c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Irish-loving Catholics face a St. Patrick’s Day dilemma this March 17. Do they follow the holiday’s tradition of eating corned beef or honor the church’s tradition of meatless Fridays during Lent?

Fortunately, cardinals and bishops are solving the problem in some parts of the country.

Dozens of Catholic dioceses have announced that they will grant indults _ exceptions to the Catholic Church’s common law _ to allow their members to eat meat on St. Patrick’s Day.

Chalk it up to the luck of the Irish.

“For those Catholics desiring some pastoral guidance regarding whether it is permitted to eat meat on St. Patrick’s Day … Cardinal (Adam) Maida grants his blessing and permission,” says a message sent to the Archdiocese of Detroit’s more than 300 parishes.

In exchange for eating corned beef, Maida suggests Catholics perform personal acts of penance, such as “prayer, fasting and almsgiving.”

The Archdioceses of New York and heavily Irish Boston have also decided to suspend the rule, as has the Diocese of Brooklyn. Overall, at least 29 of the 195 U.S. dioceses have granted exceptions so far, according to an informal tally by Catholic commentator Rocco Palmo, who has tracked the issue on his blog, Whispers in the Loggia, a widely watched source of all things Catholic.

Bishop Carl F. Mengeling of the Diocese of Lansing, Mich., has also decreed it’s OK for parishes, groups and individual Catholics to eat all the meat they want on March 17.

“I appreciate the bishop for not putting the Irish in a place of internal conflict whether to obey the church or our heritage,” said Neil Huiskens, a deacon at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Davison, Mich., and grand marshal of the 25th annual St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Flint, Mich.

Under Catholic rules for Lent _ the 40-day period before Easter _ Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are days of fasting and abstinence, and every Friday is to be meatless.

While giving a pass on St. Patrick’s Day, Mengeling urged the faithful to avoid meat on another day of the same week.

Many other dioceses, however, are standing firm in sticking to the rules and avoiding meat, even on the Irish’s big day.

“It just hasn’t come up as an issue here,” said James Wharton, spokesman for the Catholic diocese of Sioux City, Iowa. He added that many local parishes hold “fish fries” on Lenten Fridays to offer an alternative to meat.

Catholics, he said, are welcome to enjoy their corned beef on the day before or after St. Patrick’s Day.

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Corned beef began as a traditional Easter Sunday meal in rural Ireland. The beef was preserved through the winter in a brine solution of salt and sugar so that it could be eaten after the Lenten fast.

This year’s St. Patrick’s Day scuffle isn’t the first fight that’s been waged over Catholicism’s meatless Friday rule. In 2004, Boston baseball fans were irked when the Red Sox opened their season at Fenway Park on a Lenten Friday, forcing them to forgo hot dogs and Italian sausages for the game.

On these meaty controversies, Bill Donahue, president of the New York-based Catholic League, places himself in the beef-eating camp.

“These are all man-made rules of the Catholic Church. These aren’t quoted in Scripture,” he said.

St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is also patron saint of the Archdiocese of New York. Donahue suggested that could be having an influence on New York bishops who decided Donahue and other Irishmen deserve their beef this St. Patrick’s Day.

“The cuisine,” said Donahue, “calls for corned beef _ as well as for lots of green beer. That can’t be ignored.”

_ George Jaksa of The Flint (Mich.) Journal contributed to this story.

MO/PH END BARNES