Friday Penance leaflet

statues, paintings and stained glass to engage our senses through their physicality and beauty. We go on pilgrimage. We keep vigil. We count the beads on our Rosary. We abstain from meat and we fast. These physical things and actions do not of themselves lead us to faith. But when used in prayer and reflection they again and again prove themselves powerful means of deepening our understanding of our faith and helping us to live faithfully.

For faith to flourish in us we need an engagement of body and spirit.

The feast that is the Mass he Mass, of course, offers us both. There are words aplenty, rich and engaging: indeed in the Mass, Christ himself speaks to us through the living word of Scripture. (CCC 1088). But the sublime truth of Christ’s self-giving in love which draws us to the fullness of life, engages us also by the way our bodies are used. We stand, we sit, we kneel. We listen and speak. We make music and pray with it. We see candles and smell incense. We see bread and wine, and we gaze in adoration upon the Body and Blood of Christ which they become. We eat and drink these precious gifts. We speak of that eating and drinking as being in a particular way ‘our receiving Communion’. But in truth we enter into Communion with the Lord in all of that rich complex of events and actions that is the Mass. In the Mass, in body and spirit we enter into communion, and learn again what it means to live faithfully. This is our Catholic way.

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Friday penance practical steps

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Make time for prayer

There are many ways of praying.

Two ways especially commend themselves for prayer on Fridays. Praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary directly connects your penance with the Lord’s Passion. Quietly reading next Sunday’s readings, and especially the Gospel reading, helps you make the connection between the ‘fast’ of your Friday penance and the feast of our Sunday celebration.

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Search out some good non-meat recipes

In a world where many go hungry, and where meat is a resource-intensive food to produce, there are ethical issues which can encourage a low-meat diet on other days than Fridays. If you find good recipes suitable for use on Fridays think of using them on other days of the week too. Try www.meatfreemondays.com or www.deliaonline. com (and search for ‘vegetarian’, for example).

Friday Penance

Key Books to Read Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster Christian Fasting, CTS (SP34) A Simple Penance Book (New edition), CTS (D665) Simple Prayer Book, CTS (D665) Spiritual Warfare, CTS (SP16) Prayer in Sadness and Sorrow, CTS (SP35) Way of Calvary, CTS (D749) Words of Encouragement, CTS (D256)

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Going out for dinner with others?

Ask if the menu (at least for you) can include something other than meat. Don’t feel awkward about this. People are used to making allowance for vegetarians and people with wheat intolerance. Making allowance for Catholics may be new for them, but it is a quiet way of witnessing to our faith. Who knows they may not even know you are Catholic, but in the future may be grateful that they know you are a person of faith, if they need guidance or encouragement or prayer.

Visit: www.CTSbooks.org A wide range of inexpensive publications is available from CTS to help nurture your faith and keep you informed about a wide range of issues. If you would like to receive further information please contact us: CTS, 40-46 Harleyford Road, London SE11 5AY Or visit www.CTSbooks.org Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046

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Why Catholics do not eat meat on Fridays

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What is our Friday obligation? he law of the Church requires Catholics on Fridays to abstain from meat, or some other form of food, or to observe some other form of penance laid down by the local Bishops’ Conference.

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(Code of Canon Law 1251)

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he Bishops’ Conference has decided to invite Catholics to understand again the importance of self-denial which springs from that self-sacrificing love of Christ who denied himself that we might have life. What better day than Friday because it’s the day on which our Lord died and made that ultimate self-sacrifice.”

The Bishops of England and Wales have decided that in England and Wales this penance should be fulfilled simply by abstaining from meat and by uniting this to prayer. Those who cannot or choose not to eat meat as part of their normal diet should abstain from some other food of which they regularly partake.

They announced their decision in May 2011 and it came into effect on Friday 16 September 2011.

When did the practice begin? s long ago as the first Century AD there is reference to Christians fasting on Fridays. Friday penance has continued in one form or another since then. In this country, in the 1980s, the Bishops allowed for freedom in choosing from a variety of penitential acts – e.g., prayer, acts of charity as well as abstinence from meat.

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Why was the practice re-established? he Bishops explained that they wanted to help us to a firmer sense of our Catholic identity, not only as individuals but together as a community.

They wanted to help Catholic Christians to weave the Catholic faith into the fabric of everyday life.

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(Archbishop Vincent Nichols - Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales)

What is abstinence? bstinence is the act of going without. The more rigorous form of abstinence is fasting – going without food. Catholics fast on Good Friday, for example.

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On other Fridays we are not required to fast, only to abstain from a particular food, and for most of us, we are asked to abstain from meat.

Abstinence, plus…. owever for the act of abstinence to fulfil its spiritual purpose two other things are needed.

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Why penance? e are won for life with God at great cost.

Christ died for us when we were still sinners. (Romans 5:8) We do penance in sorrow for the suffering the Lord endured for us. Even now we, and the whole human race, fail to live life to the full. We offend against love, and we cause hurt and pain to each other, and offense to God. We do penance to help us turn from sin and turn to God.

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Why Friday? t was on a Friday that Jesus suffered and died on the Cross of Calvary for us. Each year, on Good Friday, as we prepare for Easter, we mark that event with particular solemnity. But the tradition of the Church from the earliest time has also been to mark that event by keeping Friday as a day of penance by an act of selfdenial, of abstinence.

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The first is that the going without should be done in a spirit of prayer. Our act of abstinence is done to help us to a closer relationship with Jesus, and to be drawn by him to a closer relationship with the Father.

The second is that the ‘suffering’ of going without should prepare us for the Church celebration of feast. Good Friday leads us to Easter Sunday; every Friday leads us to the Sunday which follows, and to the spiritual feast that is the Mass.

Bringing us back didn’t eat meat today because the Catholic Church has said ‘Let’s go back to Friday abstinence’. Now, a lot of people would think, ‘What has that got to do with religion?’ But I went to the fridge and saw this really nice bit of beef at the back and I went, ‘Oh no I am not

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having it today. It’s Friday’. And at that moment I thought about why I wasn’t having it, and it might have just been a flash-frame but it was a moment in the day when I wouldn’t have thought about my belief otherwise: but I thought about it because of that.”

(Frank Skinner in conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury)

Body and spirit e human beings are “composed of spirit and body”. (CCC 327) For faith to flourish in us we need an engagement of body and spirit.

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Words are important ometimes we seem to privilege the use of words as a way of communicating the content of our faith. Words are important. They engage our minds and often enough our emotions too.

In Scripture and doctrine, in spiritual writings and in homilies they have their impact. At their best they explain and express what has been revealed to us by God and in the Church. But at their worst they can strike us as arid, and insufficient to sustain us in faith. They can speak to the intellect but not engage the whole person.

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Actions too owever in the Catholic Church there is also a rich tradition of using our body to help us to enter more deeply into an appreciation and a living of our faith. We use the arts to create

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