father could have achieved a unified Roman Rite simply by revoking the indults and Ecclesia Dei, and supressing the usus antiquior; that he instead chose to reinvigorate and liberalize its use tells us that Benedict anticipates that the next Roman Missal will be a true blend of the two forms. So what’s the gameplan?

I will tell you my own view, and I think that Benedict has something similar in mind. First, I fully embrace the Council’s desire for reform of the usus antiquior; I think their concerns were well-taken and one cannot simply ignore the council. And why would be ignore it anyway? The situation that we have today is not the result of executing Sacrosanctum Concilium—Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy—but rather the result of its hijacking and use as a battering ram to force through a great number of liturgical changes of which it said nothing. And that’s the next point to make: Second, I think that the execution of Sacrosanctum Concilium was horribly botched; as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in an introdution to Msgr. Klaus Gamber’s Reform of the Roman Liturgy, “after the Council[,] … in the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over the centuries, and replaced it … with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.” Moreover, whatever the merits or shortcomings of the novus ordo itself, the era introduced a number of problems that are found nowhere in its text—the comprehensive vernacularization of the Mass, versus populum, etc. And third, we must recognise that the novus ordo is not going to simply disappear.

The upshot is that we have a bifurcated liturgy that is problematic on both forks: The unreformed MR1962, in which perdures all the issues that led the Council to ask for reform, and the ritus modernus, which bears little resemblance to the Mass envisioned by the Council and which has real problems in both its platonic form and especially in the ars celebrandi that has grown around it. How do we move forward?

I think (and as I’ve said, I don’t know but I suspect that Benedict has something similar in mind) that in the long term, the way forward is to actually implement Sacrosanctum Concilium—basically, to have a do-over. ¹ But what does that look like? In practice, it means reforming MR1962 in line with Sacrosanctum Concilium, incorporating the legitimate reforms of MR1969 while purging the problems that came with it and that were added to it by a deeply flawed culture in the ars celebrandi. Before one can do that, however, the usus antiquior has to be healthy enough to survive the operation, which means that it has to be returned to the point where it’s a healthy, living liturgy in widespread use, which ordinary Catholics encounter in their parishes. We are decades away from that point, but in Summorum Pontificum, Benedict has begun the process.

And after what is really a lot of prologue, we now turn to the pure speculation part. What will the Mass look like in nine decades?

My bet would be that we’d see an opening rite lifted almost whole from the usus antiquior, but with the congregation giving the responses in the manner of the novus ordo (“V. Deus, tu convérsus vivificábis nos. R. Et plebs tua lætábitur in te,” etc.). I don’t speculate on what language that part will be in, but I’ll speculate that the priest will face the same direction as the congregation. We’ll then have a liturgy of the word very much like the novus ordo, in the vernacular and versus populum. There would follow a hybrid liturgy of the eucharist in either latin or the vernacular depending on the parish, celebrated versus apsidem, but with an audible canon (most likely the additional EPs from the novus ordo will stay), usually sung and in latin. Postcommunion will probably be short and versus populum after the pattern of the novus ordo. The propers throughout will be in the vernacular.

That’s pure guesswork—and in truth, my predictive powers are colored by what I’d like to see—but if I had to put money on it, because that’s what I think the council’s vision was, that’s what I’d bet the liturgy celebrated by the first bishop of Olympus Mons will look like. The current situation isn’t stable, and I wouldn’t bet against seeing such a synthesis in my twilight years under a Pope who may not even have been be born yet.