My husband collects beavers(nicknacks, figurines, stuffed animals, etc. … not that kind of beaver) and we were watching a documentary about them one time and it mentioned that. He promptly exclaimed, “We’re eating beaver every Friday next Lent!” But finding said beaver turned out to be harder than expected…
ROFLMAO, especially with your handle Poly** Carp**…
Have any of you Catholics actually eaten beaver?
Wait…strike that…I don’t want to knnow, and I don’t want to go down that road…darnit, I did it again…
Dang, that precludes my promoting to Catholics my special blue-belly lizard soufflé.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
It was my understanding that reptiles were allowed, but reptile meat is so rare in most of the world that it’s mostly a moot point anyway.
The bit about beavers being allowed, though, is pure urban legend, and has no basis in fact whatsoever. Unless, of course, you take the figurative slang meaning of “beaver”, in which case Polycarp’s answer, though humorous, is correct.
The “Pope: capybara=fish” bit appears to be an urban legend; the same thing is told of the capybara, the manatee, and barnacle geese. None of them have any indication of what Pope allegedly said this, only the capybara story of who might have requested it, and there is positively no extant evidence of the alleged ‘papal bull’ (all four stories involve a bull, not any other form of rescript) declaring them fish.
But why would the Pope, or any individual bishop, need to grant a dispensation when it’s clear that the fasting requirement is already dispensed universally anyway?
The Pope/Church as a whole didn’t ever weigh in on this, but it seems there may be some basis for either theoretical or locally as-applied treatment of waterborne mammals as kosher for Lent (the one I’d always heard was muskrat, but apparently even beaver and waterfowl have been discussed).
http://www.neworleansbar.org/documents/ENews08Nostalgia0213LentenObservances_000.pdf
Wiki also supports the muskrat story, and claims that the Archdiocese of Detroit still grants a muskrat dispensation.
Aha – Google-Fu is strong in this one:
You may be mis-reading a word “dispensation.” A dispensation is an exception to the fasting requirement.
Response 1: The Canon you set forth can’t be read as absolute because, for instance, there could be instances of medical emergency, disease, etc. where fast and abstinence would be risky to health. Without even looking it up I’m imagining Haitian Catholics, for instance, are allowed to eat whatever and how many survival rations they want today. This is the argument from common sense, which both Jewish and Catholic law are fairly good at when it comes to making necessity-driven exceptions to rules of religious conduct.
Response 2: Read two Canons further:
I don’t dispute that countries’ Episcopal Conferences can tailor the requirements for fasting and abstinence to their own particular circumstances. The point that I’m making is that no Catholics (including the elderly, the sick, those in earthquake ravaged Haiti etc) are required to abstain on a Friday in Lent if a solemnity occurs on that day. The question of a bishop’s power to dispense from such a requirement is not relevant if there is no requirement in the first place.
Oh, okay, we’re on the same page.
Pretty sure you can eat beaver meat on Fridays. It’s not an urban legend. St. Thomas Aquinas talks briefly here about avoiding meats that are “human-like” which sets the basis for the medieval system of classifying meats based on their environment. I’m sure I can find more cites, but I have to start getting ready for work…