McSharry’s Irish Pub is serving up corned beef and cabbage meals at its Irish bar in Fairhope. The briny red beef will also be available for those attending the St. Paddy’s Day Proper Donnybrook at Buck Mulligan’s Public House in Birmingham.
And the traditional St. Patrick’s Day fare will be served up in restaurants and Irish bars throughout Alabama, along with plenty of Irish pies and “eggs and kegs” breakfasts on Friday.
For devoted Roman Catholics in Alabama, this year’s St. Patrick’s Day could have posed a problem: Long-held Lenten rules require them to abstain from eating meat on Fridays.
Never fear, Catholic leaders in Birmingham and Mobile say. A one-time dispensation to local Catholics has been granted for those wanting to indulge in tradition of eating corned beef and cabbage - or even bite into a hamburger – in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.
Bishop Robert Baker of the Diocese of Birmingham and Archbishop Thomas Rodi of the Archdiocese of Mobile both granted the dispensation to their flocks.
“Observing the season of Lent is a special and serious obligation for Catholics as we strive for spiritual renewal in preparation for the celebration of the saving passion, death and resurrection of the Lord on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter,” Rodi said in a statement. “The penitential nature of the Fridays of Lent is to be observed by Catholics over the age of 14 through abstention from meat.”
He added, “However, due to the many celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day, a dispensation is granted this year on March 17 with the condition that Catholics observe another act of penance or charity as part of the Lenten observation.”
Baker’s dispensation is similar but includes specific penances for eating meat Friday: pray the rosary for increase of vocations in the Diocese of Birmingham, participate in a public celebration of the Stations of the Cross, do an act of charity, read scripture of the Passion of the Lord and spend time praying before the Most Blessed Sacrament.
The one-time forgiveness of allowing meat this Friday matches with a majority of Catholic dioceses throughout the U.S.
According to the Catholic News Agency , some archdioceses, such as in Omaha, Neb., and Washington, D.C., are requiring Catholics to transfer their day of meat abstinence to Saturday.
Michael Altman, a religious studies professor at the University of Alabama, said it’s likely that fewer people of today’s generation strictly adhere to the meatless Fridays.
“Things like no meat on Friday really began to fall out of practice in the 1970s as more and more Catholics grew up in the suburbs and outside of majority Catholic neighborhoods,” said Atlman. “The combination of Catholics moving to the suburbs after World War II and the changes in the church after Vatican II meant that more and more Catholics began to pick and choose the teachings or practices of the Church that they would follow.”
Altman also said opting to eat meat, or forgo it, is more of a “personal choice” for Catholics.
The last time St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday was in 2006, and about half of the country’s Roman Catholic dioceses granted some form of dispensation.
“Before World War II, I think it would have been much less common for Catholics to have meat on Friday - but they were also living in more Catholic majority enclaves,” Altman said.
The number of Catholics in Alabama is relatively small. Alabama and Mississippi, according to a 2014 Gallup poll , had the highest concentration of Protestants among the states - both at 77 percent. And they had the lowest percentage of Catholics, at 8 percent.
As of 2013, data show , there were 67,488 Catholics within the Mobile archdiocese, encompassing 76 parishes. Catholics represented less than 4 percent of the population in the archdiocese area.
Meanwhile, as of 2102, the Birmingham archdiocese was home to 103,900 Catholics, according to data posted on the website catholic-hiearchy.org . That was about 3.5 percent of the area’s population.
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