Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are obligatory days of BOTH fasting and abstinence for Catholics (ages 14+ for abstinence; ages 18-59 for fasting). Fridays during Lent are days of obligatory abstinence-only.
Those who are excused from fast or abstinence: Besides those outside the age limits, those of unsound mind, the sick, the frail, pregnant or nursing women according to need for meat or nourishment, manual laborers according to need, guests at a meal who cannot excuse themselves without giving great offense or causing enmity and other situations of moral or physical impossibility to observe the penitential discipline. (NEVER make anyone feel guilty for not fasting/abstaining because they are ill, have a chronic disease, are pregnant, etc., or try to coerce someone into fasting/abstaining when it could damage their health or we may fight.)
Abstinence (in this sense) means that one should abstain from meat on Fridays and on Ash Wednesday. “Meat is considered to be the flesh and organs of mammals and fowl. Moral theologians have traditionally considered this also to forbid soups or gravies made from them. Salt and freshwater species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, and shellfish are permitted, as are animal-derived products such as gelatin, butter, cheese, and eggs, which do not have any meat taste.” This is why Catholics traditionally eat fish on Lenten Fridays.
- Catholic Ash Wednesday comes from Genesis 3:19–that moment when God expelled Adam and Eve from the paradise of Eden as the price of their rebellion and lack of faith: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast has taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.” God is telling them, “Think about what you did. Repent. Seek Me out. For you have replaced My love with your selfishness; you have replaced My grace with your sin; you have replaced My gift of immortality with death, which means that someday, you must surrender your body to sickness and corruption, and the grave will claim you as you become ashes once again.”
- Catholic Ash Wednesday is the beginning of 40 days for renewing our baptismal commitment to Jesus, at Easter. The ashes are a sign of repentance and turning back to the Gospel, because death will come, and after death, we will be judged before the throne of Jesus Christ, “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). But of course, we will joyously remember at Easter that the precious Blood of Jesus has regained “paradise lost.” The death brought down upon us by the first Adam is reversed by the second Adam. For as St. Paul reminds us in the same verse of 6:23: “But (by) the grace of God, (we have) life everlasting, in Christ Jesus our Lord!”
- For me, personally, Ash Wednesday and Lent are an annual reminder that I do not have control. The Lord God is in control. I, however, sometimes live with the illusion that I can control my life, my health, my friends, my mental state, my financial situation, and my sense of peace and comfort. I can try to control these things, but sometimes all my efforts end in “ashes.” In the end, “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Lent is my time to throw my earthly sense of power and control into the “bonfire of vanities,” which is penance and sacrifice. If I rise and have victory, it is only in the Blood of Jesus and His Calvary–“Through Him, with Him, and in Him.”
