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given by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales in 1967 for abolishing these dietary regulations now look remarkably outdated and feeble, as is their suggestion that individual Catholics should each find some pious work or good act to perform as a penance every Friday.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 ...