Masses Today

6.30: Tom Tierney, (Anniv)
11.00: Ellen Reynolds, (Anniv)
6.30: Coleman Cooke, (Anniv)





Events This Week






AS I WAS SAYING...

Up to relatively recent times, people took the Lenten fast very seriously. How many of you still remember the 'one full meal and two collations' permitted daily during Lent? The 'collation' consisted of a meat-free meal, of not more than a specified weight! The people were at liberty to eat whatever amount they liked for the 'full meal' (apart from on days of abstinence when meat was forbidden). But human ingenuity was adept at finding pathways around the rules, if not right through them! For example, what was to prevent an individual placing the limitless 'full meal' on the table at 11.00 and returning to it throughout the day? Was it not still the same 'full meal'? But the Church, with the wisdom of the ages at her disposal, rushed in to plug this particular loop-hole:
To interrupt the principal meal for more than half an hour without good reason would be a venial sin; should the interruption last more than an hour it would be seriously sinful. For a proportionately good reason (e.g. to assist the dying) once may interrupt his dinner for several hours!

These were serious times! Cigarettes and drink were common casualties. Sugarless tea was a very common penitential potion. Children abandoned sweets. There was a touch of camaraderie about the whole experience, somewhat akin to that which characterises a community on a war footing! In fact the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote on the bonding power of the Lenten fast among the Irish emigrants in London in the 1950s. The Lenten fast set them apart from the general British population, reinforcing their sense of identify and renewing annual contact with their cultural roots. When the fast was all but abandoned with Vatican II, according to Douglas, the general body of the Irish émigrés simply melted into the general population.

All that was a long time ago, of course. Fasting has now all but disappeared from Church practice. To the younger generation, such fasting is a source of some amusement, another archaic curiosity foisted upon a gullible people by an over-bearing Church! Yet 'fast and abstinence' gone forever? You must be joking! If a fellow said 20 years ago, for example, that a day would come in Ireland when cigarette-smoking in public would be banned, he would be laughed out of court! And of course fasting itself has been secularised as 'dieting', and the secular practitioners can be as fussy as their religious predecessors. In addition, those who successfully follow the strict regime are objects of much envy. The motivation, of course, has changed. But the practice is very much alive and well.

I may have written here before of the Kilkenny man who came to Galway in the 1950s, as a travelling salesman, selling sausages from a van for Clover Meats. His wages depended on the amount of sausages sold. 'Lent was a killer,' he complained, 'I wouldn't sell ten sausages in the week!' He approached the Church of Ireland rector, in search of more promising clients. "My chaps are beef-eaters in the main", the rector retorted. "But I will give you the name of the kennel-master!" As far as that Kilkenny man was concerned, Lent lost its sting that day! And he became an enthusiastic ecumenist!

Vegetables and fish were once Lenten fare, symbols of fast and deprivation. Today, fish is perhaps the most expensive dish in the most expensive restaurants and, of course, vegetarians are to be found under every cabbage leaf. In truth, the more things change, the more they remain the same!

-Dick Lyng.




FASTING IN HISTORY

It is not difficult to understand the importance of the liturgical calendar for late medieval people. There was, in the first place, no alternative, secular reckoning of time: legal deeds, anniversaries, birthdays were reckoned by the religious festivals on which they occurred, rents and leases fell due at Lady Day, Lammas, or Michaelmas. The seasonal observances of the liturgical calendar affected everyone. No one could marry during the four weeks of Advent or the six weeks of Lent. Everyone must fast during the forty days of Lent, abstaining not merely from meat but from other animal products, "whitemeats" such as eggs and cheese.

In addition to Lent, fasting was obligatory on the ember days, that is, the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays after the feast of St Lucy (13 December), Ash Wednesday, Whit Sunday, and Holy Cross Day (14 September). There was also an obligation to fast on the vigils of the feasts of the twelve Apostles (excepting those of Sts Philip and James and St John), the vigils of Christmas Day, Whit Sunday, the Assumption of Our Lady (15 August), the Nativity of St John the Baptist (24 June), the feast of St Laurence (10 August), and the feast of All Saints (1 November). Though not obligatory everywhere, it was also customary to fast on some at least of the days of Rogationtide.

"There were therefore almost seventy days in the year when adults were obliged to fast, the bulk of them in spring for the great fast of Lent, but the rest spread more or less evenly through the rest of the year."

The Embertide fasts in particular, originally occurring three times in the year, were made up to four groups of three days, one in each of the four seasons. Their seasonal occurrence was emphasized in commentaries and sermons, related to the four humours, the cardinal virtues, and the seasons of human life. In addition, late medieval devotional custom made penitential fasting on bread and water a conventional and common way of honouring saints to whom one had a particular devotion.

-Eamon Duffy, "The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580." P.40.




A LOVER'S LENTEN DREAM

This time when the birds are singing
Maybe I'll be sad no more
One I waited aeons for
May be waiting at my door.
When the Lenten roots are swinging
Lamps of light above the grass
What I've dreamed may come to pass
At a holy Easter Mass.
O the growing corn and hedges
That made me want to cry
For something lost when I
Was wandering in the sky.
My birds are all in cages
Maybe now the doors will rise
and the grief that looked so wise
Dissolve in laughing skies.

-Patrick Kavanagh.





ORDAINING WOMEN

Madam,
The Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has remarked that "Jesus did not ordain women". I would like to point out that Jesus was equally deliberate -if that is an appropriate expression- about not ordaining Irishmen.
Your etc.,
Mary Quigley,
Torquay Road, Foxfrock, Dublin 18.




HOW DO YOU FACE DEATH?

So far, I have never felt afraid of death, my own death. Belief in the resurrection is central to my faith. In our Catholic tradition too, the season of Lent confronts believers with the realities of life and death annually.

Also I have been helped to face death by being with many of my brethren at the time of their deaths, and seen them face death calmly, with serenity. Our tradition is to sing the Salve Regina with the brethren as they face death, and that is beautiful. Sometimes the way a brother dies is his last gift to the community, his last preaching of the gospel, which gives us all hope. So far, I have never had to really face my own mortality, and so, perhaps, when the time comes I will be not nearly as calm and trusting as I hope! But I trust that my brethren will help me then. But also, dying is not just an event at the end. We practise it all the time, every time we try to break through the barriers of our egotism and let God's grace change us. One of my brethren said the other day, "He who has never done anything new will have a hard time dying."

-Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.





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