despite myriad pleas from the Catholics of Red Sox Nation, the Boston Archdiocese has recently announced that it would not relax the Lenten restriction on eating meat for Opening Day at Fenway Park, which just so happens to fall on Good Friday this year. Furthermore the representative from the Archdiocese went on to rip baseball officials for scheduling the game on the Friday before Easter Sunday, claiming that doing so was "insensitive to the huge number of people who are Christians and fans".
Okay, let's deal with the second part of this first: so now scheduling baseball games on religious holidays is somehow insensitive because this year it happens to affect the Catholics? Funny that no one seemed to mind about this in years past, as Jewish fans and players are routinely made to choose between their sport and their faith during Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the many other minor holidays that fall during baseball season. With all due respect to Christianity, the increasingly-frequent cries of wounded indignation and accusations of "persecution" coming from the ranks of the Saved are getting a bit tiresome. The notion that Christians are somehow an endangered species here in America is ludicrous; that this idea has become a paranoid article of faith among believers is downright frightening.
Now back to the first point. It's silly enough that the Vatican feels that enforcing Bronze Age religious dietary laws should be its top priority, when there are so many other rotten food items on its proverbial plate nowadays, but in making an official pronouncement on the matter, the Boston Archidiocese has transformed the act of eating a hot dog on Opening Day from a venial sin to a mortal one. Why? The difference is one of intent. Here is what the Catechism has to say:
One commits venial sin when, in a less serious matter, he does not observe the standard prescribed by the moral law, or when he disobeys the moral law in a grave matter, but without full knowledge or without complete consent.
Normally if a Catholic eats meat on Good Friday, it's a sin, but a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things. "But it's Opening Day! I'll just have one. How bad can it be?"
Thanks to the clarification of Church officials on the morality of huffing a Fenway Frank on the day that Jesus purportedly died on the cross, however, going ahead and eating one anyway ratchets up the seriousness of the offense for a practicing Catholic:
Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God?s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart [cf. Mk 3:5-6; Lk 16:19-31] do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.
Venial sins happen all the time, and while regrettable, are not the sort of thing that puts your soul in jeopardy, whereas a mortal sin is as sinister as it sounds. That in this modern age a person who is essentially good at heart should have to choose between eating a hot dog and spending an eternity in Hell (if the mortal sin is committed and not subsequently atoned for) is as irrational as the idea that the Boston Red Sox is cursed by a bad trade made back in 1918. All that being said, however, I bet a person could make a killing this Opening Day by buying a truckful of lobsters wholesale in Maine and selling lobster rolls on Yawkey Way. Mmm. Lobster rolls.
(Of course you could always make the argument that ballpark hot dogs should hardly be considered "meat". Not everyone's God would approve of such a tenuous line of reasoning, but the Catholic God is at heart a deity that appreciates a good technicality here and there. So it might just work!)
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