In the current law, Catholics fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstain from meat on those days and on all the Fridays of Lent. Within living memory the Lenten fast bound every weekday of Lent, and before that it was stricter still.
“Abstinence from eating meat is to be observed on all Fridays of Lent, and on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday both abstinence and fasting are to be observed.”
Whom it binds
- ·Abstinence binds all who have completed their fourteenth year.
- ·Fasting binds those from the completion of their eighteenth year until the beginning of their sixtieth.
- ·Fasting, in current practice, means one full meal and up to two smaller ones that together do not equal a full meal; liquids do not break it.
- ·The sick, the pregnant and nursing, the frail, and those doing heavy labour are excused; a pastor or confessor can dispense or commute the obligation.
How the rule has moved
Watching a law change is the fastest way to learn it was never dogma.
- 4th c.
A forty-day Lenten fast is attested across the Church; in many places it means one meal a day taken after sunset, with meat, eggs and dairy forbidden throughout.
Attested by St. Athanasius, by the Council of Nicaea's canon 5 (which mentions Lent in passing), and by Egeria's pilgrimage account - 1917
The Code binds fasting on every day of Lent except Sundays, with abstinence on Fridays, Ash Wednesday, and certain other days.
1917 Code of Canon Law, canons 1250–1254 - 1966
Paul VI reduces the obligatory fast days of the entire year to two — Ash Wednesday and Good Friday — while urging that the spirit of penance be kept far more widely than the law requires.
Apostolic constitution Paenitemini, 17 February 1966 · read it - 1983
The current Code codifies the reduced law and sets the present ages.
1983 Code of Canon Law, canons 1249–1253 · read it
What was given up
It is worth knowing how much lighter the modern fast is, because the knowledge is bracing rather than guilt-inducing. In the patristic era Lent commonly meant one meal a day, taken in the evening, without meat, eggs, or dairy for forty days — which is where Shrove Tuesday pancakes come from: households used up the eggs and butter that would otherwise spoil. Fish was permitted, and the medieval English word for meat, flesh-meat, is why fish never counted.
The mitigations came slowly and for real reasons — the hour of the single meal crept from evening to noon, then a small evening collation was allowed, then dairy. By 1917 the law was already far lighter than the fourth century's, and 1966 lightened it again.
Why the Church reduced it, in her own words
Paenitemini does not present the reduction as a concession to softness. Its argument is that the Church wanted penance to be genuine rather than merely observed — and that the obligation had shrunk in most people's minds to a dietary technicality, while the interior conversion it was meant to serve had gone missing.
Paul VI's expectation was that Catholics would keep more than the minimum: 'the faithful are earnestly invited' to fast and abstain far beyond what is strictly required. The law fell; the invitation did not. Whether that expectation was realistic is a fair question, and one the English and Welsh bishops answered in 2011 by putting a rule back.
Where it gets mistaken for doctrine
The Church made Lent easy because she stopped caring about penance.
The law was reduced precisely so that penance would be chosen rather than merely endured. Two obligatory fast days is the floor, not the goal, and Paenitemini says so.
The rules about fish are a doctrine.
They are a definition inside a disciplinary law, and definitions have varied by region and century — some places counted beaver and capybara as fish. Nothing about salvation turns on it.
Why it matters
- ◐A body that has been told no about something small is easier to govern about something large. That is the whole argument for fasting, and it is older than Christianity.
- ◐Two days is a floor deliberately set low enough that nearly anyone can clear it — which makes clearing it the beginning rather than the achievement.
- ◐Fasting is a form of prayer the body can make when the mind is too tired to make any.
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