Pope Says Condoms Make AIDS Worse

[Alex]

I know that was just meant as a joke but I looked into that last year during lent and found the answer interesting.

Turns out it is myth that "fish fridays" was established by the pope to help the fishing industry. The original proscription of meat but allowing fish was simply and oddity of how Latin and English differ in their linguistic categorization. To a Latin speaker the word being used when saying "no meat" simply didn't include fish. Its kind of like I were to now make a rule that said "no beef on Tuesdays" but over the next 1000 years the language changed so that "beef" means any animal byproduct. Those people a millennia hence would wonder about the stupidity of being able to eat porkchops while saying we weren't eating beef.

The original practice of lenten fasting, however, over time did became so important to fisheries that when observance of lenten rules began to wane in the 1500s during the Reformation, it was civil government that stepped in and began enforcing lenten fasting specifically to prop up the fisheries.

So it wasn't the pope that did it first but rather those radical upstarts, the kings and queens of England shortly after they took on the mantle of heading the non-papist Church of England in the 1540s.