Friday abstinence rules in Canada (and a recipe)

One of the things about living in America's hat (aka Canada) is that we suffer from Eagleland Osmosis. In Catholic matters it's even worse. Almost everything comes from the US. The hymnals, the CCD materials, the missals, etc. And none of them mention that anything might be different in Canada. To a large extent this is probably a good thing because in my experience, where Canada differs from the US in things Catholic, Canada takes the wimpy route. (E.g. holy days of obligation, Canada has only TWO, Christmas and Mother of God, which occur exactly a week apart, and in some years they both occur on Sunday, meaning that Canadians have no obligation in those years to ever do anything other than Sunday Mass. WIMPY.)

I knew this, but I was still surprised to read the following in the bulletin one Sunday before Ash Wednesday:

Friday Abstinence Rules in Canada
While the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter [the religious community that runs the parish] observes the more traditional practice of abstaining from meat on all Fridays of the year, commonly called the 'Fish Friday', and also encourages you to observe this older practice, the following rules apply in Canada (rules which differ slightly from the USA):
--S.29 of the 'Ordo' of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops specifies that all Fridays of the year are special days of abstinence from meat in Canada. This includes the Fridays of Lent; however, they also state that Canadian Catholics may substitute 'special acts' of charity or piety on these days, even in Lent (except for Ash Wed. and Good Fri., when fasting and abstinence is required).

To restate: The Canadian bishops' conference makes no distinction between Lent and the rest of the year vis a vis abstinence. So if you're in Canada and you're not abstaining the rest of the year, there's no reason officially at least why you should change that during Lent, and you're under no obligation to do so.

In conclusion, Canada is wimpy yet again. :C

Of course there's the "special acts" qualifier; in the heady and optimistic past, the bishops seem to have been living in a dream world wherein all lay Catholics were just itching to apply awesome creative penances and perform superheroic acts of mercy and prayer and were somehow being held back by the idea that all you had to do was abstain from meat. "Ok, we're removing that rule! Let's see what you got, laity! Go for it!" The laity collectively went for it. Where "it" is "a hamburger." This is because the laity, being human, are very very good at hearing when they no longer have to do something difficult, but seemingly impossible to educate to start doing something difficult, much less to come up with their own difficult things to do.

Anyway. We try to keep meatless year round on Fridays. I'm always looking for more meatless recipes, and we did something tonight that was quite easy and also provided leftovers that can be easily spun into totally different meals.

African-Inspired Yams and Rice with Black-Eyed Peas and Peanut Sauce

I'm not going to insert a picture here because if you've ever seen a dish involving peanut sauce, you know what it looks like. Brown. And vaguely gross. Not even food stylists can truly make peanut sauce dishes look great; they try to trick you with neat bowls or splashing garnishes all over the place.

• sweet potatoes or yams, sufficient to feed your family and have some leftover
• rice ditto (or some other grain, or leave it out and just have it with the sweet potatoes)
• one can black eyed peas, rinsed and drained (or a similar amount cooked from dried beans)
• one large can plum tomatoes in juice
• one cup natural peanut butter
• a splash of vinegar or citrus
• nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and chile powder to taste--don't be shy

Preheat the oven to 400F and stick the yams in on a tray lined with foil (because those suckers ooze). Bake until the texture is how you want it, which depends mostly on how big the yams are and how soft you want them. Start checking with a fork or skewer at about the 40 minute mark.

Cook rice somehow. You know how to make rice, right? If you don't, look it up somewhere else. Or buy a rice cooker, because they are awesome. Especially if you make rice as often as we do.

Dump the plum tomatoes and their juice into a small pot. Roughly cut up the tomatoes with a fork and knife. Add the drained black eyed peas, the peanut butter, the vinegar, and the spices. Heat over medium-low, stirring frequently. It will look horrendous at first until the peanut butter melts and melds with the other ingredients to form a smooth sauce. Then it will just look brown, lumpy and vaguely gross (as mentioned above). But it will taste amazing.

Let each individual combine some rice, some sweet potato and some sauce in a bowl. If you cooked them soft, the sweet potato will collapse into the sauce. The result will be gently sweet, warmly savory, creamy, and spicy.

This was inspired by several different sources but notably the idea of beans and sweet potatoes in Crescent Dragonwagon's Bean by Bean and the peanut sauce in Mollie Katzen's Simple Suppers.

In Defense of Cry Rooms

In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. - Unknown

Modeled by one of my little room criers.

It seems at least once a week someone on my Facebook feed shares a piece attacking cry rooms. There are three main directions of attack, which interestingly enough, also attack each other implicitly:

1. Babies and young children should be able to cry, scream, laugh, and talk during Mass and other people should ignore, accept or even celebrate it.
2. Babies and young children need to be in the pew in order to be taught to behave. You must swiftly correct every disruptive behavior every time until your children sit attentively, or at least quietly, in the pew for an hour and a half every week.
3. Children under 7 shouldn't be at Mass at all. They should be left in a nursery or at home with another caregiver so that the parents can focus on Christ. The parents can switch off Masses if necessary to achieve this.

But although they implicitly criticize each other, the focus of their criticism always seems to be the cry room, that semi-segregated section of shame (how's that for alliteration) where brats hang from the ceiling while their mothers chat about toilet training, oblivious to the homily or the consecration.

My perspective is that there is no section on cry rooms or child behavior at Mass in either scripture, the catechism, or canon law, except inasmuch as to say that children under the age of reason are not bound by the obligation to attend Mass. Despite the dire reputation, in fact, the Church isn't terribly keen on telling people The Only Way to Do It unless there IS only one possible choice that is binding on every person without regard to circumstance, something that is rarer than you might think.

We laity are actually a lot more judgmental and strict than the Church in these matters. My perspective is basically that everyone should figure out what works for their family. Unfortunately, the cry room attacks often go all the way to a call for priests and administrators to remove or ban cry rooms. To the extent that they succeed, this is an attack on a perfectly licit and for me often a very helpful option. So I feel the need to defend cry rooms, with the important caveat that I am not claiming that letting children be potentially disruptive in Mass, OR swiftly correcting all possibly disruptive behavior in Mass, OR not bringing young children to Mass are wrong things to do, much less sinful things to do. Any might be right or wrong for your family, at this moment. Any can be taken to a harmful extreme for sure, just as the hyperbolic example of cry rooms I gave previously is easily recognized as a harmful extreme. A child who is allowed to sing loudly all through the homily, a family that is never IN the pew for more than a few minutes before yanking a child who dared to scratch an itch out to the vestibule for a time out, and a poor breastfeeding mother who misses Mass for months because she can't be separated from her baby and yet doesn't want to "disrupt" Mass with an infant's cries--all these would also be harmful extremes.

Any parent of more than one child knows that being a good parent means recognizing that the same approach doesn't work with every child. The Church is our mother, and she recognizes that we all have different needs, and require different disciplines, and different consolations. And, frankly, some of us are weaker than others, some of us are the bruised reeds. There are definitely weeks, or just moments, where I feel like a bruised reed. It's time like that, that the cry room is one of my consolations.

So if the hellscape version of cry rooms is a harmful extreme, what does an appropriate version look like? Maybe it's boastful to say so, but I think my parish does it pretty well.

At our parish, the cry room is one of the confessional rooms, with the screen pulled back, some kneelers at the window, some chairs, and a box full of quiet toys (an alphabet puzzle, some religious children's books, and some stuffed animals). There is a soft speaker, which enables the occupants to hear the priest etc, and the room is directly under the choir loft, so the music can be heard.

I can put a changing mat on the floor, and change a baby, while my toddler plays with a doll, and still be able to listen to the homily. I can let my overtired toddler lie on the floor behind me while I kneel watching the consecration and pray for strength. I can breastfeed in a chair that, frankly, is way more comfortable than doing so in the pew. These are the things that make the cry room a good option for me, at least some of the time. If you don't think these are good excuses, you should thank God that you are stronger than me, and pray that I may become as strong as you.

But in the meantime, please don't take away my cry room!