It’s Friday - Eat the Damn Fish. All Year.

By now, most American Catholics have forgotten that Friday exists for any reason other than being the day before Saturday, casual day at the office, and the evening when every restaurant inexplicably has a forty-five-minute wait. This is actually rather impressive when you consider that the Church has associated Friday with the Passion and death of Christ for approximately two thousand years. Somewhere along the way, however, we managed to take one of Christianity’s oldest penitential customs and reduce it to historical trivia, somewhere between Ember Days and remembering that Catholics are actually supposed to go to Confession.

Now—let us review what the Church actually teaches, because apparently the Code of Canon Law is stored in the same inaccessible Vatican vault as the Ark of the Covenant. Canon 1249 begins with a rather unremarkable—yet seemingly forgotten—sentence:

“The divine law binds all the Christian faithful to do penance each in his or her own way.”

Notice what it does not say. It does not say that especially devout Catholics may consider penance as an optional spiritual enrichment activity. It does not restrict penance to traditionalists like me with Baronius missals and strong opinions about felt banners. And it certainly does not say that penance is recommended unless there happens to be a BOGO bacon promotion at Applebee’s. It says that the Christian faithful are bound to do penance.

Canon 1250 then becomes even more troublesome for the modern Catholic digestive system because it identifies “every Friday of the whole year” as a penitential day, along with the season of Lent. Every Friday. Not merely Good Friday. Not merely Fridays during Lent. Not merely those Fridays when you happen to remember before ordering the ribeye. Every Friday of the year retains a penitential character in the life of the Church.

And this brings us to one of the greatest examples of selective hearing in the history of American Catholicism.

Canon 1251 establishes abstinence from meat on Fridays, subject to the determinations of the episcopal conference, while Canon 1253 permits episcopal conferences to substitute other forms of penance, particularly works of charity and exercises of piety. In 1966, the American bishops used that authority to remove the requirement that abstinence from meat on ordinary Fridays outside Lent be the particular Friday discipline binding American Catholics under pain of sin. Catholics were instead encouraged to retain Friday as a genuine penitential day and permitted to choose other meaningful forms of self-denial, prayer, or charity.

American Catholics apparently heard:

“FRIDAY PENANCE ABOLISHED. BACON NOW A SACRAMENTAL.”

That is not what happened.

In fact, the American bishops specifically maintained the special penitential character of Friday throughout the year and encouraged Catholics to make Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in remembrance of Christ’s Passion. Better yet, when discussing the various ways Catholics might observe Friday, the bishops gave “first place” to continuing the traditional practice of abstinence from meat.

In other words, the Church effectively said, “You are no longer required to use meat abstinence as the particular Friday penance outside Lent. You may choose another genuine penance. But we strongly encourage you to continue the ancient practice anyway.”

American Catholicism responded:

“Great news, everybody! We don’t have to do anything!”

This may be the greatest interpretive leap since Arius read the Gospel of John.

The bishops offered Catholics greater freedom so that Friday penance might become more intentional. We somehow made it more nonexistent. They said, “Choose a meaningful act of self-denial.” We heard, “Choose whether you would like ranch or blue cheese with the wings.” They suggested works of charity, exercises of piety, prayer, sacrifice, and voluntary abstinence. We apparently settled on feeling vaguely guilty while eating a cheeseburger.

And yes, technically, you can substitute another penance. Wonderful. That is completely true. The problem comes when you ask the obvious follow-up question: What is it?

Whenever Friday abstinence comes up, someone inevitably materializes from the mist to announce, “Well, actually, Catholics can substitute another penance.” Correct. Nobody disputes this. But what did you substitute?

Suddenly there is silence. Apparently the alternative penance is “contemplative prayer.”

Perhaps you visited the sick. Wonderful. Perhaps you prayed an extra Rosary. Excellent. Perhaps you gave something meaningful to the poor, fasted from alcohol or dessert, performed a corporal work of mercy, made the Stations of the Cross, spent time in Eucharistic adoration, or deliberately surrendered some comfort that you genuinely enjoy. Splendid. Those are actual things. Those are penances. Those require you to do something.

But if your “alternative Friday penance” exists entirely as a theoretical possibility you learned about from Catholic Answers fifteen years ago, you do not have an alternative Friday penance. You have a loophole, and apparently you have been living inside it since 1966.

It is the religious equivalent of your wife saying, “You don’t have to wash the dishes tonight. You can vacuum instead,” and forty years later the house looks like the ruins of Pompeii because you interpreted this statement to mean that housework had been abolished. No. You were given a choice. You chose to do nothing—which, by the way, wasn’t on the menu.

This is why I have developed a radical proposal for American Catholicism. It requires no committee, no listening session, no diocesan synodal consultation, no parish survey, and absolutely no forty-seven-page USCCB document entitled Journeying Together Toward a Renewed Understanding of Piscatorial Accompaniment.

Here it is: Just eat the damn fish.

That’s it. Friday comes, you eat fish. Salmon. Cod. Tilapia. Tuna. Shrimp. Grouper. A fish sandwich. Whatever. Yes, I am aware that shrimp is technically not a fish. This is not a marine-biology seminar. The point is that the cow gets Friday off. Hell, if we want to get hyper-technical, you can add the following to your list next to grouper sandwich:

Muskrats, alligators, turtles, frogs, capybaras, beavers, skunk-headed coots, puffins and the barnacle geese. They all count

Stop turning Friday penance into a doctoral dissertation. The genius of traditional abstinence is precisely that it is concrete. You do not have to remember whether you fulfilled the highly individualized penitential program you developed for yourself during a twelve-minute burst of spiritual enthusiasm last January. Friday arrives, you do not eat meat, and the matter is settled. Even better, occasionally it inconveniences you.

Good. That is the point.

Penance that never inconveniences you has suffered something of a design failure. Modern man has developed the fascinating conviction that religious practices are spiritually valuable right up until the moment they interfere with something he wants. Prayer is wonderful provided it fits between Netflix episodes. Fasting is wonderful provided we remain comfortably full. Mortification is wonderful provided nothing is actually mortified. Sacrifice is beautiful provided somebody else is making it. And abstinence is deeply meaningful provided the restaurant does not have a really good burger special.

Christianity, however, is not Peloton spirituality. You do not get credit merely because you intended to exercise while you hang clothes on the indoor bike.

Christ’s command to His disciples was to deny themselves, take up the cross, and follow Him. The modern translation sometimes appears to be: “If any man will come after me, let him discern an alternative form of self-denial appropriate to his personal circumstances and then completely forget about it.”

That is why the fish works. The fish does not require discernment. The fish requires tartar sauce and lemon. The fish does not ask you to journal about your relationship with food or spend forty-five minutes discerning whether skipping the bacon on your cheeseburger constitutes an authentic expression of synodal penitential accompaniment. The fish simply sits there on your plate and reminds you of something remarkably simple:

It is Friday. Christ died today. You are Catholic. Remember.

There is something profoundly Catholic about that because the faith has always understood that human beings need physical practices to remind us of spiritual realities. We kneel. We fast. We genuflect. We cross ourselves. We use holy water. We light candles. We keep feasts and fasts. The body participates in religion because Christianity is not merely a collection of propositions floating around inside your skull. The Word became flesh. Christianity is incarnational, and Catholic discipline has always recognized that sometimes the stomach needs catechesis too.

Before someone begins furiously drafting an email to the chancery, none of this means that ordinary Friday meat abstinence outside Lent presently binds American Catholics under pain of sin. The American bishops explicitly removed that particular legal obligation. Nor should Catholics who voluntarily abstain from meat spend Friday evening conducting a forensic investigation of what everybody else ordered at Chili’s. Someone eating a steak may have performed a perfectly legitimate alternative penance that day. The Church permits that freedom, and Catholics should respect it.

But there is an enormous difference between saying, “The Church permits another genuine penitential observance,” and saying, “Therefore I will perform no penitential observance whatsoever.” The first is Catholic freedom. The second is spiritual laziness wearing Canon 1253 as a fake mustache.

That is the real problem. We took a discipline intended to make Friday penance more personal and meaningful and somehow engineered a system in which enormous numbers of Catholics do not even seem to know that Friday remains a penitential day. The bishops themselves anticipated this misunderstanding in their 1966 statement, emphasizing that they were not abolishing Friday or repudiating the penitential tradition of the Church. Yet somehow the practical translation became: “We have not abolished Friday.” “Understood. Friday abolished.”

And here we are.

Perhaps the solution, then, is not another program, committee, pastoral initiative, or twelve-week parish study. Perhaps it is simply to recover the obvious practice that worked perfectly well for centuries. Let Friday look different. Let your children notice that it looks different. Let your coworkers occasionally ask why you are not eating the hamburgers at the office cookout. Let the waiter hear you ask whether the soup contains meat. Let your appetites encounter, once every seven days, the astonishing theological proposition that they are not sovereign.

That is what penance does. It trains the will. It disciplines desire. It reminds the body that the soul is supposed to be driving. Most importantly, it connects a tiny act of self-denial with the infinitely greater sacrifice commemorated every Friday: the Passion and death of Jesus Christ.

And let us maintain some perspective here. You are not being lowered into the Roman Colosseum while lions circle below. You are not trudging through the desert with St. Anthony. You are not wearing a hair shirt. You are not storming the beaches of Normandy.

You’re just ordering the grouper.

You will survive.

Indeed, if eating fish once a week genuinely feels like unbearable religious oppression, that may be compelling evidence that you desperately need to eat the fish.

Friday is still Friday. Canon 1249 still says the Christian faithful are bound to penance. Canon 1250 still identifies every Friday of the year as a penitential day. Canon 1253 still permits episcopal conferences to substitute other forms of penance, and the American bishops still gave first place among the voluntary Friday practices they recommended to the ancient custom of abstinence from meat.

The Church gave us flexibility not amnesia.

So pray. Fast. Give alms. Visit the sick. Serve the poor. Pray the Rosary. Make the Stations of the Cross. Spend time before the Blessed Sacrament. Give up something you actually like rather than something you were planning not to do anyway. Perform a real act of charity or self-denial. Do something that reminds you that Friday is different because something happened on a Friday that changed the universe.

Or make the whole matter wonderfully simple.

Just eat the damn fish.

Christianity is not a lifestyle brand. It is the religion of the Cross.

And once a week, your tiny little cross might come battered, fried, and served with a side of coleslaw.