St. Patrick’s Day Is A Lenten Friday: Can Catholics Eat Corned Beef And Cabbage?

(Updated) DETROIT, MI — This is a fine kettle of fish: St. Patrick’s Day 2017 falls on a Friday in the season of Lent, when faithful Roman Catholics abstain from eating meat. But many Catholics are also Irish, or at least Irish for a day, and that means they’ll have to pass on the traditional corned beef and cabbage or shepherd’s pie — maybe.

The Archdiocese of Detroit says it has been besieged with questions from Catholics asking if they can sneak in a bit of meat to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday rooted in the Catholic Church. But the holiday is hardly on par with Lent. So, when it comes to honoring the patron saint of Ireland and honoring Christ’s sacrifice with the penitential act of eschewing meat, it’s not even close.

Until Vatican II, an assembly of 2,400 Roman Catholic bishops in the 1960s that liberalized some church practices, every Friday was meatless.

“Outside of the season of Lent, we can personally elect to substitute another pious or penitential work in place of eating meat on Friday but, during Lent, we in the United States do not have this personal prerogative to exercise,” Monsignor Robert J. McClory of the Archdiocese of Detroit said in a statement.

Because St. Patrick’s Day isn’t widely observed by Catholics, Archbishop Allen Henry Vigneron decided to “rely on his priests to dispense or commute the obligation of an individual or family to abstain from meat on Friday, March 17,” according to the statement.

• See Also: Lenten Fish Fry Guide 2017 For Metro Detroit: Updated Listings

“Therefore, those wanting to partake in a celebratory meal on St. Patrick Day that includes meat simply need to talk to a priest, who may grant this for a just reason,” McClory wrote. “Priests should keep in mind the option to commute the obligation to other pious works rather than giving an outright dispensation, and that their faculty may not be used to dispense the entire parish from the obligation.”

The policy in the Detroit archdiocese runs counter to special St. Patrick's Day dispensation decrees in place in several other large cities, according to the Catholic News Service. They include Baltimore, Maryland; New York City; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota; Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Omaha, Nebraska; and Jefferson City, Missouri.

Two former Detroit archbishops, Cardinal Joseph Maida and Cardinal Edmund Szoka, who died in 2014, both allowed Catholics to eat meat when St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday.

Image: U.S. Archbishop of Detroit, Allen Henry Vigneron, right, greets Pope Benedict XVI after receiving the pallium, a woolen shawl symbolizing their bond to the Pope, in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, Monday, June 29, 2009. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)