But be forewarned: This particular service lasts approx. 371/2 hours.

 

It was worth it for me watching my mother have to get her hair wet in front of the 500 or so people. :lol:

As well as what Shamrock Fan elaborated, on the matter of Good Friday. They have a "mass" but there is no consecration of the Holy Eucharist on this day. It may only be distributed if it what consecrated the night before, and from my experience, they normally don't distribute it, just leave it in the tabernacle, only if someone who is dying would need it.

 

5wide you should come with us to some masses, I'm sure you'd enjoy it.

 

I watch it on EWTN occasionally...does that count? :lol:

Is it really only 37 1/2? I could have sworn it was 45 7/8;)

I watch it on EWTN occasionally...does that count? :lol:

 

I've been to the EWTN headquarters actually, my dad was a big fan of Life On The Rock (before recent events :madman::madman::madman:)

It was worth it for me watching my mother have to get her hair wet in front of the 500 or so people. :lol:

 

I got the consecrated oil all in my hair and on my dress. I had already been baptized as a child, so I didn't have to get my hair wet. But in pictures, i have pretty greasy-looking bangs!:lol:

I've been to the EWTN headquarters actually, my dad was a big fan of Life On The Rock (before recent events :madman::madman::madman:)

 

What happened?

What happened?

 

I'll PM you.

Is it really only 37 1/2? I could have sworn it was 45 7/8;)

Oh. Well, I went to the novus ordo version.

It has nothing to do with fish per se. It's just that we can't eat any kind of meat...and we really like fish.

 

Those of us who can eat fish that is.

 

Okay, I am confused. Why is fish not meat? Basically, isn't it the same thing as a steak?

 

Flashbacks to the old school testing. A fish sandwich is to a fish as a steak is to a cow.:lol:

Okay, I am confused. Why is fish not meat? Basically, isn't it the same thing as a steak?

I'll have to defer to our doctrinal specialists. But I know that fish is not considered to be "meat."

 

 

Actually, I think it's a loophole to allow for fish frys. Otherwise, we'd be stuck eating nothing but french fries and mac & cheese. :sssh:

Your specific question was, "Why doesn't fish count as meat?"

 

There is an answer. It's a little bit complicated, and maybe more than you wanted to know. The Reader's Digest version is, the tradition developed in a culture where 1) blood was seen as the life-essence; 2) the word we translate "meat" specifically meant "bloody"; 3) fish don't bleed red the way land-animals do.

 

You can stop there, if you like. The rest is just explanatory detail.

 

(deep breath)....

 

Different languages have different "semantic segmentation;" a word can designate a range of things, and while the range of a word in one language may have a big overlap with a given word in another, the mapping of one range onto another is rarely perfect. A big headache for translators. Example: OE "frignan" is usually translated as "to hear." Actually, it means "to learn by hearing and after having asked." So much easier just to say "hear," and in most cases, no harm done, no confusion.

 

But sometimes the finer points of the categories matter. In English, "meat" means "dead animals used for food" (this is a narrowing of meaning; originally it simply meant "food," and the Middle English term for chicken feed was "hen's meat," which we could easily misunderstand as the bird itself cooked up for dinner). Now, the word in Latin which we usually translate as "meat" has the root "carn-" (as in "carne-val," for Mardi Gras, "farewell to meat"). The "carn-" root (as in "incarnation") seems ultimately to mean "red": cp the obsolete adj "incarnadine" used in Macbeth, or the name of the red flower. At least the ancestral carnation is red.

 

Comparative notes: Gk "κρέας" and Sanskrit "kravya" meant specifically "raw flesh," and the meaning of raw is clearly "bloody," as can be seen by looking at the Serbo-Croatian word krv, which simply means "blood."

 

So "carne" means specifically "red meat," "meat that bleeds." Fish doesn't bleed that much, at least not in comparison to a pig (which some say is the original meaning of "flesh"). Leviticus has all kinds of regulations about the handling of blood in food animals, and so the traditions of the Church may owe something to that, in addition to all the sound things you've already been told about the association of Christ with fish, the luxury which the flesh of land-animals has generally represented (because it requires the expense of raising it, rather than simply taking what God has raised in the water), and the simple fact of marking off some portion of the week for a practice which has no necessary connection with penance except that the particular day has rules which other days don't. We still experience it as a restriction, if not a privation.

 

(I would point out that the deepest, richest symbols are those that don't have single explanations, but penetrate and resonate into a variety of areas of life, and of history. There is a book to be written on fish-imagery in the Christian tradition, and it will be a thick one.)

 

Tertullian reflects at length on the reasons for changes in revealed dietary laws, and he makes special note of the role of blood-consumption as a contrast between "the fish of the sea" and "flesh in the blood of its own soul;" this obviously owes something to Eucharistic thinking that was not available to the Hebrews whose texts he is quoting (look at Chapter IV of "On Fasting In Opposition to the Psychics": http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf04/...m#P1726_505586

 

But the symbolism of not consuming what Latin thinks of as "blood-meat" is obviously connected with the coming memorialization in the liturgical year of the institution of the Body and Blood: we are in pentitential deprivation of the Precious Blood which will be shed for us. Easter will be celebrated with the slaughter of a spring lamb or piglet. We will consume blood again.

I wouldn't blame you for not reading it.

 

Actually, I think it's a loophole to allow for fish frys. :sssh:

 

:laugh:

Okay, I am confused. Why is fish not meat? Basically, isn't it the same thing as a steak?

 

Flashbacks to the old school testing. A fish sandwich is to a fish as a steak is to a cow.:lol:

 

It's less about what you actually eat and more about sacrifice. For example, I believe that if a Catholic vegetarian should be compelled to not eat whatever they see as the biggest part of their diet.

I wouldn't blame you for not reading it.

 

So basically because fish don't bleed red?:sssh:

 

Thanks. I have always wondered that.

I stand educated today.

It's less about what you actually eat and more about sacrifice. For example, I believe that if a Catholic vegetarian should be compelled to not eat whatever they see as the biggest part of their diet.

 

That would make sense and be a good point.:thumb: