Lent: Are we not having fun yet?

Who says Catholics are rigid in their rituals and traditions? They can be practically antinomian if the conditions are right.

While other Catholics are fasting from meat during Lent, those in southeast Michigan can feast on muskrat. They can eat as much as they want of the foot-long, water-dwelling rodent. Restaurants in the area even have muskrat on the menu.

The practice dates from the early 1800s, when a missionary allowed French-Canadian trappers and the families muskrat as a substitute for fish in Fridays and during Lent. A church ruling in 1956 confirmed that although muskrat is a warm-blooded mammal and technically flesh, the custom had been so long held along Michigan's rivers and marshes that it was "immemorial custom," thus allowed under church law.

Of course, according to the late Bishop Kenneth Povish, "anyone who could eat muskrat was doing penance worthy of the greatest of the saints."

You can, uh, probably eat as many rusty nails as you want, too.


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