(Roberto de Mattei)
Most people are unaware of or have forgotten what Lent is. Yet the Catechism of Pope Saint Pius X was very clear, calling it “a season of fasting and penance instituted by the Church according to apostolic tradition”. In the following paragraph, Saint Pius X explained its ends:
“To make known to us the obligation we have to do penance all through our lives; to imitate in some way the rigorous fast of forty days that Jesus Christ did in the desert; to prepare ourselves by means of penance for a holy celebration of Easter.” (No 36)
But often for good Catholics who do not forget about it, Lent is reduced to a few ascetic practices: fasting, mortifications, almsgiving, certainly praiseworthy and always recommended by the Church, but not sufficient to transmit to us the spirit of Lent, which is first of all that of detaching ourselves more deeply from sin and embracing the will of God with greater generosity.
Benedict XVI, in his Message for Lent 2009, recalls that in the first pages of Sacred Scripture the Lord commands man to abstain from consuming the forbidden fruit: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:16–17). This injunction that God gave to Adam is the first precept of abstinence from food that man receives. Commenting on the divine injunction, Saint Basil writes that “the ‘you shall not eat’ is, therefore, the law of fasting and abstinence”.1 So, Benedict XVI goes on to observe, if Adam disobeyed the Lord’s command “not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, “the believer, through fasting intends to submit himself humbly to God, trusting in His goodness and mercy.“2
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