MOTIVES OF ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS PERTAINING TO ABSTINENCE
According to the vagaries of the Manicheans, Montanists. and Encratites, flesh meat is intrinsically evil and merits the most rigorous kind of prohibition. Keenly sensible of this heterodoxy, the Church of Christ has not based her ordinances enjoining abstinence on any such unwarranted assumption. As the exponent of revelation, the Church knows and teaches that every creature in the visible universe is equally a work of the divine wisdom, power, and goodness, which defy all limitations.
This is why the first pages of the inspired text indicate that the Creator "saw all the things that he had made and they were very good" (Gen., i, 31). St. Paul is, if anything, still more explicit in condemning the folly of those sectaries, though they originated after his day.
"Now, the Spirit manifestly says that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, and doctrines of devils . . . forbidding to marry, to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by them that know the truth. For, every creature is good, and nothing to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving" (I Tim, iv, 1, 2, 3). Neither is the Church, in her legislation on abstinence, animated by any such gross superstition as influences the adherents of Brahmanism or Buddhism.
Moved by their theories regarding the transmigration of souls, they are logically induced to abstain from eating the flesh of animals, lest they should unconsciously consume their parents or friends. In consequence of those notions their diet is vegetarian. So rigorous is the law prescribing this diet that transgressions are visited with social and domestic ostracism. At the same time this ultra conservatism has not been espoused by all who share the doctrine regarding the transmigration of souls. Many of them have not hesitated to temper their belief in this creed with a mitigated form of abstinence from flesh meat.
BigMack