Growing up Catholic and not liking fish was never easy for me.

[Drunken Irishman]

Except tuna. I lived on tuna back then.

[Zuni]

1. my dad had the same problem

my grandmother used to make cod-cakes. I can't even imagine how awful Friday dinners must have been. When my father was older, even the mention of cod cakes made him turn green.

Luckily I was born after the Vatican relaxed the whole no-meat-on-friday rules.

[Drunken Irishman]

3. Have you ever had salmon patties?

NASTY!

Oh and I should mention I grew up under the new rules, too, I was mostly talking about lent.

[mykpart]

22. My mother made those.

But I didn't hate them as bad as tuna casserole!

[DarkTirade]

2. There's an old catholic saying...

"Nothing tastes better than a steak on Friday."

[rurallib]

4. Me also. I usually ate peanut butter until .......

that one Friday I ate a hot dog after school and work. I was really scared I would die and go to hell. But Saturday came and I was till alive. What did die was not eating meat on Fridays.

[KitchenWitch]

5. I ate a lot of peanut butter.

[flvegan]

6. Not Catholic, no idea. Why no meat on Friday?

Never understood what I had heard about that.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

9. As I recall,

and I was a Catechism Class kick-out - the nuns hated me, and I was happy to sit outside and wait for my friends to come out of the compulsory classes we had to take to prepare for our Confirmation - it was supposed to be a reminder of Jesus' forty days and forty nights in the desert, when he went without food.

What really got to me was when I got to travel around the world at a relatively young age and discovered that the "No meat on Fridays" rule existed only in the United States.

People in South America laughed when I told them about it.

[flvegan]

So "without food for 40 days" became "no meat once a week"?

Weird.

Well, weird to me. Not looking to say anything about anyone's religion. Especially one I have no idea about.

Thanks for the info.

[Drunken Irishman]

12. It's mostly used for Lent now.

For a while, it was every Friday, but then they changed it to just during Lent. Basically, Lent is where you give something up and I guess you're supposed to give up meat on Fridays.

[JVS]

14. In Bavaria the restaurants' special on Fridays is generally a cheese or fish based dish

So this is not only a US observance. At some point in school, I realized that it was also the reason that the school menu for friday usually involved grilled cheese with soup, pierogies, or cheese pizza

[Tangerine LaBamba]

17. That might be tradition,

but it didn't come from the Vatican. It was purely a US thing.

Or maybe there were some vegetarians in Bavaria trying to make a point?

One of the funniest incidents I remember about that "fish on Friday" rule was when it was announced that, ever after, Roman Catholics would now be allowed to eat meat on Friday and it would no longer be a sin.

My mother's butcher, whose middle son went on to become a priest, announced loudly that "There'll be no meat-eating in this house on Fridays! Not in this house!"

The concept of obedience, so roundly touted by the Catechism, never quite made it into my mother's butcher's head, bless his heart.

[JVS]

19. No it's not a purely US thing. Nor was it vegetarians trying to make a point in most restaurants...

on Fridays only. When the rules changed, many people in different places (US and Bavaria, at least. I'd suppose in other countries as well) decided to keep doing what they had been doing all along.

[vadawg]

24. not a US thing, we didnt eat meat on a friday

The majority of my family still dont.

[RagAss]

7. Pizza for me back then....what a sacrifice !

[DeepBlueC]

8. Wasn't it a bitch?

I could have eaten macaroni every Friday but my father had to have the protein. My poor mother often ended up cooking three different meals for the four of us. She was the least fussy of us.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

10. Everyone in my family hated fish,

so my Mom used to fix big shrimp salads, or lobster salads, or sometimes tuna salad, with Polish bleenies, which - for the uninitiated out there - are potato pancakes, latkes.

Our Friday night dinners were real easy to take. There was, in my landbound little Pennsylvania borough, the most amazing fishmonger, who had the best and freshest stuff imaginable. Back then, lobster and shrimp didn't cost a week's pay, too..........

[Career Prole]

11. What I hated was no eating Sunday mornings until...

...after eating your Jeez-it (shout-out to the kid across the street from Calimary for the Jeez-its!)
The local merchants loved that post-Mass breakfast crowd!
"Can you make me a six-egg omelet with ham and cheese and steak?" :P

[Tangerine LaBamba]

18. In my church,

which had a primarily Italian and Italian-American congregation (think "The Sopranos" in a coal mining town and you won't be far off), all the guys knew the ritual of the Mass so well - that your obligation to attend Mass on the Sabbath required you to be there between the Gospel and the Communion - that they'd stagger in just as Father Mike began to read the Gospel for that Sunday, make it up to the altar rail for the Body and Blood (shudder), and then head down the aisle, right out the door.

By the time we caught up with them at a restaurant, they'd already eaten.

[Career Prole]

20. ROFL!

Efficiency experts!
"I ain't goin' to hell on no technicality!"

When we got old enough to go on our own we used to come home with a bulletin as proof of attendance, but there were always plenty of those blowing around in the church parking lot. Mom never actually asked for one, but we thought it was a nice touch. :)
Kinda like a ticket stub to a concert you never went to.

[ScreamingMeemie]

13. Fish Sticks and Tater ToTs...that was the extent of it for my mother.

I refuse to bring either of them into my home now.

[MrSlayer]

15. The only meat a priest could eat on friday was nun.

I grew up Catholic too and I never followed this rule. It was only instituted to prop up the fishing industry way back in the day.

[Redstone]

16. Yeah, especially if you grew up as I did in a New England Irish family, where Friday

dinner was carbonized frozen fish stick, more suitable for driving nails that for actually eating.

But hey, the frozen French fries were so soggay that they made up for the ossified condition of the fish sticks.

(No, actually they did not. Two dreadfuls do not balance out to a good meal.)

Redstone

[crimsonblue]

21. why?

:shrug:

[mykpart]

23. I was twenty before the Vatican relaxed those rules about

no meat on Friday. And I went to Catholic school, where the Friday lunch menu was always fish sticks. In the early 60s a company came out with hot dogs made from tuna! They were called Tunies, and were specifically marketed to food vendors for Catholic high school football games, which were always on Friday night! During the Texas State Fair, the Bishop of Dallas would grant a special dispensation to allow Catholics to eat meat at Fair Park regardless of the day.