A Catholic Worker’s Perspective on Fasting

Not eating meat on Fridays used to be synonymous with being Catholic.
Restoring abstinence would not only revive tradition but signal solidarity
with the poorFasting – Our Lost Rite
The Tablet 1/31/2004 Eamon Duffy

THE RENEWAL inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council sprang in large part
from the liberating discovery of the depth and variety of Catholic tradition.
Yet paradoxically the post-conciliar reforms were sometimes implemented in a
spirit of philistine dismissal of “tradition” as nothing more than the dead
hand of the past. In shedding a past perceived as sterile and oppressive, much
that was profound and life-giving was also lost. One of the saddest casualties
of that process was the effective abolition of the Church’s ancient
observances of fasting and abstinence.

The ritual observance of dietary rules – fasting and abstinence from meat in
Lent, and abstinence from meat and meat products every Friday, as well as the
eucharistic fast from midnight before the reception of Communion – were as
much defining marks of Catholicism before the council as abstention from pork
is a defining characteristic of Judaism. The Friday abstinence in particular
was a focus of Catholic identity which transcended class and educational
barriers, uniting “good” and “bad” Catholics in a single eloquent observance.
Here was a universally recognised expression of Catholicism which was nothing
to do with priests or authority.

But instead of seeing this as one of its greatest strengths, it was often used
as an argument against Friday abstinence. Bad or badly instructed Catholics –
who it was thought drank their wages or beat their wives, yet who were
nevertheless punctilious in eating fish on Fridays – were adhering to the mere
externals, it was claimed, while ignoring the essence of “real” Christianity.
What was needed was a more spiritual sort of religion that offered no such
crutches to lame practice.

So fasting is now confined to a derisory two days of the year, and compulsory
Friday abstinence has been replaced by a genteel and totally individualistic
injunction to do some penitential act on a Friday – an injunction,
incidentally, that most Catholics know nothing about. What had been a
corporate mark of identity has been marginalised into an individualistic
option.

Why did it happen? Certainly not because fasting was in some sense peripheral
to Catholicism, an inessential and minor aspect of the tradition that needed
tidying away. Fasting was an important element in Israelite religion, and
Christ’s own defence of his disciples’ failure to fast during his lifetime
specifically envisaged that they would fast after his death. From at least the
end of the first century Christians have observed Fridays, and later the 40
days of Lent, as fast days in commemoration of the Passion. At the heart of
Catholicism for a millennium and a half lay a dialectical dividing of time, a
rhythmic movement between the poles of fast and feast, Lent and Easter,
renunciation and affirmation.

Catholics shared that rhythm with most of the world’s great religious
traditions, a fact which ought to have suggested that there was something
essential about fasting not only for our specific identities as Catholic
Christians, but as religious beings – as human beings. But since 1967 what was
once a truly corporate observance, reminding us of the Passion of Christ, of
our own spiritual poverty and, even more concretely, of the material poverty
of most of the human race, reminding us what it was like to be hungry, has
become another individual consumer choice, like going on a diet. Though we pay
liturgical lip-service to the old dialectic, and still nominally observe Lent,
in practice all our time now has become “ordinary time”, and there is nothing
in this respect to distinguish Catholics from anyone else.

Yet religious communities depend on the differentiation provided by such
shared observances to sustain their identities. The long and noble pilgrimage
of Israel through a multitude of cultures and times, without a temple, without
a priesthood, has been possible, at least in part, because of the unifying and
sustaining effect of their dietary laws. The Jews knew who they were because
of what they did and did not eat. Christian fasting and abstinence did not, of
course, spring from a ritual distinction between clean and unclean meats, but
it was just as deeply embedded in theological conviction as the older
dispensation. Its abandonment was not therefore a simple change in devotional
habit, but the signal of a radical discontinuity in the tradition and a
decisive shift in theological perception.

The theological and practical shift represented by this abandonment of an
ancient part of the tradition was not merely a matter of theological emphasis,
and more, too, than a question of whether ascetical exercises like fasting are
good for the character. What was also at stake was the Church’s prophetic
integrity: its claim to solidarity with the poor. Considered from this
perspective, compulsory fasting and abstinence, practised regularly, routinely
and in common, was a recognition by the Church that identification with the
poor and hungry, with those who know themselves to be needy before God because
they were needy among men, is not an option for Catholics, but a necessary and
definitive sign of their redemption, as essential in its way as attendance at
Mass. The Church has always linked personal asceticism and the search for
holiness with this demand for mercy and justice to the poor; the Lenten
trilogy of prayer, fasting and almsgiving is both fundamental and structural.
By making fasting and abstinence optional, the Church forfeited one of its
most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a
private devotional gesture, the action of the specially pious, and the
prophetic witness of the whole community – the matter-of-fact witness,
repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy.

What was striking about the instructions issued by the English bishops in
abolishing compulsory Friday abstinence in 1967 was the total absence of any
attempt to explain the power and meaning of the traditional observances. The
American bishops did much better: while also making the matter optional, they
offered a powerful and sympathetic discussion of the religious reasons for the
old observance, and urged American Catholics to continue the practice as a
gesture of solidarity with, and gratitude for, the Passion of Christ, as an
act of fidelity to the Christian past, and to help “preserve a saving and
necessary difference from the spirit of the world”. In total contrast, the
English bishops recited the problems and inconveniences surrounding
abstinence. Many people, they pointed out, have their main meal at work, in a
canteen; social events are often arranged for Fridays; abstinence therefore
made Catholics an awkward squad. As the bishops wrote: “While an alternative
dish is often available, it is questioned whether it is advisable in our mixed
society for a Catholic to appear singular in this matter. Non-Catholics know
and accept that we do not eat meat on Fridays, but often they do not
understand why we do not, and in consequence regard us as odd.”

This misses the point. The whole rationale of symbolic gestures requires that
they disrupt and disturb the secular order. Their power to witness – not only
to others but to ourselves – comes precisely from their awkwardness. The
abolition of such observances strikes at the heart of tradition, the
distinctive language of belief. Catholic value cannot be sustained without its
proper symbolic expression. Spiritual needs are expressed in physical needs.
People can know the fundamental neediness which is the foundation of faith
only if they feel our involvement with those who fast because they have
nothing to eat.

But none of those arguments prevailed, or were even explored. The bishops saw
in the plight of the hungry not a reason for communal fasting as a gesture of
solidarity and a call to justice and charity, but as a demonstration of the
emptiness of any such gesture. Many Catholics, they wrote, “have begun to ask
themselves if going without meat on Friday is penance enough. Some find it no
penance at all. Meanwhile in Asia, Africa and South America many Catholics
have to go without meat not only on Fridays but every day. Millions are
starving or at least underfed. The bishops have therefore decided that the
best way of carrying out our Lord’s command to do penance is for each of us to
choose our own way of self-denial every Friday”.

The abandonment of fasting and abstinence was symptomatic of a more widespread
levelling down and disappearance of much that was distinctive in the symbolic
lives of Catholics. That drift continues. Holy days of obligation are
celebrated on the nearest Sunday so as to avoid inconvenience or the
interruption of secular patterns of living. Sunday Mass can be heard on a
Saturday to make way for a day’s work or cleaning the car or a morning in bed
with the papers, like our pagan neighbours. From time to time there is talk of
a fixed date for Easter and Whitsun – all part of the minimising of symbolic
distinctiveness, in the service of secular convenience, and a slow form of
ritual suicide for any religious tradition.

For this aspect of tradition – the dimension of symbolic distinctiveness
preserved in the ancient patterns of the worship and ritual life of the Church
– is at least as central to Catholic identity as many of the doctrinal
positions worried about by those who conceive of tradition primarily as a body
of authoritative teaching. Indeed, the massive desensitisation to the meaning
and value of symbolic gesture and symbolic differentiation in the two
generations since the council would not have been possible had Catholics not
long since parked responsibility for all that with an abstraction called the
Magisterium, thereby absolving themselves from understanding and teaching the
value of their symbols and traditional practices. How else could the Catholic
people have allowed their pastors to assail and abolish these ancient
continuities in the name of convenience and the avoidance of oddity?

The authoritarian narrowing of the tradition to, in essence, a body of
doctrines to be believed and orders from above to be obeyed, was a decisive
factor in desensitising ordinary Catholics, clerical as well as lay, to the
beauty and independent value of their inherited observances – matters over
which no authority has or ought to have absolute control. The ordinary members
of the Orthodox and Byzantine Rite Catholic Churches have a far less
authoritarian mentality than Catholics, a far more widespread and lively sense
of the richness of their traditions of prayer and practice, and a far more
secure sense of ownership by the people of the symbols which provide
continuity with the Christian past and guidance to its future.

The realisation that perhaps too much was carelessly abandoned in the years
after the council is now widespread – it is even something of an official view
in the later years of the present pontificate – and has helped fuel sometimes
scary projects for a restoration of “real Catholicism”, programmes in which
the vigorous exercise of authority from above loom very large. Such programmes
are at least as bad as the ills they seek to remedy. There are no quick fixes:
tradition cannot be rebuilt to a neat programme and by orders from Rome. Our
shared past can only be excavated by shared endeavour, by a painful and
constant process of re-education and rediscovery; in that process, we start
from where we are, not where we wish we had stayed. The Church cannot afford
the pleasures and false securities of reaction. But that is not to say that in
our march into the needs and opportunities of the twenty-first century we
should not try once more to summon up some of the deeper resources of our own
tradition, and try to rediscover within it once more some of the supports
which helped our fathers and mothers to live the Gospel. We could do worse
than rededicate ourselves to the observance of fasting and abstinence.

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity in the University of
Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College. This is an abridged extract from
his Cardinal Hume Memorial Lecture given at Newcastle, 27 November 2003.
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