The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.

 

 Cathedral of the Madeline, Salt Lake City Utah.

I started this post a very long time ago, something like over a year ago, and I"m just getting back around to it now.

Today is the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday, that more or less forty day period prior to Easter in which Catholics and the Orthodox, and often the faithful who closely base their practices on the Catholic Church, observe a penitential season that includes fasting and abstinence from meat on certain days.  The fast and abstinence practice, we should note, is considerably more rigid in the Eastern churches, both the Orthodox and the Catholic, than in the Western ones.  

That called this old post to mind, but it isn't what got it rolling.

Sometimes a person cannot help but be amused.

Meatless Monday is global movement with a simple message: once a week, cut the meat. Launched in 2003, Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns, working in collaboration with the Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

That's what brought this post to mind.

Meatless Monday.

 

 Meatless Days, Wheatless Days, and Porkless Days (and Heatless Days) all became a feature of civilian life during World War One, in an effort to conserve food resources.  True to form, the government didn't put the Meatless Days on Friday, which means that Catholics and the Orthodox got all these days plus the existing Friday one they already had.

Frankly, I'm not hugely impressed with the various "meatless" movements and to a certain degree I think they reflect the increasingly effete and disconnected nature of Western Society.  There's a real fear of nature anymore in our highly urban-centric world which has lead to people being afraid of their own shadows, including their food, and a weird sort of belief that if only they do this or that, or avoid this or that, they'll live forever.  They won't.

Part of that, in very real terms, is that people have so lost a sense of the Divine, and a spiritual life, that they don't know what it is. They grasp for it, and oddly, and amusingly to some of us in the Apostolic faiths, they eventually grasp and grope their way around to something they think is new, but which is ancient. But in grasping on it ,they don't really get the point.

Let's start with Meatless days.

Usually you'd hear something like we live in an era when meat is more common on the plate than every before, but that's not really universally true.  Some cultures in some parts of the world have always had very large quantities of meat in the overall percentage of their diets. Some less so. All have had meat in their diets, contrary to some erroneous beliefs.

In Western societies abstaining from meats, as a form of penance and religious observance, was at one time the absolute norm.  So Meatless Days aren't a concept that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health thought up by a long shot.  All Catholics at one time abstained from meat, which was not defined to include fish, from some point a very long time ago up until, in some countries, but not all, after Vatican II.  It was a universal Catholic practice and even bad Catholics observed it.

 

 The government during World War One didn't consider fish a meat either, so while secularist today will sometimes scoff at the Catholic exception for fish, society at large has always had this view itself.

Catholics still observe it during Lent, and the fact that 22% of Americans are Catholics shows this time of year as all the fast food joints suddenly start serving fish sandwiches.  A lot of them do this only during Lent, although they never specifically note that's why they're doing it.  Some traditionalist Catholics in North America still do this on every Friday of the year as they simply kept on after the United States Council of Catholic Bishops changed the rule for the United States.  At that time, Catholics were still supposed to do something else penitential, which is widely ignored and which, frankly, if they'd been thinking would been something that they'd know would have been widely ignored.  "Spirit of Vatican II".  Hmph.

And as noted the Orthodox their own rules, as do the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church, which include much  more strict abstinence rules.   Over Lent, or Great Lent as they call it, they step out the abstinence rules so that, over time, they give up fats, oils and alcohol.  By the end of Lent their diet restrictions are, therefore, pretty significant.  I'm not sure what the various branches of the Eastern churches do otherwise, but at least at one time their abstinence periods were fairly significant.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Salt Lake City.  There are enough members of this church in Salt Lake to support a respected elementary school.

That this is a Catholic thing I think implicitly shows as while the Catholic Church is the largest church in the United States, a majority of Americans are not Catholics, and so the old Protestant prejudice shows in avoiding putting the Meatless Days on our Day of Abstinence, Friday.  Even if we throw in the few percentage of Orthodox in the mix (the Orthodox are only a significant religious demographic geographically in some locations in the US) we're still only a quarter of the overall population.  So 75% or so of Americans aren't Catholics.  Having said that, probably at least another 10% follow Catholic customs to some degree, and we have to note that both Jewish and Muslim Americans also have some dietary laws that are seasonally unique.  Anyhow, so when John Hopkins discovers what it thinks is this nifty secular penitent practice, it puts it on Monday, not on Friday.

Wouldn't want to be too Catholic there, is apparently the thought.

This is amusing enough, but recently people have been discovering intermittent fasting.

I'm not a dietician and I'm not going to make any recommendations let alone opine on the safety of anything for anyone, but intermittent fasting is something that's recently made an appearance here and there.  Indeed, hardcore fasting has in some places.  Again, it's interesting to see a secular and somewhat left wing fad come riding in on the unacknowledged path long trod by various religions, including the very ones that such people spend so much time pretending they are avoiding.

Fasting can mean more than one thing to more than one person, but basically in this context it means abstaining from food for a discernible period.  In the Catholic and Orthodox faiths it means, on days of fast, to abstain from food save for one meal.  As I'm not closely familiar with the Eastern practice I'll only note that in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church what that means is to take one primary meal and you can take two minor ones to sustain yourself during the day. . . not much of a fast really.  Some people will take that further and omit a meal.  Or some will take it further yet and only eat the primary meal. This is what in secular terms is intermittent fasting.

There are faiths that go further than this, we should note.  Muslims during Ramadan eat only after dark and not at all during the day.

It's weird to read about intermittent fasting from secular sources as they'll go on and praise things like clarity of mind, or weight loss, and the like.  But at the end of the day, there's always some perceived spiritual nature of it from people who are desperately trying to avoid being spiritual.

Indeed, it's interesting how all of this works.  In this very secular age in which so many people are lost and struggling for a center, and in which the social left is constantly thinking it comes up with something new and brilliant, what they've come up with recently is the unacknowledged rediscovery of Fasting and periodic Abstinence of the Catholic type, let alone, at the same time, a rediscovery that more and more a lot of the old rules about personal conduct that they liberated us from starting in the 1960s were really good ideas in the first place.

But then, they're not going to admit that, or give credit perhaps where credit should be given.

Oh well.  Have a good and productive Lent. . . no matter how you approach it.