Lent 2020. Why fish can be eaten

One of the most entrenched traditions among Catholic believers is the abstention of eating meat during Ash Wednesday, Lent Fridays, Holy Thursday, Dolores Friday and Glory Saturday. But, interestingly enough, this abstention typical of wakefulness only applies if it is red meat and in general fish and shellfish – and sometimes chicken – are allowed.

There are many historical and religious reasons to explain this exception, let’s mention some of them:

• The word Lent It comes from the Latin fortieth, which means ‘forty’ and refers to the forty days of fasting – since it was originally fasting – before Easter, which was the commemoration of the departure of Egypt from the Hebrew people.

• The number 40 is of great symbolism in the Judeo-Christian tradition: the Jews traveled 40 years in the desert, and Jesus spent 40 days of fasting in the desert before his public life – in addition to having spent 40 hours in the grave.
• There are records that, in the fifth century of our era, Church Fathers —That is, the teachers in spiritual matters in Catholicism — believed that the fast of Lent had an apostolic origin, and urged the faithful to refrain from food so that “with their fasts they could fulfill the apostolic institution of forty days “.
• However, existing documentation provides various ways in which it was carried out. fasting and abstinence from Lent: There was talk of fasting one day, two, a few hours or in cycles that varied in duration.

• On the other hand, in the first centuries of Christianity it was a common practice among non-Christians the offer an animal in sacrifice to some pagan deity and then sell the meat in some public square; for this reason, Christians preferred to refrain from consuming meat that could have been sacrificed to idols.
• Now, according to the doctor Alberto Peralta of Legarreta —Teacher and researcher in gastronomy at the Universidad Anáhuac—, “Christian fasting does not necessarily require total food deprivation, but only the replacement of the natures of food“As the academic explained to us, replacing red meat with white meat is not a criterion merely of color but of essences: “The essence of red meat – terrestrial mammals of warm blood – is linked to the mundane, while that of white meat is volatile, cold-blooded, typical of the air or aquatic.”
• Finally the historian Socrates in its Ecclesiastical History, he tells us that “some abstain from any type of living creature, while others, among all living beings only eat fish. Others eat birds and fish, because, according to the mosaic narration of creation, the latter also came out of the waters”.

As you can see, there is no single explanation for this tradition almost as old as Christianity. And you, do you know any other ecclesiastical or historical explanation?

FM / EHH

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