William Marshall Barker: My dad would have turned 100 today

My dad would have turned 100 today. Sadly, he left us almost 30 years ago in 1989. My cousin, Sharon Seager posted this picture of her mom and my dad two years ago.

William Marshall Barker, shown here at right, beside his youngest sister, Norma, my sweet aunt, was called “Bill” by everyone who knew him (aside perhaps from my mother, Pat, who called him “William” on rare occasions, which never failed to get his attention), and my Uncle Bob Barker in Indiana, who always called him “Will.”

My dad would have been 100 today if he was still alive. He died in 1989.

He was the finest man I’ve ever known. His word was his bond. I never knew him to tell an untruth, which is simply remarkable. He never equivocated. He was always straight forward, meaning what he said and saying what he meant.

He worked at General Motors of Canada in Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown, as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in the same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

There are other memories, of course, which I haven’t quite got around to writing about yet. Like how he used to take me tobogganing in the winter at the Oshawa Golf Course. Or before I had a driver’s licence, pick me up after the third period of Oshawa Generals games, where I sold pop and hotdogs when I was 14 and 15 at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium. That’s where the two of us would go together many winter Friday nights to cheer on our hometown Junior B Oshawa Crushmen, especially our neighbour, Scott Willson.

While my parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

Before that, and well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work, first at Paul and Helen Plishka’s Rose Bowl Fish and Chips at the corner of Bond and Prince streets, and later Pat and Mike Volpe‘s Pat & Mike Fish & Chips on Hortop Street, as well as from the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, where we also enjoyed their fish and chips. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965. Pope Paul VI’s proclamation of Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851, so dad was in no hurry to abandon eating fish on Fridays, especially Halibut. I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

My dad had a Grade 8 education and wasn’t much for reading. I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, other than maybe to consult the odd one for some factual information. His idea of leisure was to work with his hands at carpentry or upholstery, and he built me, the reader, several fine custom-size wooden bookcases, with a larger than normal shelf sometimes for oversized books.

My non-book reading father, however, made time every day to read the local daily newspaper, and from 1983, when I began working as a newspaper reporter, until his death in 1989, quite likely read every newspaper story I wrote during that six-year period, and, as I learned only after he died, would often point out my byline in the Peterborough Examiner to shopkeepers and acquaintances in Bridgenorth, a small community just outside of Peterborough on Chemong Lake, where he lived from 1980 to 1989.

That man, an ordinary man by the measures of the world, yet an extraordinary man of character by any measure, was my father.

Bill Barker. Born on July 13, 1919. Gone from this earthly plain to his true home, but never forgotten by those of us who knew him here. My dad.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger

 

 

 

 

Back in September 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism?  Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food? Who’d a thunk it?

Admittedly, I had written on occasion about food, especially fast food, prior to venturing forth with soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) but not that often.  Mainly if it involved a road trip from Southern Ontario to New England or vice-versa that wound up taking me to my favourite Red Barn, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, New York, or something got me thinking about high school back in Oshawa, Ontario and memories of Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza. That sort of thing.

Just taking a quick look here, it looks like I’ve become an insatiable lowbrow fast food blogger who dreams of being to blogging what Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is to TV. And that’s just looking for headlines that trumpet food, not so much others posts that mention food either in a secondary or passing fashion, overshadowed by a main non-food story. Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

In a similar vein, I’ve written a couple of times about the Burntwood Curling Club’s monthly, from November to April anyway, fundraising pickerel fish fry, now in its third season, to bring in some revenue at $20 a plate for the older crowd and $10 a plate for those 12 and under, with proceeds going towards what it cost to replace the club’s aging ice plant, a big ticket six-figure item for curling clubs. The last fish fry of the season is set for Monday, April 3 in the upstairs club lounge from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The fish fry involves club volunteers cooking about 50 pounds per fish fry of  fresh pickerel, also known as walleye, from the commercial fish packing station in Wabowden. Pickerel is the most valuable commercial fish catch in Manitoba, with an average value of  about $20 million per year, which is about 70 per cent of the landed value of all species, and comprise more than 40 per cent of commercial fish production in the province by weight. Am I writing primarily about curling or pickerel? I suppose some of both really, but I know a bit more about pickerel. Jeanette and I are looking forward this spring and summer to marking a decade fishing together off the dock for pickerel at Paint Lake Marina!

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

Maybe we all just love food, no?

In Winnipeg, we have V.J.’s Drive Inn at at Broadway and Main with its overstuffed double chili cheese dogs, greasy spoon certified cheeseburgers, golden fries and chocolate milkshakes, all for the more discerning among the Fort Garry Hotel clientele methinks.

And speaking of chili dogs: should you ever find yourself down in Durham, North Carolina, you can’t go wrong enjoying a meal at The Dog House, locally owned and in business in Durham since 1970, and serving up an assortment of Bull-Dogs, Boxer Dogs, Collie Dogs, Hound Dogs, Puppy Dogs, Ol’ Yallows and the like.

Living in North Carolina was where I developed tastes for chili dogs, deep-fried cornmeal-batter Hushpuppies, pork barbecue and fat back, cracklins and wash pot pork rinds, while prudently not losing said tastes by overdoing it with low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol testing at nearby Duke University Medical Center, although I visited the world-class medical facility for other ailments on occasion.

The Dog House says its chili is made from a family recipe with pure beef, and no beans, soy or other fillers; just a blend of secret spices and 47 years of experience.

As for the slaw, it is “not too sweet and not too spicy,” and always freshly made.

But closer to home, when you’re appetite is a bit larger than a sausage dog or one of its cousins,  my pick is Lovey’s BBQ in St. Boniface for hand trimmed briskets, pork shoulders and ribs. Yum!

Sometimes you get to combine your writing interests, say about Catholicism and food, as I did in “Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/)

I combined Catholicism and food on a few other occasions as well: In “‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/make-mine-halibut-please-fish-and-chips-catholic-on-friday/) I wrote that until Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays. Catholics had been eating fish on Friday under an edict in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851. With the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day.

No need to feel too sorry though for us fish eaters for having to forgo meat on Fridays from 851 to 1966. We made up for it on an annual basis on “Fat Tuesday,” which fell on Feb. 28 this year. Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but we made sure we ate  – and ate big and ate rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon – the last day of Shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes. Come to think of it, even though we can eat meat on Fridays now outside of Lent, we remain fond of Shrove Tuesday.

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican or Episcopalian brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/).

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

And you can be pretty sure that while I might not post about it on soundingsjohnbarker, I’m quite likely to put in a bit of a plug on my Facebook page at least for annual Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day come Wednesday, April 12. I’ve done so for the last two years.

Melting cheese on top of bread is a culinary concept that has been around since the time of Ancient Rome,  but modern grilled cheese sandwiches, as we know them, didn’t become popular until the 1920s. Due to the ready availability of cheese and sliced bread for the average consumer by the early 20th century, they became an American staple, but a connoisseur’s love for grilled cheese sandwiches also spread around the world.

Thanksgiving, of course, gives me a change to give holiday nod to turkey, such as in this piece, “Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/mouthwatering-american-thanksgiving-recipes-correction-in-the-new-york-times-and-other-pardonable-acts/):

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And I wouldn’t be much of a former New Englander, if after enjoying a “blue” rare steak, I didn’t enjoy  scarfing down some super premium ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream, named after Steve Herrell, as it was in the early 1980s at the original location on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, or Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., which got its its start  in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont. In 1980, they were  showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.\

Burgers have been the continuing jackpot for my food entries, however, which may not surprise many. What might surprise you, however, is the relatively big numbers (outpacing anything I’ve written on Thompson city council, can you believe it?) has been for two posts on two defunct American burger chains, both of which also operated for a time in parts of Canada, particularly in the 1970s.

Apparently former employees of the two burger chains and hungry aficionados who remember them fondly, salivate, or so it seems, to a helping of words on the Red Barn and Burger Chef, gone, but never forgotten.

Both stories get read pretty much daily somewhere in the world and “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) was published here back on Sept. 13, 2014, while “Burger Chef: The story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/burger-chef-the-story-of-the-greatest-might-have-been-in-the-history-of-the-fast-food-business/) appeared originally on March 13, 2016.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catholic Church: Change comes when it comes

I’ve always heard something haunting but yet beautiful whenever I hear Karin Bergquist’s rendition of Over the Rhine’s “Changes Come” from the 2008 Cornerstone Music Festival in Bushnell, Illinois. She wrote the song, with her husband, Linford Detweiler, and the Cincinnati alt-country band recorded it five years earlier in Nashville on Oct. 19, 2003. The lyrics go partially like this:

“Changes come, Turn my world around, Changes come, Turn my world around. Jesus come Turn my world around Jesus come Bring the whole thing down Bring it down.”

Change comes when it comes.

For some reason, this song has been running through my head, as I reflect a bit on Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) the 624 words in English language translation declaration on the relation of the Roman Catholic Church to non-Christian religions that Catholic bishops adopted 50 years ago today, near the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, which ended Dec. 7, 1965.

Perhaps it also resonates after the three-week Synod on the Family from Oct. 4 to Oct. 25, which just ended. One of the great issues of the synod, which advised Pope Francis, was whether civilly divorced Catholics who remarry, and haven’t received an annulment within the Catholic Church, might be admitted pastorally, if not doctrinally, to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Church teaches that the sacrament of marriage is “indissoluble” and that remarried Catholics who have not received annulments are committing adultery and living in sin. They may receive communion if they abstain from sex.

Pastoral versus doctrinal. Discipline versus doctrinal. Orthodox versus heterodox. These are always the stuff of great Catholic debates among ourselves. Doctrine encompasses the overall teachings of the Church. For example, Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”) now Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical teaching on birth control. Pastoral practice is how the Church applies doctrines in real life.

Doctrine is important, but not every doctrine is dogma, which refers to core Catholic beliefs, such as the Resurrection, which is foundational. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the kingpin upon which all of Christianity and Catholicism stands or crumbles. If Christ has not been raised from the dead then Christian faith is futile. No other prophet of any religion has come back from the dead. In the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth in (15: 14-19), he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day.

The Old Testament Mosaic law allowed for divorce and remarriage among the Israelites. The Israelites saw divorce as a way to dissolve a marriage and enable the spouses to remarry others so the Pharisees questioned Jesus when he taught on the permanence of marriage by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?

As we see in the Synoptic Gospels of Saints Matthew (19: 3-8); Mark (10: 2-9); and Luke (16: 18), Jesus answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

“They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ He said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.’”

Catholics therefore believe Jesus re-established the permanence of marriage among his followers and raised Christian marriage to the level of a sacrament, teaching that sacramental marriages cannot be dissolved through divorce, which was part of Jesus’ perfection of the Old Law, of which he said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them.”

While there is much debate about what the synod’s advice on the subject to the Holy Father means, the final document offers divorced and remarried Catholics the possibility of returning to fuller participation in the Church, on a case-by-case basis, after receiving spiritual counselling from priests in what is called the “internal forum.” It says nothing about whether divorced and remarried Catholics may or may not receive communion. But it does say divorced and civilly remarried Catholics “must not feel excommunicated.” The document said that opening to Catholics in less-than-perfect situations was not a “weakening of the faith,” or of the “testimony on the indissolubility of marriage”; instead, it was a sign of the church’s charity.

In his closing address last Saturday night, Pope Francis said the Synod on the Family was “about trying to view and interpret realities, today’s realities, through God’s eyes, so as to kindle the flame of faith and enlighten people’s hearts in times marked by discouragement, social, economic and moral crisis, and growing pessimism.

“It was about bearing witness to everyone that, for the Church, the Gospel continues to be a vital source of eternal newness, against all those who would ‘indoctrinate’ it in dead stones to be hurled at others.

“It was also about laying bare the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families.

“It was about making clear that the Church is a Church of the poor in spirit and of sinners seeking forgiveness, not simply of the righteous and the holy, but rather of those who are righteous and holy precisely when they feel themselves poor sinners.”

Change comes when it comes.

Peter, the first pope, and the apostles that Jesus chose were, for the most part, married men, although the Council of Elvira decreed in 306 a priest who sleeps with his wife the night before mass would lose his job.

It wasn’t until Pope St. Gregory VII in 1074 that celibacy was imposed uniformly across the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. And It wasn’t until 1215 that the Fourth Lateran Council used the word transubstantiated, when speaking of the change that takes place in the Eucharist, while it would be a few years later at the Second Council of Lyons, convened in 1274, that the teaching of Pope Innocent IV was used to develop a formal declaration on purgatory.

In 1964 and 1965, a year after the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was enacted, the new mass (Novus Ordo) in the vernacular rather than Latin was introduced, the priest turned around and started celebrating mass facing the people, who could stand to receive the Eucharist, as the altar rails were soon to be removed.

Now Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a prescription which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851 (with the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day).

Following the lead of the Vatican and national episcopal conferences in France, Canada and Mexico earlier in 1966, the U.S. norms (which are similar but not identical to those in Canada) were approved in “On Penance and Abstinence,” a pastoral statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on Nov. 18, 1966. The first day Friday American Catholics could eat meat on Friday under the new regulations was the first Friday of Advent on Dec. 2, 1966.

Change comes when it comes. Or not. But history will not move backwards no matter how much I personally would like to hear monks chanting vespers in Latin at every mass.

Canadian Catholics, both heterosexual and homosexual, will continue to get married and divorced, either inside or outside the Church.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada for more than 10 years since the federal Civil Marriage Act received royal assent on July 20, 2005. Carey Nieuwhof, a Protestant evangelical and lead pastor of Connexus Church in Barrie, Ontario, in a blog post last June 29 headlined, “Some Advice on Same-Sex Marriage for US Church Leaders From a Canadian” wrote, “Most of us reading this post have been born into a unique season in history in which our culture is moving from a Christian culture to a post-Christian culture before our eyes.

“Whatever you think about history, theology or exactly when this shift happened, it’s clear for all of us that the world into which we were born no longer exists.

“Viewpoints that were widely embraced by culture just decades ago are no longer embraced. For some this seems like progress. For others, it seems like we’re losing something. Regardless, things have changed fundamentally.”

Nieuwhof went onto write: “If you believe gay sex is sinful, it’s really no morally different than straight sex outside of marriage.

“Be honest, pretty much every unmarried person in your church is having sex (yes, even the Christians).

“I know you want to believe that’s not true (trust me, I want to believe that’s not true), but why don’t you ask around? You’ll discover that only a few really surrender their sexuality.

“Not to mention the married folks that struggle with porn, lust and a long list of other dysfunctions.

“If you believe gay marriage is not God’s design, you’re really dealing with the same issue you’ve been dealing with all along – sex outside of its God-given context.

“You don’t need to treat it any differently.

“By the way, if you don’t deal with straight sex outside of marriage, don’t start being inconsistent and speak out against gay sex.

“And you may want to start dealing with gluttony and gossip and greed while you’re at it.”

Meanwhile, abortion has been legal in Canada for almost three decades now, since Jan. 28, 1988 when the Supreme Court of Canada, in Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Dr. Leslie Frank Smoling and Dr. Robert Scott v. Her Majesty The Queen, struck down Section 251 of the Criminal Code of Canada, the 1969 therapeutic abortion criminal law, as unconstitutional, without force and effect, in a 5-2 decision.

The law was found to violate Section 7 the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it infringed upon a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security of person,” the court held. Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott had been charged in 1983 with performing illegal abortions at their Toronto clinic. A Supreme Court of Ontario jury had acquitted them on Nov. 8, 1984, but the Crown appealed and on Oct. 1, 1985 the Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside the acquittals and ordered a new trial. Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott then successfully appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to have the Court of Appeal for Ontario decision overturned and their acquittals restored. The following year, on Nov. 3, 1989, then Progressive Conservative Minister of Justice Kim Campbell introduced in the House of Commons Bill C-43, which, had it been approved by both the House of Commons and the Senate, would have made it a criminal offence to induce an abortion on a woman unless it was done by, or under the direction of, a physician who considered that the woman’s life or health was otherwise likely to be threatened. “Health” was defined as including physical, mental and psychological health.

On May 29, 1990, the House of Commons passed Bill C-43 on third reading by a vote of 140-131. Although cabinet ministers were required to support the bill, it was a free vote for all other MPs. On Jan. 31, 1991, the Senate voted on Bill C-43. As with the House of Commons, it was a free vote except for members of the cabinet, in this case Senator Lowell Murray, leader of the government in the Senate. Of 86 senators present, 43 voted for the bill and 43 voted against it. Under the Rules of the Senate, the 43-43 tie vote is deemed to be a “no” vote, therefore Bill C-43 was defeated.

Pope Francis, the pope of mercy, understands how the world and families really are in the real world, rather than how we might simply wish them to be.

Divorce is reality.

Same-sex marriage is reality.

Abortion is reality.

So what are we going to do? As Catholics.

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‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday

If you grew up Catholic in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, you probably have memories of having a favourite fish-and-chips shop, serving halibut, haddock or cod, along with French Fries, maybe some coleslaw and a wedge of lemon.

Now true enough, Pope Paul VI had proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a prescription which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851 (with the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day).

The fact such substitutional acts of charity or piety have never really been spelled out in any great detail or emphasis by most bishops in Canada or the United States has meant that the Friday-abstinence story has been cast not surprisingly by reporters since 1966 primarily in terms of “no more going to hell for eating a hamburger on Friday,” as Daria Sockey wrote in “What Ever Happened to Meatless Fridays?” in the National Catholic Register on June 1, 2003, “rather than a call to continue the tradition of Friday penance, embraced out of love, and with leeway for more variety.”

Following the lead of the Vatican and national episcopal conferences in France, Canada and Mexico earlier in 1966, the U.S. norms (which are similar but not identical to those in Canada) were approved in “On Penance and Abstinence,” a pastoral statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on Nov. 18, 1966. The first day Friday American Catholics could eat meat on Friday under the new regulations was the first Friday of Advent on Dec. 2, 1966.

I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966. As far as I can remember, it didn’t really change our family practice and the fact that for years, well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work.

My earliest memories of that were fish and chips from the Rose Bowl that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets for many years, memories that include malt vinegar and newspaper wrapping.

Sometime in the early 1970s, an H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise came to Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, and we enjoyed their fish and chips also for a time. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965.

At its peak in the 1970s, there were close to 60 H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips restaurants in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), including Oshawa. Today, the company is headquartered in Monterey Park, California, and has about 18 remaining locations operating in Chino, Corona, Covina, Downey, Long Beach, Gardena, Garden Grove, Hollywood, North Hollywood, Orange, Rancho Palos Verdes, Reseda, San Fernando, Temple City, Upland, West Los Angeles, and Westminster in Southern California.

When I went off to Trent University in 1976, my love of fish and chips followed me to Baker’s Seafood (now gone) at 262 Hunter St. W. on the edge of downtown and an old residential neighbourhood fronting Hunter at the corner of Bethune Street. A sign midway between the first and second storeys of the Hunter Street side of the building had a white background and red letters proclaiming Baker’s Seafood. On the  side facing west on Bethune Street was a similar sign reading “Fish and Chips” and on the wall next to the front door was a sign with a cartoon-like blue fish in the middle holding a knife and fork and a lemon that said: “Est. 1954. Seafood. Chicken. TAKE OUT. Shrimp – Scallops. Salads – Veggies. HALIBUT Fish and Chips. Peterborough’s Tradition.”

Another great Peterborough fish and chip is Jeff Purvey’s Fish & Chips, which has two locations, although I am more familiar with the older Rubidge Street restaurant.

The Purvey tradition started in 1919 when Henry Purvey went into business on Dundas Street in Toronto. Henry’s son, Jeff Purvey, was born there. After serving for six years in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945, Jeff joined his father and together they expanded into three Toronto locations on Yonge Street, Danforth Avenue and McRae Avenue in Leaside.

In 1956 Jeff moved to Peterborough and opened the Rubidge Street location with just 12 seats originally.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Pilot House in downtown Kingston, Ontario, established in 1981 at the corner of King and Johnson streets, where I spent some cheerful Friday evenings during my graduate school days at Queen’s University from 1993 to 1995, and the pints were as famous as the fish and chips.

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