Canon 1250 makes every Friday of the year, and the whole season of Lent, penitential days in the universal Church. Canon 1251 requires abstinence from meat, or from some other food determined by the episcopal conference, on all Fridays unless a solemnity falls on that day, and requires both abstinence and fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. In the United States the bishops' 1966 Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence keeps abstinence from meat obligatory on the Fridays of Lent, and, outside Lent, allows the faithful to substitute another act of penance for Friday abstinence while urging that the day never be left without penance of some kind. Make this practical: decide on Thursday what Friday's penance will be, so that Friday does not simply pass. Good substitutes are those that cost something and help someone — a meal skipped and its cost given away, an hour of volunteer work, abstention from alcohol or from screens, the Stations of the Cross, a visit to the sick. Keep it quietly, and join it to almsgiving and prayer, which the Church always names alongside fasting.

Paul VI's apostolic constitution Paenitemini (1966) reformed the Church's penitential discipline and left to episcopal conferences the determination of how the obligation is met in their territories; the current Code embodies that reform in canons 1249-1253.

Penance

Latin Church; particular law in the United States

Every Friday of the year

penance