FRIDAY FAST

Many older Catholics talk about the days when Friday fast laws were in place in the Roman Catholic Church. They were warned that they would go to Hell if they ate meat. Many of them were surprised when a priest wrote in a recent column, "No one ever went to Hell for eating meat on Friday."

But, older Catholics assure me, they were told that eating meat was a mortal sin, but the fine tuning of this theology was never explained to them.

The reason eating meat was a mortal sin was that the law to abstain from meat on Friday was one of the current Laws of the church. People went to Hell not specifically for eating meat, but for breaking one of the Laws of the Church.

In this way, the Catholic Church can amend its disciplinary laws and still not deviate from the punishments incurred by breaking the Church's Law.

However, conservative Catholic theologians remind us that Friday is still a day for penance. If one chooses to eat meat, he is still obligated to do some kind of penance every Friday. I have not seen any infallible statement about this, so there doesn't seem to be a law that says you must do some penance on Friday, but conservative scholars say that you do.

This is one of the doctrinal stands in Roman Catholicism that makes it so confusing. A Catholic who started to eat a ham sandwich as his plane took off from London did not, on a Friday in 1968, commit a mortal sin.

That is because the British bishops had taken advantage of the opportunities given by Vatican II to relax the disciplinary laws of Catholicism. They legislated that fasting on Friday was no longer a Law of the Church, so that eating meat was not a mortal sin.

However, if he was a slow eater and 40 minutes later was still munching on the ham sandwich as the plane landed in Dublin, he would be committing a mortal sin because Irish bishops had not yet relaxed the rule for Ireland.

I suppose if the plane crashed in the middle of the Irish Sea on the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland, the people sitting in the part of the plane that crashed west of the boundary would be all right even if they were eating meat.

Pity the poor passengers at the front of the plane that had crossed the border and were now in the Irish Republic. If they died while eating ham sandwiches they would go to hell They would be damned, not for eating meat, but for breaking a law of the Church.

To modern Catholics, writing articles about eating meat on Friday seems infantile, but this was a real issue for Catholics 50 years ago. Some rules laid down by Irish prelates then were confusing, if not asinine.

There was always some rule regarding fasting before taking Communion. This used to be from midnight, so that one could attend early Mass and still get home and have a good breakfast. (A pamphlet put out for young Catholics warned them not to brush their teeth before going to Mass, as they might swallow some tooth paste which would break their fast. They were likewise advised not to swim before Mass, as some water might be swallowed.)

Now the situation is reversed. Instead of going to early Mass and coming home to a cooked breakfast, Catholics now can plan to attend, for instance, a ten o'clock Mass. They would figure that they would be receiving the Host approximately 10:30, so they could have a good breakfast as long as they finished by 9:30. They would thus obey the mandatory one hour fast before Communion

If for some reason the Catholic miscalculated and is served the Host at Communion at 10:25, all he has to do is take the Host in his hand and wait five minutes.

Catholics who write to me today as brave apologists for the "truth of Catholicism" just don't know what the church used to be like!

We must admit that scandal was caused by the severely wicked popes of the Middle Ages, (which is also admitted by most Catholic historians).

Who can minimize the confusion caused by having the body of Pope Formosus exhumed so that he could be placed on the papal throne and tried for heresy? Not able to answer for himself, his responses were given by a cleric. Formosus was found guilty, and his body thrown into the Tiber.

Catholics like to deem ungodly papal acts irrelevant, saying that, wicked as they admittedly were, these popes did not teach any heresy. That, of course, is debatable, as instances of popes embracing the Arian heresy in order to secure their pontificate are firmly established in viable history books.

Can we downplay the importance of the error-ridden Bible published by Sixtus V and hastily withdrawn after his death?

With all the wordy defences of Catholicism that are spouted forth by Catholic apologists, most Catholics do not realize the utter bankruptcy of the Catholic system historically. The average Catholic is living in a fantasy world without recognition of how wicked the Church has been, and how childish are its rules.

Most American Catholics embrace a system of religion whose substance is the product of their own minds. What they conceive to be Catholicism is in reality far removed from what the Church has been in history. All the modern ecumenisms prated so glibly could not have been the Catholic Church of Pope Eugene IV, who said that even if a person shed his blood for Christ but died outside of the Catholic Church, he would go to hell. Recent moral lapses among a minority of Catholic clergy and the subsequent cover-up of their leaders are nothing when compared to the routine conduct of popes for hundreds of years.

The greatest condemnation, however, comes in their doctrines of salvation, which now try to gloss over the necessity for good works. There still is, and always has been, a complete lack of understanding about the sufficiency of Christ's work and the absoluteness of God's decree of satisfaction with that work and consequently a decree of judicial justification.