Don't eat that Melvin—a Lenten observation

One of the pretenses of conservative Catholic websites is that here, at least, you will get nothing but orthodox Catholicism. It's well ... I allude above to one of my father's favourite expressions, "Don't eat that Melvin it's horse****!"

Case in point a piece up at First Things by Francesca Aran Murphy called "The First Rung of the Ascent".  Well, really, the title is all you need to know isn't it? If you saw this stuff on a poster downtown advertising a lecture by Swami Gimmeurcash you'd spot it right away as stuff Melvin shouldn't be eating. But here it is on the website of a conservative Catholic publication. How'd that happen?

Especially with gems like this (emphasis added):

Vegetarian and vegan practices are not something new, imported from eastern religions. They have sustained the Church since the first centuries. They belong to us for some of the same reasons they were practised by ancient Pythagoreans and modern Buddhists: natural, human religious wisdom acknowledges that the body must be tamed before the soul. 

 In a word No! You don't have a body, you are your body. Disciplining the body and disciplining the soul are the same thing. it is to discipline yourself. The only self you have.

What is happening here is gnosticism pure and simple. How long into this article do we have to read before learning that life is ascent wherein we leave things of the body behind and ascend to a spiritual plane? Exactly three paragraphs:

However, Christian spiritual writers depict the ascent to God with the metaphor of a ladder. Experienced spiritual travellers like St. Bonaventure describe the ‘soul’s journey to God’ as ascending through sensible things, taking pleasure in their beauty, while being purged of undue attachment to them, up to the mind, and its graced experience of God, and on up into God himself. They knew all about the effects of giving up meat. Abstaining from the ‘mind’ habits is more lightly achieved by a vegetarian. Giving up favourite things paves the way for giving up favourite ideas.

Leaving aside the obvious point that there this no evidence whatsoever to indicate that vegetarians are any better or any worse than anyone else at moral discipline, I can't help but think that there is no mention in the Gospel of the Last Supper being vegetarian. I can't help but notice that the author is of Irish descent. That could be coincidence but it sometimes seems to me that more pagan notions have been smuggled into Catholicism by the Irish than any other group.