Why wait for fish fry season?
by Bishop Joensen | February 19, 2025
Before entering seminary, I and a few of my fellow students at the University of Iowa joined the Medical Historical Society. We were invited to take part in their annual banquet at a nice local restaurant on a Friday night during Lent. When it came to the main course, the servers brought plates with sizable ribeye steaks. A couple of my fellow Catholic students and I looked uneasily at each other; one of us asked if there might be an alternative fish or meatless entrée and were told “no.” So, after pausing for a few moments, we tucked into our steaks.
You might disagree with our decision as a flaunting of the serious Lenten discipline of Friday abstinence and a wonton form of disobedience to Jesus and to Church law, and you may be right. But for me, it was less a matter of craving for beefsteak and more a sense of not letting something so expensive and energy-intensive go to waste. A cow gave its life for human consumption, and it would have been a bloody shame to have it end up in the trash.
I’m prompted to recall that experience both because Lent is fast approaching (Ash Wednesday is March 5), and because of some remarks made last November at our annual fall bishops’ meeting by my colleague on the U.S. Bishops’ Domestic Justice and Human Development Committee, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia Borys Gudziak. Recognizing that 2025 is both an ordinary Jubilee Year for the Universal Church and the 10th anniversary of the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’, “On Care for Our Common Home,” Archbishop Gudziak called for a return to the Catholic tradition of Friday abstinence from meat not only during Lent, but throughout the entire year. He did not advocate for the bishops to pass a piece of disciplinary legislation that would bind the faithful (as the Catholic bishops of England and Wales did in 2011), but offered various spiritual and moral reasons why the practice of abstinence is even more relevant, fitting, and salutary in our contemporary context.
Even if I’m not yet perfectly observant, I find myself to be convicted and compelled to take up Archbishop Gudziak’s call with ever greater firmness of purpose. In “coming to my senses” in this way, I would be honoring the intent of U.S. bishops when they lifted the obligation of Friday abstinence following the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, when they urged that “the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”
I know people who continue to embrace rigorous fasting and abstinence on all Wednesdays and Fridays in accord with early Church custom, who subsist on bread and water and who take only one substantial meal those days. They are prophetic in the manner of Jesus and John the Baptist, who embraced radical periods of fasting as a form of solidarity and intercession for sinful humanity; they also seek to be spiritually strengthened against the forces who tempt us toward sloth and self-indulgence. The malicious deceivers tell us that we are the masters of our personal bodies and souls, and that we should redraw the lines of consumption and the balance of relationships among God, the human community, and nature in our favor.
In his death on the Cross, Jesus exposes the root causes of the ravages of poverty, hunger, war, and environmental corruption resulting from our enslavement to power, pleasure, and selfish pride. Abstinence from meat on Fridays in recognition of Christ’s Passion intensifies our identification with our Crucified Lord; it is a form of penance that fuels our will to follow Jesus as his disciple by denying ourselves and taking up our own personal cross every day of the week (see Luke 9:23).
Abstinence intensifies our cooperation with Jesus in his mission of saving the world from itself. Forgoing meat on Fridays is a modest form of temperance that carries over into other aspects of this and other cardinal moral virtues, including chastity and fortitude. It calls us to look outside and upward beyond ourselves. In the words of Bishop Erik Varden, a Norwegian spiritual writer and Trappist monk, fasting from meat is a Eucharistically-flavored form of “lifting up our hearts,” recovering the beauty of embodied intimacy so woven into our universal call to holiness.
Abstinence helps us regain our bearings and stay the course on our common pilgrimage to heaven; it is an act of hope. Again, Varden: “The Church, surely, is called to provide the compass by which people of good will might orient themselves in times of confusion, not to run after the crowds like a puffing old spaniel striving to keep up with the hunt” (Chastity pp. 115-16).
Abstinence helps us to see the world as it is, and not as our disordered appetites would fantasize it to be. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis extols the Gospel-inspired Christian spirituality that is both contemplative and simple to the core. For, as our Holy Father Francis observes, when we “recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings,” we are able to “accept our own bodies as God’s gift and behold the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home” (LS n. 155).
This sort of grateful simplicity is not a ‘down-sizing’ of life.’ “On the contrary, it is a way of living life to the full.” For those “who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have,” are able to “experience what it means to appreciate each person and each thing.” Abstinence (partnered with fasting) helps us “shed unsatisfied needs,” freeing us to “cultivate other pleasures and find satisfaction in fraternal encounters, in service, in developing their gifts, in music and art, in contact with nature, in prayer” (LS n. 223).
Many parishes in our Diocese are justifibly proud of the fish frys they host during Fridays of Lent. While prompted in part by the discipline of Lenten abstinence that spurs us to look for meat alternatives, they are even more moments when we can find pleasure in the encounters we have with familiar friends and newly met neighbors. Abstinence is truly an occasion for embodied mutual presence! The act of preparing and serving the meal is a form of community builder among different generations that bears fruit in a deeper sense of connection and solidarity which transcends the ample fare that fills the plate. Ideally, the parish fish fry is not an insular affair that simply reinforces existing circles of relationships, or promotes a “carry-out” mentality that misses an opportunity to cultivate connections in Christ (though there are certainly worthy reasons to pick up food that we take to a homebound or vulnerable person wary of the weather or being in public, or to a single parent trying to keep track of the kids).
Some of you are aware that this past January, I joined retired Father Ray McHenry, some folks from St. Francis of Assisi Parish in West Des Moines and other Christian friends on a mission trip to South Africa’s Limpopo Province near the city of Mokopane. The trip was Father Ray’s 10th under the aegis of Blessman International Ministries, whose founding “godparents” are Dr. Jim and wife, Beth Blessman. Along with their team and various partners, including Caravan of Hope and Meals from the Heartland, they feed 50,000 children each day.
There are too many experiences to recount, but one afternoon experience at the Del Cramer school founded by the Blessmans springs to mind. The after-school program that feeds upwards of 200 students had not received their shipment of wild game sourced from international tourist hunters who first flex their “license to kill” and then donate the meat to a number of area schools. And so the creative kitchen staff made due preparing a meal of chicken feet and “pap,” a cornmeal polenta-type mixture that is a popular staple in South Africa. The children gladly feasted on their practically meatless meal served by our mission team, who were not exactly brimming with hunger to fix themselves a plate. But we were able to engage and laugh with them afterward as we served up stories inspired by faith in a God who takes on flesh in fellowship, worship, and fun.
It is children, such as the ones we encountered in South Africa, who will no doubt spring to mind in the midst of my own Friday abstinence, in solidarity of spirit and hope that our world will be ever more united in our common desire to be at peace with one another, and that we all have a chance to flourish on a human scale and in personal holiness. I want to be grateful not only on Fridays, but every day, for the simplest of pleasures, for the food that nourishes our bodies, all the while obedient to the promptings of grace that restores the balance of life in everyone’s favor.