Can i eat meat on good friday

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the mourning or sorrowful season that many Catholics and some Christians honor annually. This six-week period can be looked at with similar importance to some people as the Advent season. Overall, the Lent season is one that helps those who celebrate it understand and feel some of the sorrow Jesus felt.

Previously the season has been explained in comparison to Jesus in the desert, to me. I found this interesting because this was when Jesus was fasting for forty days in the desert and being tempted by Satan. This season for those who celebrate it can be a challenge to their faith, just as Jesus was challenged, which also means it can be a big opportunity for growth.

After all, Jesus began His ministry right after leaving the desert period. Every year the date of Good Friday changes as well as the Easter Sunday and the beginning of the Lent season, based on the calendar of that year. Good Friday is always the Friday before Easter Sunday. This is to remember the day Jesus was crucified and died, followed by the miraculous rising three days later, and represented by Easter Sunday. I have found it interesting to see what non-believers think about fasting and praying throughout my life as a Christian.

To me, I would want to understand my own heart behind fasting on Good Friday or at any point. The higher the vote, the further up an answer is. A good answer provides new insight and perspective. Here are guidelines to help facilitate a meaningful learning experience for everyone. Follow Question. Is eating meat on Good Friday a sin? Answers 6 Discuss 1. Steve Nearman A sinner saved by grace. After the flood God gave man all animals for food also. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.

I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. When God built a nation from one man Abraham through Isac through Jacob and his 12 sons, the tribes of Israel, He instituted dietary standers for them after coming out of bondage in Egypt. When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Still, Christian tradition has since its beginning maintained the Jewish practice of fasting, as a modality of ascesis and discipline.

The Didache, for instance, one of the most ancient Christian texts — from the 1 st century — provides guidance on fasting, as well as the New Testament. Therefore, fasting — as any ascetic practice — has the function of exercising our freedom, of freeing us from the need to answer to the first suggestions of our body, our mind, and our environment. It is a way of tidying up the house, so that we have true conditions of putting our lives to the service of good.

Once the meaning of practice has been understood — which makes it clear that gorging on cod is not exactly an expression of penance — what is left is to understand the connection with abstaining from meat. It is like saying that, outside of a more general orientation of interior penance in the life of the faithful and the Christian community, fasting and abstinence in these two days of the liturgical calendar also do not make much sense: this requirement may be an invitation to give more room for ascesis also outside these two days, or a communal expression of a practice already present in the life of the Christian but, if considered in isolation, is much more similar to an empty custom or an eccentricity.

Three more quick observations. As it has already been made clear, the practice of fasting is, to the Church, in a field outside the moral realm.

It is also a day of strict fasting , in which Catholics between the ages of 18 and 59 are permitted only one full meal and two small snacks that don't add up to to a full meal.

Those who cannot fast or abstain for health reasons are automatically dispensed from the obligation to do so. It is important to understand that abstinence, in Catholic practice, is like fasting always the avoidance of something that is good in favor of something that is better.

In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with meat, or with foods made with meat; abstinence is different from vegetarianism or veganism, where meat might be avoided for health reasons or out of a moral objection to the killing and eating of animals.

If there is nothing inherently wrong with eating meat, then why does the Church bind Catholics, under pain of mortal sin, not to do so on Good Friday? The answer lies in the greater good that Catholics honor with their sacrifice. Abstinence from meat on Good Friday, Ash Wednesday , and all the Fridays of Lent is a form of penance in honor of the sacrifice that Christ made for our sake on the Cross.

The same is true of the requirement to abstain from meat on every other Friday of the year unless some other form of penance is substituted. That minor sacrifice—abstaining from meat—is a way of uniting Catholics to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, when He died to take away our sins. While, in the United States and many other countries, the bishops' conference allows Catholics to substitute a different form of penance for their normal Friday abstinence throughout the rest of the year, the requirement to abstain from meat on Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, and the other Fridays of Lent cannot be replaced with another form of penance.