Fasting and Abstinence in Lent

Today is Shrove Tuesday and with the imminent approach of Lent one thinks about the fasting discipline one will try to adhere to over the coming days and weeks.

Little is mandated these days in the wake of Papal pronouncements in the 1960s and continuing cultural social and changes. I think that we can also fall into confusion about the differences between the practice of fasting and abstinence and of creating our own rule or ‘tradition’ - of what we choose to ‘give up’. There is also the impact of  the various dispensations allowed on Solemnities and such things as not revealing what you have chosen to abstain from when accepting hospitality - and where the rule of charity is invoked. These are very tempting means of relieving the discipline.

Although I am now of an age that makes me exempt from such stipulations as there are I do try to maintain the discipline in respect of eating in Lent that I have aimed to observe for the last forty or so years. I will not set it out but it is I think, by contemporary standards, relatively strict. That said it is not necessarily in accord with historic practice and does reflect the exigencies of my own life.

By contrast I have Orthodox friends who observe the traditional fasting rules laid down and maintained by that part of the Church, ans speak well of it both as a spiritual discipline and as an expression of religious identity.

In respect of cultural norms, as an Oratorian priest was saying to me some years ago, we eat differently from our predecessors at the beginning of the twentieth century or even in the mid-century. Three cooked meals a day is a rarity I imagine, for convenience or simply because we do not need that calorific intake for physical labour. Many of us do have only one main meal and light collations in an average day - so reducing that becomes more difficult. Substitution of foodstuffs is a way of course. 

At the same time food is more plentiful than in those past times, more varied, more highly promoted by advertising, more tempting …. Fasting and abstinence, as opposed to the fads and fashions of dieting, is distinctly counter-cultural.

There is a classic account based on the historical evidence as it stood at the beginning of the twentieth century by Fr Herbert Thurston in the Catholic Encyclopaedia which can be read online at Lent

The history of Lent and its fasting rules is at out at The history of Lent and at A Short History of Lent and the Lenten Fast

A 1986 article from the New York Times has more about the development of Lenten observance at EVOLUTION OF THE LENTEN FAST and there is also an interesting article, citing textual sources, from The Conversation from 2016 at The surprising truth about fasting for Lent

Finally from SSPX there is Think Lent is Tough? Take a Look at Medieval Lenten Practices which has at its end a link to a useful and clear listing of the requirements for fasting and abstinence today in the Catholic Church and also the regulations as they were at the time of the promulgation of the 1962 Missal.

A Holy, happy, spiritually renewing and abstemious Lenten Fast to all my readers.