Fasting and the Call to Holiness

Fasting and the Call to Holiness | John B. Buescher | HPR

Our salvation depends wholly on God’s grace, of which we are completely undeserving. But through fasting, as well as through prayer and almsgiving, we can open up space for God’s grace to enter.


The Second Vatican Council’s document, Lumen Gentium, was
issued in 1964. Its section on “The Universal Call to Holiness,” read on
its own, is puzzling because it seems to suggest that lay Catholics had
not realized before that they, too, like the clergy, were called to
holiness. However, I’m trying to imagine who those Catholics were who
didn’t know that they were called to holiness. As far as I can remember,
Catholics well understood that the Church called everyone, everywhere,
to be holy. The section on the Universal Call to Holiness appears in Lumen Gentium’s
longer description of the hierarchical Church, and so should be read as
an effort to emphasize that the laity, too, are called to pursue
holiness as an explicit part of their vocation.

The document’s explanation of what this call to holiness for the
laity entails, practically speaking, is sketchy. The main “new” practice
that has resulted from it has been the encouragement in some quarters
for the laity to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. We are also encouraged
to attend daily Mass, and to receive Communion frequently. In this, the
laity are to take up more seriously one of the three, long-established
spiritual practices—prayer—the other two being fasting and almsgiving.

It seems doubly confusing and disconcerting that the 1964 “call to
holiness” was quickly followed in February 1966 by a revision of
Catholics’ fasting rules (in Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Constitution, that
relaxed and, in effect, nearly eliminated the fasting and abstinence
requirements altogether.)

(See: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/apost_constitutions/documents/ hf_p-vi_apc_19660217_paenitemini_en.html>Paenitemini  

and in the USCCB’s: http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-resources/lent/us-bishops-pastoral-statement-on-penance-and-abstinence.cfm Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence).

To get some perspective on how lax today’s requirements are, compared
to previous times, take a look at this description of the fasting and
abstinence rules in effect in Britain in 1828, from Thomas Ignatius M.
Forster, Circle of the Seasons, and Perpetual Key to the Calendar and
Almanac:

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