"More roast muskrat, Your Grace?" Fasting and abstinence comes in all shapes and sizes
The Church’s tradition of abstinence reaches back much further than the 1960s, of course. A homily of Pope Gregory the Great is amongst the first sources for the current discipline. This in turn got bound into the earliest collections of the Church’s laws, ended up in the Corpus Iuris Canonici,and later found its way (by means of a reference, at least) into the 1917 and 1983 codes. But with the expansion of the Church’s mission field well beyond the familiar territories (and cuisines) of Europe, the definition of what is and what is not included in abstinence has shifted over time.
