Contra the Old South

 

It is fashionable among some American traditional Catholics I know to idealize the antebellum South (and demonize Lincoln and the North). Some of this comes from Chesterton’s writings in What I Saw in America, some of it from other sources. 

The problem is that this requires us to ignore the culture of the vast majority of southern people for the entire history of the region’s inhabitance by whites. 

The “southern way of life” for most white southerners was and is a dubiously moral, uneducated, often violent life with occasional vignettes of low church Protestantism. The movie Forrest Gump and the song Sweet Home Alabama portray the South as wild and irreverent because it is. 

Apologists will stretch vignettes about Pope Blessed Pius IX sending letters of recognition and then a crown of thorns to Confederate President Jefferson Davis as proof that the Pope somehow saw the Confederacy as fertile ground for a rebirth of genuine Catholic culture. They will also insist that the agrarian, localist “southern way of life” was more respectful of tradition than the industrial north. This article goes further, pointing to Catholic conversions among Southern aristocracy, Catholic education of those aristocrats’ children, and other examples. 

Academically, it might make sense that a conservative, agricultural society is prime territory to give rise to a flourishing Catholic society. There’s just one problem. As Pink once said: Listen up, it’s just not happening. 

It did not happen in the two and a half centuries between Jamestown and the Civil War. It has not happened in the nearly 150 years since the end of Reconstruction, when southern elites retook control. That’s longer than it took to Christianize much of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the South has had multiple cycles of mass religious conversion, from Anglicanism to Baptist and Methodist denominations, and more recently to Pentecostalism. But not to the Catholic faith. 

The American South was and remains dominated by a culture that glorifies violence, libertinism, and emotion over education, traditional religion, and self control. Religion for antebellum southerners typically meant low church Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian liturgies fueled on emotional rhetoric. Thomas Sowell explains how this religious culture came from initial southern immigrants’ land of origin in the border areas between England and Scotland. Dan Jackson explains how the violence, including a deadly fixation on family and personal honor, has the same roots. 

This was not a Catholic culture. This is confirmed by the fact that the vast majority of Catholic immigrants to the United States who arrived before the Civil War arrived in the north and stayed there, despite the nativism of the locals. They mostly preferred to try their luck in the lands that exiled Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, not in the supposedly Catholic friendly south. Nor can it be assumed that postwar Catholic immigrants would have headed south if the South had won independence. Why would they? Where is the evidence that a conservative, localist South run on slave labor would have welcomed large numbers of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrants, either culturally or economically? 

It still isn’t a Catholic culture. Many southern states, like Tennessee, still have the lowest percentage of Catholics among the population across the states in the US. 

Moreover, apologists also ignore the real threats posed to Catholics in the South. The largest lynching in American history killed 11 Italian men in New Orleans in 1891. Father James Coyle was murdered by a Protestant minister in Birmingham in 1921 for celebrating the marriage of the minister’s daughter and a Puerto Rican man. The murderer was successfully acquitted by Hugo Black, a Klansman who served on the US Supreme Court until 1971. In the 1920s, the KKK successfully passed laws allowing Catholic monasteries and convents to be searched without warrants based on fears that the Knights of Columbus were the military arm of the pope planning to overthrow the government. 

The slavery issue also cannot just be ignored, or written off as equivalent to the abuses of industrialism. Slave owners commonly fathered children with slaves. So much so that South Carolina plantation matriarch Mary Chestnutt Boyd said: “Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God, forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an inequity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

Add that to the fact that it was common for slaves, including children of white masters (likely including Frederick Douglass), to be moved or sold, and families to be separated, often permanently. These were grave offenses to the natural family, worse than many that faithful Catholics condemn today. Those condemnations lose credibility when those same Catholics bizarrely ignore or excuse worse behaviors because they were practiced in a society that was vaguely more open to a Catholic faith that never took hold in reality. 

But the Northerners were hypocrites, they might say. Well, so were the Southerners. For one thing, the South could hardly demand respect for states’ rights after a decade of enforcing slavery on the Northern states through the Fugitive Slave Act. Nor could they complain about political marginalization given they only exercised controlling power in the US government because of the 3/5 rule in which each slave (of course without voting rights) counted as 3/5 of a person when counting population for apportioning Congressional representatives. 

For another, if the North enabled slavery by buying Southern cotton for use in factories, then the South enabled Northern industrialism by providing the raw material that kept it going. 

The Southern apologists have a point that President Lincoln’s handling of secession was a brutal waste of 600,000 lives. Maintaining armed forces on Southern forts that the Confederacy offered to purchase peacefully was likely unconstitutional and led to an unnecessary war that destroyed half the country. Votes by elected state legislatures to secede hardly qualifies as an “insurrection” that the President has a mandate to suppress, and the seceding states maintained a republican form of government, so that provision of the Constitution doesn’t justify the use of force either. It gets worse for Lincoln when one considers that Virginia and North Carolina likely would have remained in the Union if he had not used force on South Carolina. Nor did the war concretely improve the lives of many who lived under the oppression of the Southern plantation system, given the sharecropping and KKK reign of terror that followed. 

Still, it is very difficult to justify defending that culture of the antebellum South, which had such deep rot that showed little sign of healing. All the more infuriating is Robert E Lee’s role in the Confederate army. Lee accepted that secession was anarchy and that slavery was wrong, the protection of which was the stated objective of many politicians who promoted secession. And yet he was willing to facilitate the killing of thousands for causes that he knew to be wrong, in violation of his oaths to the federal army, merely because of the way the legislature in his home state reacted to Lincoln’s handling of the attack on federal forces at Fort Sumter. It should be remembered that Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief of the federal army at the outbreak of the war, also hailed from Virginia and said truly to Lee: “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life; but I feared it would be so.” 

I would say similarly to today’s Catholic Southern apologists: the antebellum South is too flawed to be worth your defense and your reputation, as well as that of the Catholic faith you profess. 

Pax Super Israel

 

When I was a child, it was fashionable to hold one’s fingers in a peace sign and say “Peace in the Middle East.” We could do this because these were the years after the Oslo Accords but before the Second Intifada, when peace in the Middle East seemed possible. A good metaphor for the 90s as a whole: superficial peace and prosperity masking a cauldron of instability. 

Peace in the Middle East will not come any time soon because the West and the Arab world have built theologies and identities that make compromise impossible. 

For the West, an obsessive pluralism has replaced Christianity as the defining worldview. The West is also driven by PTSD from the memories of the Holocaust, justly kept alive by Eli Wiesel and others. The West’s penance for this and other sins is an outward fixation on elevation of minorities. A prime example is near universal, fervent support for modern Israel as the Jewish national homeland, to be defended at all costs.

The West cannot let Israel fell, and cannot exercise any meaningful restraint on Israel without giving up a cornerstone of its identity. Were we in the West to let Israel fall, we would have to admit with Elijah that we are no better than our fathers. Like 20th century Europe, we too marginalized the Jews and then stood idly by while hostile militants waged savage war on the Jewish people. And if there is anything we in the West cannot do, it is to admit that we lack moral superiority over our racist ancestors. 

If anything, the Arab world has defined itself even more closely with opposition to Israel. At first it was an expression of the pan Arab militant secularism common to regimes like Nasser’s Egypt and Hussein’s Iraq. Now it is an expression of Islamist militarism, which is a unifying thread across groups as different as Sunni Hamas and Shiite Iran. 75 years after Israeli independence, many Middle Eastern states cannot bring themselves to recognize Israel. Doing so would be to accept Western dominance and imperialism. The Middle Eastern states believe that eventually, as with the Crusader states, the West will tire, then enough Muslim powers will unite, and expel the invaders. To accept Israel would be to accept the West’s ability to dictate who rules historically Muslim land, including some of the land most sacred to Islam. It would also be a rejection of the Qur’an’s command in 9:29 that Muslims fight Jews and Christians until they are brought low and pay tribute. 

And so, despite the tiny area of land involved, the conflict will continue to be a festering wound. After the next bombardment and invasion of Gaza, Israel will continue to live under constant threats of terrorism that no other Western nation would accept. The West will continue to pour billions of dollars and credibility down the drain doing public penance for their fathers and grandfathers. Nearby Muslim states will continue paying to funnel rockets and explosives to genocidal murderers while the masses of the Palestinian people live desperately, relying on Western aid to stay alive. Middle Eastern nations will cynically point to Israel as the scapegoat for their own failures of government. Wider Muslim militant group will continue to point to the real abuses against the Palestinian people as cause for young men to radicalize and take up arms against the West. And the target will remain placed firmly on the United States as Israel’s main military and geopolitical enabler. 

While there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas, we must ask: how many people must die across how many decades for the West to keep its promise to itself and complete its penance? When do we receive absolution, and who can give it to us? 

Forgiveness: Loan Edition

 

Of late, the news is awash in student loan forgiveness plans. 

I’m not terribly interested in the details. I simply note that the opposition seems to miss the point. Many student loans are unjust by their nature, increasing endlessly due to interest capitalization that leaves people owing more than they borrowed even after years of making payments. 

It does no good to complain that forgiving outstanding loans in 2023 isn’t fair to the people who paid off loans in 2015. The issue is that both loans were unjust, and eliminating the abuse is more important than being afraid to play favorites. 

As for the “you signed the papers” argument, that is highly debatable. Many people incurred student loans when they were basically children. Barely legal adults, they had no experience managing money and little possibility of understanding the life altering consequences of such debt. Moreover, they lived their entire lives being told by every authority figure that their life to that point was all about preparing them to go a “good school” so they could get a “good job.” In such circumstances, can we really say these people validly consented to take on their student loans? 

Regardless, every Catholic should recognize that consent is not sufficient to make an action morally right. This does not just apply to sex. Usury is always wrong because it objectifies the human person and turns him into a financial object, just as pornography turns the human person into a sexual object. 

Morally, it does not matter that forgiving student loans may create perverse incentives to unwisely pursue higher education, or it may increase inflation, or it may unfairly reward certain high income earners. Such reasoning is consequentialism, which denies objective morality, instead trying (and failing) to judge the rightness of an action based on its consequences. 

We can’t know in advance all of the consequences of forgiving various categories of student loans. What we can know is that many of them were unjust from the beginning, and that the lender (whether the federal government or another) has the just authority and the duty of redressing these abuses. 

Anyone who has read Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah is aware of Divine mandates to forgive debts and to release debtors from prison. Better late than never. 

In Vanya’s Shoes

 

Late on the afternoon of the Vigil of Pentecost as my wife has taken the kids out to run some errands so I can get some cleaning and projects done around the house, a visitor appears on the other side of the screen door. He has not knocked, as he knows I hate loud noises. His smile cuts across a face that almost matches my own, save that it has a shock of hair darker than mine ever was, and its eyes and skin have the slightest tinge of yellow, suggesting a hint of jaundice. 

I feel around in my pockets and realize I left my pocket Benedictine cross in the other room when I changed pants. 

As I open the door, the sun’s fading yellow rays bounce off the window pane and obscure his figure. 

“Where did you come from?” I ask. 

“From going back and forth on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” 

“And why now?”

“You know I have always been the only one to appear with an understanding smile, much more understanding than Gatsby’s, when you’re tired and feeling guilty over your lack of productivity.” 

“Well?”

“I’ve come to call you to your own place.”

“My own place?”

“Yes, I can surely see you preparing to leave this house for something better. Why not leave someone else’s broken down dwelling and make your own spiritual home as well.

I offer you what you really want. Freedom and time. Isn’t that what you said you wanted the first time you did Exodus 90? And knowledge, recognition, and visible impact on society. Well, here they are. Come and take them. 

Now there’s no need to make a clean break of it and upset your family and friends. You can keep the outward aesthetic trappings. Like Sam Harris says, the music isn’t bad. In your own place, you can reenact all the traditional solemnities you want. It’s only a minor annoyance for me, I’ve accompanied many monks through years of chants day in and day out. And you’ll get along with the Sadducees just fine. You can even create the community dynamic and social reform that you’re after, I don’t mind. With me, you can do just about anything, as the carpenter could have if he had stayed with me on the mountain.” 

“I see you’re feeling generous today.”

“Well, and why not? After all, it is I who has true compassion on the tired, the weak, the struggling. It is I who comfort them rather than demanding they become someone they are not, or push themselves beyond their capacity. I care about everyone, not only the elect. I offer a way out. And I always pursue. I am not as the false beloved in the old Canticle who vanishes when the lover opens the door.” 

“Yet the beloved vanishes for the sake of the lover, that in the pursuit the lover might grow to achieve blessedness.”

“Yes, I congratulate you for your literary style, as well as for your superhuman forgiveness of your father. Though I was pleased to see your friend react by reassuring you that the wretched man would come to me. You know of course, that whatever fasts you try, he and the rest of your family will come to me in the end.”

“You have fine taste in compliments.”

“Yes, and most appreciate that about me. And you’ve always perceived it. Let me tell you, social media runs on my compliments and encouragements around humanity’s correct opinions these days. And really, this is why I’m here. You can keep whatever vestiges you like, including your newfound dedication to project work, gift giving, and all the rest. 

But it’d be better to give those things up and focus on honing your unique talents. Put all your might into becoming a top performer, as I am. Surely you owe it to your family and humanity to do what you can do best, and to give up the rest. 

There’s no need to get started all at once, it’s only a change of mindset first, and then a gradual freeing of your mind from all these pretended obligations. And for now, it would be our little secret.”

“I was always good at keeping secrets, unfortunately.”

“Yes, and all in preparation for making the right choice. You don’t expect to achieve success by minding houses and children for all of your best years, do you? Imagine, how much better off society would be if the people worth listening to spent more time building culture and less time wiping children’s behinds and breaking up temper tantrums? As for you, stick with me and you have the whole world before you. You can truly take life and make it your own, the way your mom described you doing in that one Facebook post.”

“Though you touch close to home, I must rather cast my lot with one of my father-in-law’s patron saints, if such be my fate. Ego amavi iustitiam et odivi iniquitatem, propterea murio in exsilio.”

“All your life an exile. Well, one day surely you must decide to make your home instead of living in someone else’s. Until such an opportune time, I depart, though never far.”

Bear with One Another

 

Traditional Mass attendees are more likely to be unusually knowledgeable about liturgy and theology, and thus have higher standards for both. They’re also more likely to be embittered by experiencing poor liturgy, catechesis, and homilies, then being swatted by a priest or parish office when they dare to speak up about it. They feel that traditional parishes should be a safe space to ask hard questions and push for the best in liturgy. 

Diocesan priests who celebrate the traditional Mass are more likely to feel entitled to heightened deference and loyalty from their parishioners, feeling that they are doing their parishioners a huge favor by offering the Mass at all. Witness this article and comment section in which dozens of people pile on traditionalists whose worst crime, while obnoxious, was occasionally whining and nagging to improve the liturgy. 

Priests in traditional orders are more likely to have been formed in an older ethic that emphasizes obedience above all else and especially the laity’s duty to be subordinate to their priests in all matters. 

This is a recipe for frustration. On one side, you have laity puffed up by their heightened knowledge who demand the highest standards from their priests. On the other side you have priests who expect the laity to be submissive and eternally grateful for whatever the priest is willing to give them. 

This is why Saint Paul reminds us to bear with one another. Both sides need to manage their expectations. 

The laity need to understand that diocesan priests often have an exhaustive workload due to the shortage of priests. They are unlikely to feel that they have the time to perfect their Latin pronunciation or celebrate the liturgy to the utmost every week, complete with solemn Mass and sung Sunday Vespers. 

Those priests are also unlikely to push the envelope on liturgy with the bishop, whether it’s celebrating pre1955 Holy Week or vigils and octaves suppressed before 1962. 

Remember, priests are formed in seminaries, largely separated from the communities they will one day serve. They are assigned to parishes by bishops who are almost never traditional and who have almost unlimited authority about where and when to send a priest (even a pastor) at any given time. 

Their loyalty is to their bishop, and their culture is often that of their brother priests, complete with praying the new Liturgy of the Hours rather than the traditional Office and celebrating the Novus Ordo for most of their Masses. And now, they especially fear offending their bishop given that the bishop can cancel the traditional Mass entirely. 

The bishops in turn are loyal to Rome, since they are almost always elected by the Pope and curia to serve a diocese to which they have no prior connection. And Rome is currently hostile to tradition and to taking hard stances on moral and doctrinal teaching. 

The laity also need to understand that a certain amount of disagreement and even argument with priests comes with the territory. The priests are in charge of the liturgy, sacraments, and church administration. The laity are not, even if the laity are more knowledgeable about some of those matters than the priest. 

The clergy in turn need to understand that the laity have many reasons to be frustrated with the state of the Church and to insist on high standards, especially in the liturgy. A certain amount of annoying questioning and occasional nagging comes with the territory. These tendencies can be gently corrected or harnessed to get such laity involved in altar serving, choirs, or church decoration. Casting off an entire traditional Mass congregation because 5 out of 75 people occasionally whine and nag is unreasonable and not healthy for priest or laity. 

After Traditionis Custodes, these laity are also way past the notion that they have to obey whatever a Church authority figure says. Priests need to be prepared for some pushback and tough questions, not unflinching obedience. 

Laity at traditional Masses will likely have large numbers of children, as the Church demands openness to life, and it is not always possible to keep children quiet for an extended period in an enclosed environment at Mass. This demands patience from priests. And creative solutions would be nice. The FSSP parish in Allentown for instance has a glass enclosed, sound insulated cry room in the choir loft with a full speaker system so that parents with difficult children can see and hear the entire Mass while the rest of the parish doesn’t hear the children’s squawking. 

We’re going to have to deal with each other. Given the paucity of traditional Masses, the laity don’t often have options to move parishes, and priests can’t control where they’re assigned. 

Demographic Collapse

 

Warnings of demographic collapse due to low fertility abound. There’s this video on the European collapse. 

In the main, these come across as reverse Malthusians. Both sides are forever prophesying society’s collapse due to population swings in one direction or another. And it never seems to happen the way they say it will.

The problem with the reverse Malthusian position is that it has even less evidence behind it than the Malthusian position. Malthusians can at least point to real social collapses due at least in part to high population, including Easter Island and even modern Haiti and Rwanda. They can also point to the fact that the global population has multiplied by 8 in just over 200 years. 

The reverse Malthusians can point to… well some economic stagnation in Japan and parts of Europe. Population globally and in most countries isn’t even going down any time soon. This isn’t a social collapse. As for the dire warnings that these economies don’t have enough young people, Spain’s youth unemployment is worse than US unemployment during the Great Depression.

Which brings me to another point. Conservatives complain that Europeans are not having enough kids and that they get married too late or not at all. They then complain about urbanization. 

What’s the alternative? As the video notes, in many of these countries, there isn’t room for many Europeans to live in areas with lower population densities. Where there is room, there isn’t economic opportunity. Even in more successful (and fertile) France, youth unemployment is twice that of the US, and it’s hard enough to build a family in the US. The US trend of conservative families buying farm land and going rural isn’t available to many Europeans, where land and gas costs are much higher. 

Let’s be reasonable: these are small countries where population surged in the 20th century, population in most of them isn’t even going down, and they already have heavy competition for scarce land and jobs. 

Back to my original point: the collapse never seems to come. And I doubt it will, at least in the way we typically think of a societal collapse. Rich western countries have had declining fertility for two full generations and any deficit of young workers is simply recouped through immigration and technology. In China, demographics are even worse but that hasn’t stopped their economy from being one of the most dynamic in the world. 

This isn’t to say that the general lifestyle of having dogs instead of children and building culture on contraception is a good thing. Childless Europeans will be miserable and likely abused in their old age with no family to care for them. But for many, especially those who grew up in secular families without strong communities, it’s tough to see an alternative. They’ll continue to muddle along with a wealthy country middle class lifestyle supported by the welfare state with the hard work (including elderly care) being done by poorer immigrants. It’s not a good life, but it’s also not the French Revolution. 

The Flaw in the Plan

The flaw in the plan of the bishops of the Second Vatican Council, or at least the groupthink that prevailed, was the belief that the average Catholic’s faith was far deeper than it really was. 

The documents give the impression that, if only the Church would remove the brakes applied following the Council of Trent, modern Catholics would Christianize the world, beginning with unity amongst Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.

This foundational assumption was backwards. The popular devotions and disciplines of the post Trent Church were not barriers to the fullness of the Christian life for most Catholics. Rather, these were the faith for many Catholics. Removing them by force all at once proved devastating, alienating many who hadn’t already chosen to leave the Church in favor of secularist culture. 

There are several clear examples, each of which identified a real problem, but provided a kneejerk solution that backfired. 

Liturgy

Most Catholics today, even traditionalists, agree that praying the rosary through Mass is not the ideal way to assist at Mass. It was said that Catholics at Mass should be full and active participants, meaning they must be fully conscious of what’s going on at Mass. Presumably this means that they are engaging in some way with the prayers of the Mass itself and not some private devotion. 

This is reasonable, and lack of understanding of the Mass was a real issue. Still, what was the appropriate pastoral way to address this? Many Catholics had no other experience of the Mass through multiple decades than silent personal prayer. This is probably why the rosary in particular was regarded as a barrier to fully experiencing the Mass. 

Was it appropriate to take a man who had quietly prayed his rosary through a mostly silent low Mass for 30 years and force him to show up at a Mass one Sunday where everything was now audible, and in English, and where he was expected to verbalize responses, shake hands, and look a priest in the face for close to an hour? This is exactly what happened, and it seems spiritually cruel. 

The rosary wasn’t a barrier to the experience of the Mass for those people, it was their experience of the Mass. Any movement toward a more direct participation in the prayers of the Mass could have been handled more gradually, and in a less condescending manner. Moreover, it was already happening. I know someone who entered high school in 1958 and received a Latin/English Missal on day 1 of grade 9. Greater engagement with the prayers of the Mass was coming, though apparently not fast enough for the authorities. 

Cathechesis

The older generations seem to positively loathe the Baltimore Catechism. And yet 60 years after it was largely thrown out, the boomers who studied it still remember the responses. And we haven’t found a better way of teaching children the basic truths of the faith in a way that sticks. Embarrassing mistakes and accidental heresy on basic matters abound, often in priests’ homilies. 

And many who have discovered the Baltimore Catechism as adults, myself included, find it a refreshing way to understand and explain key concepts of the faith clearly and concisely. 

Yes, the fact that, for many, the faith was reduced to a set of rote questions and responses was a real issue. 

The problem though, was not the Baltimore Catechism, the problem was that catechesis often stopped there. The catechesis of the day did not sufficiently teach Scripture, the lives of the saints, and how those could be realistically lived out in the real world. But you’d be hard pressed to say we’re doing better today.

Error

Pope John XXIII’s opening address to the Council assumed that the faithful were well formed enough to be able to spot and reject error, even if error were no longer censored and punished by Church authorities. In conjunction with throwing out the Baltimore Catechism and Thomist-based education in seminaries, this was also an unsafe assumption. 

Barely three years after the Council, the media was filled with theologians, bishops, lay “experts” and everyone else explaining why Humanae Vitae was wrong or did not need to be accepted by the faithful. If the Conciliar assumption was correct, the faithful should have been able to sort truth from error and do the right thing. Only they didn’t, and Catholics contracept at the same rates as any other demographic group. Widespread acceptance of abortion and divorce weren’t long in following. 

This also filters down to more critical matters. Over 2/3 of Catholics who regularly attend Mass don’t believe in the Real Presence. Plenty others believe that people become angels when they die, and we can’t blame It’s a Wonderful Life for that. Others don’t realize that Jesus Christ is God. 

While the prosecution of error in the Church could certainly get out of hand, some restraint of error by proper authority was all that kept the faithful safe from endless spiritual confusion and questioning on every subject. The faith is not supposed to be an independent research project, it is supposed to be something handed down. There needs to be something to hand down that isn’t clouded by endless uncertainty and dissension.

Fasting

While I’m admittedly more fuzzy on the rationales here, there was a strong belief that the Church’s rules around fasting made remaining in a state of grace inaccessible to many and relegated the faith to a set of legalistic rules. 

Still, fasting has proven to be one of the more enduring aspects of the Christian life. I know plenty of people who do not attend Mass but who still give up something dear to them for Lent. I know people who aren’t even Catholic who attend Friday Fish Fries. And it’s well known that Ash Wednesday remains one of the most popularly attended Masses despite not being a holy day of obligation. An elderly relative whose grandfather was Catholic often recalls his grandparents’ house smelling of fish every Friday, when his protestant grandmother (who refused to raise their children Catholic) consented to cooking meatless dinners each week. 

And the loss of fasting discipline has been disastrous. If one wonders why stores are filled with Christmas merchandise in mid-October, you could do worse than pointing to the Church’s dropping of the traditional fasting practice on vigils (like Christmas Eve) in the 50s. If you’re struggling to understand why belief in the Real Presence is flagging, the reduction of the Eucharistic fast from midnight to one hour is a contributing factor. I know several priests who have complained about the loss of any real penitential character to Lent- without bringing up that Lent used to require daily fasting. While the full breadth of traditional fasting may have been a struggle for the upper classes, this is one precept that simpler people could and did fulfill that gave their faith real physical grounding. 

If the Church no longer asks anything of its faithful, it’s easy to conclude that the Church and her teachings just aren’t all that important. This is especially true when one contrasts the attitude of the modern Catholic Church with fasting practices still observed by the Orthodox (no meat and dairy most Wednesdays and Fridays, fasting each day in Lent), Muslims (fasting from sunup to sundown through Ramadan), and Orthodox Jews (kosher laws). 

Legalism was and remains a problem in the Church. But this is inevitable given that the faithful need minimum guardrails from those in authority so as not to drift, especially in a secular world of plenty. And some will always misuse those minimums to marginalize and claim superiority over those who struggle in one area or another. 

A lighter approach may have been to reiterate longstanding exceptions for the sick and infirm, loosen the reigns to grant local bishops more authority over local fasting practices (which they should be expected to uphold rather than ignore), and enable other pastoral exceptions on the advice of a confessor. The traditional practices though, could remain as the gold standard, to be striven after by most, even if not achieved perfectly by many.