Can Catholics eat meat on the Feast of the Assumption?

For the first time since 2020, the Feast of the Assumption will fall on a Friday.

A central tenet of the Catholic faith, the feast celebrates the belief that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the end of her earthly life, was taken body and soul into heaven.

A popular belief among early Christians and found in apocryphal texts such as the Book of Mary’s Repose and the Liber de transitu Virginis Mariae, the Assumption appears as a feast in the Eastern Church as the “Dormition of the Virgin” in the 6th century. By the 7th century, during the pontificate of Sergius I, processions were held for the feast, with the date and observance spreading across the Western Church. Pope Leo IV gave the feast a vigil and an octave to solemnise it above all others, Pope Nicholas I placed it on a par with Christmas and Easter, and by the 9th century “Dormition” had been replaced by “Assumption” in some liturgical calendars. In the 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV declared it “a probable opinion, which to deny were impious and blasphemous.”