. . . about buying some fish at the grocery store as a protein source for Friday.
Then I realized, "Wait a minute! Ash Wednesday is coming up fast!"
So I guess I'll be going to the store later today.
What are your meal plans?
Year: 2010
Meal Planning for Ash Wednesday
Every year a bunch of questions come up concerning Lent and the details of the laws governing it. Sometimes these rules are misstated or not clearly stated in various places on the web, so let’s look at what the Church’s official documents say regarding the practice of fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday.
Before we do that, though, let me offer a few notes of caution:
1) The Church’s laws regarding fast and abstinence today are very mild. As such, they are minimums. One can go beyond what they require and observe a stricter form of penitence, though one is not legally required to do so.
2) There are ways of technically staying within the letter of the law while violating its spirit—e.g., avoiding meat but having a lavish seafood feast. These should be avoided. We want to keep both the letter and the spirit of the law.
3) The Church does not mean us to hurt ourselves by observing penitential practices, and there are a number of exceptions to the law of fast in particular. Anyone who has a medical condition that would conflict with fasting is not obliged to observe it. For example, someone with diabetes, someone who has been put on a special diet by a doctor, someone with acid reflux disease who needs to keep food in the stomach to avoid acid buildup.
Now let’s look at the law.
Ash Wednesday is a day of abstinence and fast. According to Pope Paul VI’s constitution Paenitemini:
III. 1. The law of abstinence forbids the use of meat, but not of eggs, the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat.
2. The law of fasting allows only one full meal a day, but does not prohibit taking some food in the morning and evening, observing—as far as quantity and quality are concerned—approved local custom.
Something to note about the law of fast is that while it acknowledges one full meal, it does not further specify the quantity of “some food” that can be consumed in the morning and evening. You sometime hear or read about “two smaller meals as long as they don’t add up to another full meal” but this is not what the law says. It just says “some food.” That is certainly something less than a full meal, but the Church does not intend people to scruple about precisely amounts. (Also, the “doesn’t add up to another full meal” rule is very difficult to apply since people eat meals of different sizes during the day and the “size” of a meal can be measured in more than one way; e.g., calories vs. volume.)
The law does provide that approved local custom can regulate the quantity and quality of this food, but the U.S. bishops have not established a complementary norm regulating this. Nor has any U.S. bishop bound his subjects in this respect, to my knowledge. (Your mileage may vary.)
Now: Who is bound to abstain and fast? Here the governing document is the 1983 Code of Canon Law:
Can. 1252 The law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year. The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Pastors of souls and parents are to ensure that even those who by reason of their age are not bound by the law of fasting and abstinence, are taught the true meaning of penance.
“Those who have completed their fourteenth year” mean those who have had their fourteenth birthday (your first year starts at birth and is completed with your first birthday). The obligation to abstain begins then and continues for the rest of one’s life.
Not so with the law of fasting. “Those who have attained their majority” refers to those who have had their eighteenth birthday, and “the beginning of their sixtieth year” occurs when one turns fifty-nine (the sixtieth year is the one preceding one’s sixtieth birthday, the same way the first year precedes the first birthday). The law of fast thus binds from one’s eighteenth birthday to one’s fifty-ninth—unless a medical condition intervenes.
What about those who are too young to be subject to these requirements? Here Paenitemini states:
As regards those of a lesser age, pastors of souls and parents should see to it with particular care that they are educated to a true sense of penitence.
As noted, these are legal minimums, and one certainly can do more.
What If . . .
Apparently, we were closer than commonly realized.
Recently the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been discussing John Paul II’s practice of self-mortification. Though some of the details had been known before, new life was given to the story by Msgr. Slawomir Oder’s new book on John Paul II, which revealed new information.
Oder’s book has ruffled some feathers at the Vatican, because Oder is the postulator of John Paul II’s cause for sainthood, and it is not customary for postulators to write tell-all books including the kind of behind-the-scenes information that Oder’s does. Worries include that this book may make it harder for future postulators to get witnesses to be frank if they think their comments will appear in public.
Reportedly, the chill about the book has grown so strong that Oder is no longer willing to publicly comment on his own book.
But amid the hoopla about John Paul II’s self-flagellation and questions of the prudence of the book, another very interesting subject has been neglected: Just how close were we to a papal resignation during the reign of John Paul II?
For years rumors had circulated that John Paul II would resign when he turned 75, which he did in 1995.
The logic was that bishops submit their resignations at age 75 (though they can serve longer if the pope chooses not to immediately accept their resignation). Perhaps the pope should resign at that age, too. If the burdens of pastoral office for an ordinary bishop are such that submitting a resignation at age 75 is appropriate, surely the even greater pastoral burdens of a pope would make this reasonable, too.
John Paul II apparently spent years considering this line of thought, as revealed in Msgr. Oder’s book. He also made contingency plans in case he became unable to fulfill his pastoral responsibilities. (Apparently Pius XII did the same thing, penning a letter specifying that he was to be considered as having resigned if he was kidnapped by the Nazis, as he thought he might be.)
Catholic News Service reports:
Msgr. Oder’s book also marked the publication for the first time of letters Pope John Paul prepared in 1989 and in 1994 offering the College of Cardinals his resignation in case of an incurable disease or other condition that would prevent him from fulfilling his ministry.
For years there were rumors that Pope John Paul had prepared a letter instructing cardinals to consider him resigned in case of incapacity.
But even a month before his death in April 2005, canon law experts in Rome and elsewhere were saying the problem with such a letter is that someone else would have to decide when to pull it out of the drawer and apply it.
Church law states that a pope can resign, but it stipulates that papal resignation must be “made freely and properly manifested”—conditions that would be difficult to ascertain if a pope were already incapacitated. . . .
The 1989 letter was brief and to the point; it says that in the case of an incurable illness that prevents him from “sufficiently carrying out the functions of my apostolic ministry” or because of some other serious and prolonged impediment, “I renounce my sacred and canonical office, both as bishop of Rome as well as head of the holy Catholic Church.”
In his 1994 letter the pope said he had spent years wondering whether a pope should resign at age 75, the normal retirement age for bishops. He also said that, two years earlier, when he thought he might have a malignant colon tumor, he thought God had already decided for him.
Then, he said, he decided to follow the example of Pope Paul VI who, in 1965, concluded that a pope “could not resign the apostolic mandate except in the presence of an incurable illness or an impediment that would prevent the exercise of the functions of the successor of Peter.”
“Outside of these hypotheses, I feel a serious obligation of conscience to continue to fulfill the task to which Christ the Lord has called me as long as, in the mysterious plan of his providence, he desires,” the letter said.
I must say that I think John Paul II made the right decision by not resigning at 75, for a whole host of reasons. Being elected pope is like being married to the Church. Barring truly grave problems, the union should remain. Merely turning a certain age should not mark its end.
And imagine what would happen if he had resigned at this age: It would create a precedent that would put pressure on future pontiffs to also resign at this age, giving encouragement to those who don’t like them (and there are always people who don’t like a particular pope) to put further pressure on him to resign—or to ignore what he says, knowing he will be gone at a foreseen date (making him a lame duck), and then hating him all the more if he doesn’t resign. In other words, it could be a recipe for chaos.
And, indeed, some dissident Catholics were openly enthusiastic about a papal resignation when John Paul II turned 75 in 1995. They didn’t like the stability he was trying to restore to the Church—a project the pope had been pursuing in an effort to reign in the post-Vatican II dissident movement.
So how close were we to a resignation in 1995?
Notice that the second of the two letters was written in 1994, the year before. Also, the CNS story notes:
Msgr. Oder wrote that in Pope John Paul’s 1994 letter the stressed syllables in spoken Italian are underlined, making it appear that the pope had read it or was preparing to read it to the College of Cardinals.
The idea is that John Paul II, not a native speaker of Italian, annotated the text to help him stress the right syllables for reading the letter aloud. And perhaps he did read it in private to the Cardinals.
The letter says that he has rejected the idea of retiring at 75, but it also says that two years earlier (i.e., 1992, when he had a tumor removed from his colon) he thought God might have mooted the question. That suggests he was still actively considering an age-based resignation as late as 1992 and perhaps as late as 1994, when the second letter was written.
That’s rather close for comfort.
I’m in Julian, CA Right Now
Julian's a little mountain town that reminds me of where I grew up in the Ozarks. It even gets snow, despite being in Southern California. The still above is what it looked like when I got here yesterday morning.
And here's a short video I did:
About That Pro-Life Super Bowl Ad . . .
Here ’tis:
So the much commented-upon Tim Tebow Super Boal ad is now out.
I thought it was really, really . . . sweet.
Tim Drake offers similar thoughts on the beauty of the ad.
The ad was disarmingly non-controversial. It was just really, really sweet.
Yes, I did see a comment from NOW proclaiming that the ad fostered violence against women due to the unexpected mom tackle in the ad, but . . . c’mon. This is an ad to be aired in a football game. It’s a joke. Even I, a total non-football fan, “get it.” And mom even has the “You’re nowhere near as tough as I am” line as the capper. This is all playful, not threatening.
It’s sweet.
And that’s about all.
The pro-life issue was so buried in the ad that you’d have to know that it was there in order to perceive it at all. The only way an uninitiate would ever find out that this ad had anything to do with abortion would be to go to Focus on the Family’s web site and read more.
So this was definitely pro-life lite in its approach.
Maybe it had to be. Maybe the network wouldn’t have run the ad with an explicit reference to abortion.
But that raises the question—given the large amounts of money paid for Super Bowl ads—of whether the effort was worth it.
The ad may have too little bang for too many bucks.
Maybe it was worth it. Maybe enough people will go to the link to make it worthwhile. Or maybe the controversy that preceded the ad got enough helpful discussion going that it would make it worthwhile to run the ad.
Or maybe not.
I can certainly see why people who had high hopes for the ad would be disappointed.
It would have been strengthened 500% if mom’s line, “I call him my miracle baby. He almost didn’t make it into this world. I remember so many times when I almost lost him,” had been augmented even just by the words “Some people told me not to have him.” That would have at least gotten the real issue on the table, without having to use the “A” word (if that would have been a dealbreaker with network).
So it definitely seems that it’s debatable whether the ad was worthwhile.
Anyone care to debate?
Persistent “Vegetables” Speak!
File this one under “Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show.”
Let’s deal with the medicine part first and the Frankenstein part second.
On the medical front, good news! Researchers have found a way to communicate with patients who are in a “persistent vegetative state.”
Turns out that they, or some of them, ain’t so vegetable-like after all!
Here’s how it works: Hook the “vegetable” up to an MRI machine and ask the
vegetable
person to think about playing tennis. Note what areas of the brain light up.
Then ask the person to think about walking through their house. Note what areas light up then.
Then say, “I’d like to ask you some questions. If you want to answer ‘yes,’ think about playing tennis. If you want to answer ‘no,’ think about walking through their house. Do you understand?”
If the tennis-playing areas light up, go ahead and ask your questions. If the house-walking areas light up, explain again. (Or assume that the person is really smart and having a joke on you by thinking “no” when really he does understand.)
This really works!
At least with some patients. (Not with others, unfortunately.)
What it shows, though, is that these patients aren’t “vegetative” at all—at least mentally. They’re able to process and respond meaningfully to questions based on thinking about remembered/imagined actions.
That shows advanced cognitive functions! Remember: The person isn’t just thinking about saying “yes” or “no.” The person is thinking about other actions as a way of saying “yes” and “no.” That shows sophisticated mental processes in action!
So! Good news for the pro-life side, right?
Yesssss . . . but . . . here’s where Dr. Frankenstein—or at least Dr. Kevorkian—comes into the picture.
Already people are talking about using this technology to ask PVS patients questions like “Are you in pain?” and “Do you want to die?”
The first question is entirely legitimate! If someone’s in pain, let’s do what we can to alleviate it! By all means!
But let’s not proceed so quickly to the “Do you want to die?” question.
Other questions would be good ones, like “Do you need to change positions?”, “Are you hungry or thirsty?”, or “Would you like me to get a nurse?” or—once the immediate pain is dealt with—“Would you like me to get a priest to come pray with you and give you the sacraments?”, “May I squeeze your hand to show that I care about you?” (or even just do this one and don’t ask!), “Would you like me to turn the TV on?”, “Would you like to listen to some music?”, “How about an audio book? I could get you a subscription to Audible.com.” Or even, “Let’s use ‘yes’/‘no’ with the alphabet so you can tell me what you want. Think about what you’d most like, and we’ll spell it out.”
There are all kinds of compassionate alternatives to “Do you want to die?”
But folks are already noting that the new technique may put more pressure on people suffering from PVS to just go ahead and die.
So what can—and by rights should—be a vindication for pro-lifers may get twisted into a new way to promote euthanasia.
Hence: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show. . . . turning legitimate medicine to the service of evil.
Watch this one, folks. It’s going to be a BIG one as brain scanning technology becomes more common and more robust—allowing easier, richer communication with people in this state. It’ll be a major new feature of the discussion.
The work “changes everything”, says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who is carrying out similar work on patients with consciousness disorders. “Knowing that someone could persist in a state like this and not show evidence of the fact that they can answer yes/no questions should be extremely disturbing to our clinical practice.”
Well That’s Cool (As Far As It Goes)
Christianity Today has a web article noting (and quoting from) our recent discussion of John Paul II’s practice of self-mortification.
The piece—written by an Evangelical—is noteworthy in that it doesn’t just lash out against the concept. (No pun intended! Honest! Didn’t even notice that until later!) Indeed, it devotes a significant amount of attention to understanding the practice from a Catholic perspective.
Though ultimately the author sees self-flagellation as “misguided,” he acknowledges and recommends the practice of self-denial, including fasting.
(So . . . why is self-flagellation “misguided” whereas fasting is to be recommended? As long as you don’t permanently injure your body with either—and both can be done in ways that do permanent damage—why is one more misguided than the other?)
In any event, I’d like to kudos CT and the author of the piece—Collin Hansen—for seeking to explore the issue in a fair-minded way!
Blog Status Update
I've been studying a question for some time, and I'm still working out the answer, but I thought I'd give a status update.
The question I've been working on is this: How can I best use this blog and integrate it with other online activity I'm working on.
As alert reader Paul H notes down yonder, I'm doing some blogging over at the National Catholic Register.
But though I am blogging there, I don't want to shut down this blog, for a number of reasons. One of them is that here I can do posts that don't fit the word count or subject matter parameters of the Register gig.
So I've been trying to figure out the best way to let folks know where and when I'm blogging, regardless of the venue.
I've settled for the moment on at least posting here links to what is going on there. So if you come here, you'll find out what's going on on this blog and what's going on on my Register blog.
If you're into RSSes, you can also just subscribe to the RSSes for the two blogs.
I'm also looking into additional forms of notification.
For example–after several decades of resisting–I have now joined Facebook and Twitter.
HERE'S MY FACEBOOK PAGE, IF I UNDERSTAND THINGS ARIGHT.
(AND HERE'S MY FACEBOOK PROFILE; THANKS FOR THE CORRECTION IN THE COMBOX!)
I'm taking baby steps at this point with these media, but the goal I'm pursuing is to try to provide more, better, and better-linked online content for folks.
Advice very much appreciated, particularly on how to get these different things to work together.
And others; e.g., I know Google has some social networking doo-dads that have cross-service functionality I'm interested in trying.
Pet Phrases
I very much like and respect the work that John Allen does for the National Catholic Reporter (the same cannot be said for the rest of the paper).
But Allen has a waggish tendency that sometimes manifests in the form of a tin ear.
I still cringe whenever I remember a piece he did a while back in which he said that "some people" referred to the 2004 controversy over pro-abortion politicians (esp. John Kerry) receiving Communion as "the 'wafer' wars."
Whenever Allen says "some people" refer to some thing by a joking name of this sort–or that "a wag" might refer to it as such–I can't help thinking that he's just playing with a pet phrase he's come up with.
It brings to mind the classic piece of writing advice: Kill your darlings.
"Wafer wars" is just too unserious a phrase to use when discussing if Our Lord should be received in Holy Communion by people that advocating the mass slaughter of babies (or that the mass slaughter of babies should be legal–if you want to let them use the "Personally opposed but" dodge).
Now Allen's come up with another one.
Can your heart stand the shocking truth about . . . "TALIBAN CATHOLICISM"?
Whoa, Dude!!! Taliban Catholicism?!?!
File this one under the heading “defending the indefensible.”
Author and blogger John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter (not the Register, just to avoid any misunderstanding), is a competent and insightful journalist whose pieces I enjoy reading.
Mostly.
A thing that occasionally mars them is his desire to play waggish phrasemaker, a role in which he can display a tin ear.
For instance, in today’s column he writes:
I may have inadvertently added fuel to the fire by introducing something new to fight over: My phrase “Taliban Catholicism” to capture a certain trajectory within the church. (At least I think I coined the term, though for all I know somebody else got there first.)
In my brief remarks Monday night, I applauded [Bishop Kevin] Farrell’s vision, underscoring it with a bit of rhetoric that’s become part of my standard stump speech. A defining challenge for the church these days, I said, is to craft a synthesis between entirely legitimate hunger for identity on the one hand, and engagement with the great social movements of the time on the other.
That synthesis, I said, has to involve striking a balance between two extremes. Here’s how I described them:
“On the one extreme lies what my friend and colleague George Weigel correctly terms ‘Catholicism Lite,’ meaning a watered-down, sold-out form of secularized religiosity, Catholic in name only. On the other is what I call ‘Taliban Catholicism,’ meaning a distorted, angry form of the faith that knows only how to excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.”
Allen then recounts how he was politely taken to task by a member of the audience he was addressing and offers two defenses of his use of the term “Taliban Catholicism.”
First, he says that he uses the terms “Catholic Lite” and “Taliban Catholicism” not to describe specific people but states of mind. Second, he says that he doesn’t use them to refer to the left or right portions of the theological/political/whatever spectrum and that both exist on both sides of the spectrum.
These are pretty weak excuses to my mind.
Unless one has the linguistic bullheadedness of Humpty Dumpty, it should be recognized that words do not just have stipulative definitions where you get to use them the way you want to, with no thought to the real-world consequences.
Words are used by communities, and when you create compound terms like “Catholic Lite” or “Taliban Catholicism,” they’re going to suggest particular things to the community. In this case, no matter what Allen might subjectively mean by these terms, they’re going to be taken by contemporary English-speaking Catholics of the type found in his audience as references to the Catholic “left” and the Catholic “right.”
That’s what the audience is going to automatically assume.
Perhaps, with a lot of explanation and exposition and disclaimers by Allen, he could overcome that initial perception, but that’s what the initial perception is going to be.
But there’s an even more fundamental problem.
There is just no parity whatsoever between Weigel’s term “Catholic Lite” (incorporating a reference to low-calorie food products) and Allen’s own “Taliban Catholicism” (incorporating a reference to murderous thugs with whom we are at war).
It is as if Allen had used the phrase “Al-Qa’eda Catholicism” or “Nazi Catholicism.”
Now matter how many Humpty Dumpty games you play with these terms, they are just going to generate more heat than light.
Allen is smart enough to know that.
I chose the picture that I did for this post to call to mind the kind of murderous thugs that the Taliban are. But this picture doesn’t tell the half of it. In searching for it, I came across far more disturbing and violent pictures of the Taliban. People they had killed. People they were about to behead. People about to be shot in the head. I don’t suggest that anyone go looking for such pictures, but they underscore the force of the word “Taliban” and just the kind of evil with which it is associated.
Allen’s “Taliban Catholicism” is said to “excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.” The real Taliban has done far, far worse acts than that, which is precisely why his use of the term to refer to people who—however much they rage against certain things in the modern world—do not actually commit Taliban-like atrocities is disgusting.