I think part of the confusion also stems from the fact that the church have waxed and wained over the years on the subject of carnal abstention. Some of the times when the church has required more abstention have occurred when there were also more temporal reasons to encourage people to eat more fish in place of meat.

On the other hand, I have very little trust in EWTN as a resource. They take a very hard-line position on the faith, and have a strong conservative bias in all that they do.