A few weeks ago I posted about the loss of communal, penitential abstinence from meat on Fridays. Now Amy Welborn has posted a quote from a book by Eamon Duffy, Faith of our Fathers, on the same loss:
Duffy’s last chapter is on Friday abstinence, and in it, he takes a strong position: dropping the obligatory Friday abstinence was the worst consequence of these post-Conciliar years. Why?
In abandoning real and regular fasting and abstinence as a corporate and nomative expression of our faith — by making it 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. …
…But that isn’t 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 start by rededicating ourselves to the shared observance of fasting and abstinence.
That really resonates with me. Sounds like a good book, as well as the other work by Duffy that Amy links to: a history of religion in England, 1400-1580.
UPDATE: Rich Leonardi blogs the same book.
bearing blog 