In NH, the bishop has granted an exemption in Lent for Catholics who want to eat corned beef with their cabbage and potatoes this Friday, St Patrick's Day. This seems sensible and I imagine it is widespread throughout the country.
Yet if it isn't in your diocese, is it considered acceptable to bishop-shop and find something nearby where you can have what you think is reasonable, or is that considered worse than mere sinning for venal reasons? I would tend to the latter myself, considering sins of the will more serious than those of the flesh, but it's not a specialty of mine.
Corned beef background, in case I haven't covered it before: It was not originally an Irish tradition. In Ireland, corned beef was an export because it was so precious. It brought in the few pennies a packer might have, wistfully watching it go out the door to either Manchester or London. So when they came to America and made a little money, the pain of that corned beef going to "rich" people elsewhere stuck in the mind, and they bought corned beef when they could as a luxury. Eventually, it became so strongly associated with Irish Americans and St Patrick's Day that the custom made its way back to Shannon and Dublin and is now a tradition even there. tourist dollars and all that.
Traditions that made it to America from Europe are often like that. I can't testify to the ones from Africa or India, but the idea that "this is what they used to do in the Old Country" is usually a lot more complicated.
You would have to ask your bishop for an individual dispensation. Looks like Providence is asking people to do that this year. I’d be interested though if you got invited to a dinner in a difficult diocese what they would do. I have several lay Dominican friends in the Providence diocese, and I’m seeing them Sunday so I may ask them. That’s the kind of hypothetical they love to get in to.
ReplyDeleteI had heard this was an American tradition, because the beef was available to immigrant laborers whether Irish or — originally— Jewish. It’s not a great cut of beef. The ‘corns’ are corn-sized spices meant to improve the flavor. The rich cuts are the marbled steaks.
ReplyDeleteI think those things can fit together. As poor as they were in Ireland, they would know that tinned beef wasn't fully the best cut, but they would still be impressed, because only the rich got to eat beef. In America, having the availability of even a cheap cut you could afford was a prize. The older name for corned beef, potatoes and cabbage is "New England Boiled Dinner." Cows are one of the few agricultural products that make it up here (hence Vermont cheddar), and between the brine and the cold you can actually store the stuff well into winter.
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