Originally published at crisis magazine
It would seem so, if some of the higher prelates have anything to do with it. More than a few of them, at the beginning of Lent, urged us to imitate our “Muslim brothers” as they undergo their Ramadan fasts.
Us imitate them? The Catholic Church had been exercising the rigorous disciplines of Lent for 500 years before Muhammad arose from the sands of Arabia. Have these good prelates forgotten the fasts of the apostles? Or the emergence of Christian men and women braving the wildernesses of Arabia and Egypt to give birth to the great eremitical and coenobitic Orders? Have St. Anthony, the Desert Fathers, or St. Simeon Stylites slipped their minds? Monasticism as it is known emerged from those centuries with the great stress upon taming the beast in man so that he becomes even more than angel.
Perhaps their lapse in memory is due to their predecessors’ devaluation of the whole apparatus of atonement for sin, reparation for past offenses, and the singular value of mortification and fast? Pope Montini, after all, was driven by the need to soften the signature self-abnegations of the Church’s millennial tradition as empty exercises of a benighted past. Thus, the obligatory Friday abstinence, the
