I like Ash Wednesday. It is one of the few days left where Catholics (well those who practice anyway) visibly act united as Catholics. While Ash Wednesday is not a Holy Day of Obligation it is a day of fasting and abstinence from meat so today we have to go out of our way to live our faith and that is a good thing. Good Friday, Easter and Christmas also fall outside the regular Sunday Mass routine but in this country we are still hanging onto them as national public holidays (although one wonders how long for).
There are now only two days of the year (apart from Sundays) when is obligatory that Catholics in Australia do something for their faith. The feast of The Assumption which is a Holy Day of Obligation and will fall on a Wednesday this year and also today, Ash Wednesday, when Catholics will receive the visble mark of ash on their forehead but will abstain from meat and fast in a public act of somber penance.
One mistake that I believe was made in the past 40 years of change in the Church was the cancelling of the obligation for Cathoics to abstain from meat every Friday. While the obligation to do an act of extra prayer or penance still does exist every Friday (though unknown by most Catholics) I do believe we lost something. The Church is well within her rights to make that change as it was only ever a Church law but from those who remember those days I am told there was something almost patriotic about being a Catholic because we were in the struggle together. The whole society was well aware that Friday was fish day because a quarter of the population would not be eating meat that day and it adjusted accordingly. It was the exterior mark of being catholic, Mass on Sunday and fish on Friday. Any group has to treasure the things that unite them and while of course all Catholics are united in Christ and his Church, that Church exists in the world and must give visible signs to the world through the actions of it's members. Abstaining from meat is not the be all and end all but it was one way, and that way does not seem to have been replaced by anything notably visible.
Growing up in my family we continued the practice of no meat on a Friday as that was our family act of penance. It is a practice that I know still exists in other catholic homes and it would not be a bad thing to have it spread out once again. Abstaining from meat and fasting from certains foods is a time honoured practice spoken about and practiced by the early Christians. It helps us to master our wills and can serve to remind us that our faith is not just something we do in private, we do it as part of the Mystical Body of Christ.
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