Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.
Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:
Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests
Eh?
This found:
In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.
FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.
Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.
Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.
For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.
Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.
For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.
I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.
Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.
Related threads:
