It’s Joseph Campbell’s “marsupial pouch analogy.” Religion is a “womb with a view,” meant to prepare neophytes for everyday, moment to moment real situations where the “liturgical year” scheduling of spiritual activities are not much help except as background.

Campbell said that the problem with Western religions is that they demand to keep the member in the womb from cradle to grave. I agree.

For the Magisterium to be so assertively authoritative on prescribing fasting (i.e., self-deprivation and voluntary loss for the sake of the Gospel) on certain days of the week and the liturgical year is indeed a questionable usurping of personal choice and freedom. But it is one of the oldest traditions in Christendom.

However, what is called “fasting” by the Bishops is what nearly every modern health professional advocates as daily lifestyle change if you want to live a long, healthy and energetic life.

I’m a commercial fisherman. Meatless Fridays was continued for all those years in part because of the power of the seafood lobby. But the long term affects of this policy by the Roman authorities of the largest and most powerful religious body in the Western World has been devastating to the industry.

The cattle industry in Texas sued Oprah several years ago under a law they got passed that makes it a civil offense to publicly denigrate beef. I would like to call the Magisterium to task for promoting eating fish as a means to complete the suffering of Christ on the Cross.

“That proposal was, as shocking as it sounds, to actually do it as Scripture says, to use the actual astronomical vernal equinox and do the first full moon after that at Jerusalem as determined by astronomical observances/calculations.”

Yeah, but then if we did it that way, we’d have all the fun of the controversy over calculating Eid ul-Fitr that our Muslim brethren indulge in. Do you use the physical sighting of the new moon, or do you rely upon astronomical calculations? That’s an ongoing dispute, with both sides advancing reasons for their practice.

Now, if the Easterners would only submit to Rome…

I’m saying they grew up as Catholics, with the same background of what was acceptable exegesis as the rest of Western Christendom, and even when (for example) Luther was convinced of the necessity of “Sola Scriptura”, he still had the formation of mind that unconsciously moved along the channels of one authoritative (not authortarian!) interpretation derived from the text that would be self-evident to all.

They got a nasty shock when the ‘self-evident’ interpretations contradicted one another, and when trying to come to some reconciliation of their views to present a united front against the errors of Rome.

I’m saying that is why they instinctively looked to the earthly princes as God-delegated authorities to guard and guarantee the new dispensation.

I’m saying Luther and Calvin, in some ways, were closer to me than to their modern disciplines, purely because they had come out of that mediaeval world. They may have rejected the veneration of the saints as superstition, but they understood it in a way modern Protestants don’t, because modern Protestants haven’t grown up with it and come out of a culture saturated with it. If Luther could be brought forward in a time machine and witness, for example, the celebrations of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I’m sure he might denounce it as rank superstition, but he’d get it; he’d get why it happened and how it happened, and what people were thinking/feeling/believing, because he grew up with the likes of that.

Indeed, there was a lot of variety in mediaeval Catholicism that was pruned away during the Counter-Reformation, but I defy you to quote any “pre-Vatican I” source that says in effect that differing perspectives on baptism, or communion, or the nature of the priesthood, are all acceptable local options, whether or not “rigorism” was in force at that time.

Yep, as has been all too common in history, the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, Oriental Orthodox, Jewish believers only agreed to keep disagreeing.