By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Reflecting on a recent ruling by the bishops of England to reintroduce the discipline of abstinence from meat on Fridays, New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan thinks American Catholics should consider doing the same in order to restore some of our lost Catholic identity.
In a blog posting he wrote on Tuesday, Archbishop Dolan said the 1967 ruling by Pope Paul VI that relaxed the meatless Friday tradition from obligatory to voluntary was one of the reasons why penance and mortification – essentials of Christian discipleship – have diminished as a trait of Catholic life.
But it also took away an important “external marker” of our faith, something that enhances our religious identity. These external markers can be things such as how we dress, feastdays, seasons, rituals, customers, special devotions, and are meant to arise out of a genuine interior devotion.
“Islam, for example, is renowned for Ramadan, the holy season now upon them; dress; required prayer three times daily; and obligatory pilgrimage,” the Archbishop writes. “Orthodox Jews are obvious, for instance, for their skull caps, for the seriousness of the Sabbath, and for feastdays.”
What about us Catholics? What are our external markers?
“Lord knows, there used to be tons of them: Friday abstinence from meat was one of them, but we recall so many others: seriousness about Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation; fasting on the Ember Days; saints names for children; confession at least annually; loyal membership in the local parish; fasting for three hours before Holy Communion, just to name a few,” he writes.
“But, almost all of these external markers are now gone. Some applaud this; some mourn it. I guess some were helpful, while others were not. Besides the black smudge on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, is there any way we Catholics ‘stand out’ as distinctive?”
Most scholars say that without such identifiable characteristics, any religion runs the risk of becoming listless, bland, and unattractive. This is why so many people welcomed the initiative of the bishops of England as a step in the right direction: restoring a sense of belonging, an exterior sign of membership, to a Church at times adrift.
“I’m not saying we should re-introduce any or all of these markers,” he writes, because there must be a sense of balance.
” . . . (I)f all the emphasis is on these external markers, the danger is hypocrisy and scrupulous observance of man-made laws. But, if all the emphasis is on the interior, with no exterior sign of identity, the risk is a loss of a sense of belonging and communal solidarity.”
Perhaps the more pivotal question is this: what makes us different as a Catholic?
“Is it fair and timely to ask if we ‘threw out the baby with the bathwater’ when we got rid of so many distinctive, identifying marks of Catholic life five decades ago?”
Maybe, which is why he believes the bishops of England might be on to something after all.
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