The Meaning of Fasting and Abstinence in the Church

There are words that, just hearing them, make us a little uncomfortable. Fasting is one of them. It sounds old, it sounds heavy, it sounds like something for people who want to suffer for no reason. But Christian fasting is the exact opposite of that: it is not punishment, it is openness. It is the way we tell our own body that the stomach does not run everything — and make room for God to take charge of what truly matters.

At its core, fasting means giving up food — entirely or in part — for a spiritual purpose; abstinence means refraining from meat on certain days. They are two distinct practices that the Church usually combines on the most important dates of the calendar. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday call for both: eating little and not eating meat. Every Friday of the year, in principle, is a day of penance, with abstinence from meat. In the United States, the bishops allow the Friday abstinence outside of Lent to be replaced by another concrete act of charity or piety.

The roots of the practice are older than Christianity itself. Moses fasted forty days on Sinai before receiving the Law. Elijah fasted forty days on his way to Horeb. David fasted while pleading for his sick child. The whole city of Nineveh fasted at Jonah’s preaching and was spared. And Jesus himself begins his ministry with forty days of fasting in the desert — and answers the tempter by quoting Deuteronomy: man does not live by bread alone.

The Church’s teaching on fasting rests on two strong convictions. The first: we are body and soul, not only soul. What we do with the body trains the soul. When I hold back hunger out of love for Christ, I am teaching desire to obey — and disordered desire is precisely the root of sin. The second: fasting is never an end in itself, it is a means. By itself, it turns into a spiritual diet or disguised pride. Paired with prayer and almsgiving, it becomes that classic threefold path of conversion that the Fathers of the Church never grew tired of repeating.

The current discipline was reformed by Paul VI after the Council, giving more flexibility to local bishops. The Code of Canon Law spells out who is bound: abstinence applies from age fourteen onward, and fasting from eighteen to fifty-nine. The sick, pregnant and nursing women, and those who do heavy labor are naturally dispensed. But flexibility is not emptying out — it simply recognizes that penance must take different shapes in different lives.

The Catechism places fasting among the means of conversion and of preparation for the liturgical feasts. It is not the heart of the faith, but it is one of the hands that holds the faith up. The Fathers of the Church, from Augustine to John Chrysostom, spoke of fasting as a remedy that purifies the mind, orders the senses, and brings the body under the spirit. Old language, radically current content: in a world that lives in a constant state of fullness — food, screens, stimulation all the time — recovering a hunger for God begins, first of all, by experiencing any hunger at all.

We are in the Easter season, and Christian tradition does not fast in the atmosphere of the Resurrection — after all, as Jesus himself said, no one fasts while the bridegroom is present. But precisely for that reason it is worth meditating on the topic away from the rush of Lent. Friday penance still stands all year long; and understanding the meaning of fasting when it is not being required is the best way to make sure that, when the right time comes, we do not approach it as a tired obligation, but out of love.

Start with what is within reach. This coming Friday, set the meat aside — no theatrics, no complaining to the family, no fanfare. If that feels too easy, choose another small gesture: skip the afternoon snack, step away from social media for a day, drop the sugar in your coffee. The point is not the amount of deprivation, it is the reason: offer that small hunger for a concrete intention — someone who is sick, a difficult conversion, your own will that has grown stubborn. Pray while you feel it. And when the stomach complains, remember that desire is being trained for something greater. Fasting alone saves no one; but joined with prayer and charity, it opens a space within us that was occupied — and that is the space where God tends to enter.

And when you fast, be not as the hypocrites, sad. For they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Amen I say to you, they have received their reward. But thou, when thou fastest anoint thy head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not to men to fast, but to thy Father who is in secret: and thy Father who seeth in secret, will repay thee.

Mt 6:16-18 (Douay-Rheims)