Some Upcoming Meat Fridays

Canon 1251 of the Code of Canon Law binds abstinence from meat on every Friday of the year, “unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday.” So a Friday carrying a solemnity is a Friday you may eat meat. That is the only question this site answers, and it answers it from the liturgical calendar of the United States.

Two things sharpen that. In the United States the bishops’ 1966 Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence lets Catholics put another penance in place of abstinence on Fridays outside Lent, so outside Lent the obligation is already gentler than the canon alone sounds. On the Fridays of Lent, abstinence binds, and a solemnity is what lifts it. Second, three solemnities that fall on weekdays elsewhere are kept on Sunday in most of the United States, the Epiphany, the Ascension and Corpus Christi, so they can never make a Friday here. The Ascension is still kept on Thursday in the provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Omaha and Philadelphia. Thursday is not Friday either, so the answer on the front page is the same wherever in the country you happen to live.

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is always a Friday, which is why no year in the list above is empty.

Two calls on this site are genuinely arguable, so here they are in the open. Friday within the Octave of Easter is counted. The Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year say the eight days of the Octave “are celebrated as solemnities of the Lord,” and Canon 1251 keys on that rank, but no Vatican or USCCB text addresses that particular Friday by name, so this is a reading rather than a ruling. All Souls, the second of November, is not counted. The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed sits beside the solemnities in the table of precedence but is not itself titled a solemnity, and Canon 1251 says “a solemnity.” No source settles it either way. If your pastor tells you differently on either point, believe your pastor.

Three things this site cannot know. Your parish or diocese may have its own solemnity, its dedication anniversary or its patron, and that genuinely lifts abstinence where you are, but it is not on the national calendar and no national list can carry it. Saint Patrick’s Day is not a solemnity in the United States, so it is absent here even in the years some bishops dispense their people for it; a dispensation is a bishop’s decision, diocese by diocese, and not something arithmetic can predict. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a solemnity in much of Latin America and a feast, not a solemnity, on the calendar of the United States.

How it is computed. Easter comes from the anonymous Gregorian computus, checked against an independent implementation for every year from 1900 to 2299. The nine fixed solemnities and the two movable ones that can land on a Friday are taken from the USCCB’s own liturgical calendar. When a solemnity is impeded it is counted on the day it is actually observed: the Annunciation moves forward to the Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter, as it did in 2008, 2016 and 2024, and Saint Joseph moves back to the Saturday before Palm Sunday, as the Congregation for Divine Worship decreed in 2008. Neither of those ever lands on a Friday, so no transferred feast is hiding in the list above. Abstinence is lifted by a day’s rank, not by whether it obliges you to attend Mass, so an Assumption or an All Saints whose Mass obligation is abrogated still counts. The whole table was generated once, in advance, by a tested program, and these pages only look things up. Nothing here is decided while you read it.

This site is a curiosity from The Ordinary Times, an independent lay newsletter. It is not an official publication of any diocese or parish, and it is not a substitute for your pastor.