From the editor’s desk

Ways to deepen faith this lent

Friday abstinence from meat and Lenten fasting were obligatory for Catholics until about 40 years ago, with one or two exceptions such as Good Friday. As we begin Lent this week, there is now a serious case for reviving these customs, for they were not only distinctive marks of a Catholic identity but valuable aids along the spiritual path to holiness ? and a reminder that the path is open to everybody. In a multicultural society, community relations are not fostered by the suppression of difference but by the celebration of it in a spirit of goodwill. ?Fish on Friday? is not yet too much of a forgotten folk memory to be beyond revival, and the value of such symbols of shared identity needs rediscovering.

Catholicism received an injection of devotional inspiration from Islam in the Middle Ages, for which it has every reason to be eternally grateful, and it is to Muslims that Catholics can turn now for inspiration in the value of fasting. Ramadan, the month-long fast during the hours of daylight that is simultaneously observed each year by the world?s one billion Muslims, has a public and a private aspect. Privately it teaches that dependence on Allah is the most important fact of human existence; publicly it says: ?See, we are God?s People, we observe his laws.? Ramadan and its fasting rituals may well play a vital role in the transmission of Islam from one generation to the next, a role that the Catholic community should be eager to learn about at a time of its own declining numbers and growing generation gap.

The reasons given by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales in 1967 for abolishing these dietary regulations now look remarkably outdated and feeble, as is their suggestion that individual Catholics should each find some pious work or good act to perform as a penance every Friday. This idea had no communal aspect, no reinforcement from the fact that everybody else in the Catholic community was known to be doing it too, and it faded quickly out of sight. Fasting and abstinence had come to be associated with a particularly rigid and scrupulous attitude to church law ? eating meat on a Friday was a ?mortal sin? to be confessed before one could receive Communion, and so on. That was never the point of it, and while breaking that sense of over-scrupulosity was doubtless a good pastoral move at that time, the climate now is entirely different.

Any return to a more general practice of fasting and abstinence would have to be seen as an exercise in valuable self-discipline rather than as the empty observance of regulations, but that is something that modern culture, with its interest in ?diets and detox?, could readily appreciate. If we are what we eat, then not eating for a set period makes a powerful point. Why should our bodies not worship as well as our minds and hearts? But to leave the choice entirely up to individuals would not be sufficient. It has to become normative again, a regular and routine feature of Catholic life. In 1967 it was abolished from the top down. Why not let it return to Catholic life from the bottom up, by the spontaneous initiative of local parishes seeking ways to deepen their faith?