Ever look up major events in the year of your birth? In 1966, my dear mother brought me into the world, the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, Star Trek debuted, and—you won’t find this on Wikipedia—the Catholic bishops in America relaxed the regulations concerning fast and abstinence.
“Relaxed” understates things. Most Catholics know that once upon a time, Catholics faithfully ate fish on Fridays—every Friday. There were exceptions: if a holy day of obligation fell on a Friday not in Lent, meat was a go, and there is a longstanding rumor, at least, that Pope Pius XII dispensed American Catholics from abstinence on another Friday: the Friday after Thanksgiving. (I’m pretty sure it’s because he thought eating turkey—and leftover turkey at that—was penance enough.)
What many—doubtless most—Catholics do not know is that until 1966, the calendar had many more obligatory fast days than it does now: all weekdays in Lent, including Saturdays; all Ember days; and the Vigils of the Assumption, Christmas, Pentecost, and All Saints. If you want to break out your traditional missal and do the math, feel free to send me what you come up with, but by my quick reckoning, we’ve gone from fifty-three days on which Catholics were obliged to fast to two.
St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, in his sermon “Fasting a Source of Trial,” points out that Our Lord, requiring neither to subdue the flesh nor to perform penance, nonetheless made a forty-day fast. Why? To give us an example of how to prepare for trial. What’s more, Our Lord insisted in Mark’s Gospel (9:25-29) that certain demons are driven out only by fasting.
Who’s with me this Lent revisiting the merits of this ancient penitential practice? Well, oddly enough, a growing percentage of the world. The health benefits, for example—I can testify—of intermittent fasting are manifest. I have a close friend who fasts from Thursday evening until Saturday midday (forty hours), and he insists it brings him unusual focus and clarity of mind. This welcome effect, however, is not his motive. His motive is love of Jesus Christ.
Newman, in fact, warns against making the end of fasting the reason for doing it, pointing out that fasting can make one man humble and another irritable. He offers another perspective on fasting—that it, as it did for Our Lord, opens “the way to temptation.” Sounds like a reason not to fast.
Not so fast! (Sorry!) Here’s Newman:
And, perhaps, this is the truest view of such exercises, that in some wonderful unknown way they open the next world for good and evil upon us and are an introduction to somewhat of an extraordinary conflict with the powers of evil. Stories are afloat . . . of hermits in deserts being assaulted by Satan in strange ways, yet resisting the evil one, and chasing him away, after our Lord’s pattern, and in his strength; and, I suppose, if we knew the secret history of men’s minds in any age, we should find a remarkable union in the case of those who by God’s grace have made advances in holy things . . . union on the one hand of temptations offered to the mind, and on the other, of the mind’s not being affected by them, not consenting to them, even in momentary acts of the will, but simply hating them, and receiving no harm from them.
Wow! That is dramatic. But then so is salvation! Newman holds that abhorrent and terrifying thoughts to which we might be exposed while fasting are mysterious occasions for us to contemplate, with “vividness and distinctness, the condescension of the Son of God.” In other words, seeing the severity of the evils Christ overcame helps us not only cultivate a hatred of sin, but also better appreciate the weight of Christ’s infinite sacrifice.
This Lent, I’ll offer my own fasts for the intentions of anyone reading this column who takes on more than just two days.