Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything by Michael P. Foley

Author:Michael P. Foley [Foley, Michael P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Catholic, History, REVELATION
ISBN: 9781403969675
Google: XstmMVLDzIIC
Amazon: 1403969671
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2005-11-29T07:00:00+00:00

MISCELLANEOUS

Priest. Combining the black humor of the Irish with their peculiar line of reasoning is the Irish word for a fish-killing hammer. A “priest” in Ireland refers not only to a man of the cloth but to a wooden mallet that is used in delivering the coup de grace to a foundering fish. The idea is that the mallet is brought in “to perform the last offices” of finishing off a feisty salmon or pike just as a priest is called in to administer last rites to a dying parishioner.18 (Last rites, which consist of anointing the forehead and hands of a sick or dying person to give them spiritual aid and strength, is the common name given to the sacrament of extreme unction, or anointing of the sick.) The priests made today range in style and function, some being a part of an aluminum, multi-tool gadget, others containing unhooking devices for easy catch-and-release. That the priest can now be used to get something “off the hook” may also be symbolically appropriate given the purpose of last rites in preparing one for the afterlife.

There is more than one piscatorial use of the word priest. In fly-fishing, a priest can refer to an artificial fly with white feathers and a black-and-white shoulder and cheek that resemble a Roman collar.19 Given the Gospel injunction to the apostles to be “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19), the name is certainly appropriate.

Catherine Wheel. St. Catherine of Alexandria was a virgin-martyr of the early Church and one of the fourteen Holy Helpers. According to tradition, St. Catherine was sentenced by Emperor Maximus II to die from slow torture on a spiked wheel especially made for that purpose. As she approached the wheel, however, lightning or the power of an angel miraculously struck it, killing the executioner and breaking the bonds of the young maiden. Furious, the Emperor had her beheaded, and, according to legend, angels carried her body to Mt. Sinai. The Catherine-wheel firework, a series of rockets that spin on a rotating disc fixed to a pole, can be seen as a combination of the angel’s lightning and the executioner’s wheel, and thus it is fittingly named. Incidentally, a Catherine wheel is also the synonym for a cartwheel and the name for a window in architecture.20

Artificial Fertilization. Dom Pinchon was a monk of Reome Abbey, near Montbard, France, who wished to provide sustenance for the populace during the numerous days of the liturgical calendar in which the faithful abstained from flesh meat. In 1420 he successfully fertilized trout eggs by taking the eggs from a female fish and the milt from a male and agitating the water into which they had been placed. Next, he placed the newly fertilized eggs in a wooden case with a wicker grill at each end and then put the case in gently running water. Though Pinchon’s experiment worked, it was ignored until a German naturalist reinvented the “hatching box” three and a half centuries later.

Cemetery. The Greek word koimetērion refers to a dormitory or “sleeping-place,” not a site at which the dead are interred.

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