Today begins the forty-day fast, with which Christians prepare for Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, with the help of deepening their faith, reconciliation and renunciation, reads the statement sent to MTI by the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference (MKPK).
They pointed out that abstaining from meat is not an act of fasting in itself. Eating meat was considered a rare, festive occasion for ancient and medieval people, meaning that giving it up was indeed a suitable means of expressing sorrow and self-denial in the given culture. Continuing with this idea, as an exercise of “external fasting”, the modern person can ask himself what is the value or habit in his life, that he usually adheres to, but renounces during the fasting period as a “sign of bowing before God”.
The announcement added that the forty-day fast became common in the Christian world. Since the resurrection of Jesus is celebrated on this day, the church does not consider Sunday as a fasting day, therefore since the 19th century, Lent begins on Wednesday, and in the period from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, the number of fasting days is exactly forty.
Fasting in the 19th century was so strict that they did not eat anything until late in the afternoon, and meat, dairy products and eggs were not consumed at all on fasting days, they wrote.
The church has now relaxed the fasting rules, but on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday it imposes a strict fast: believers between the ages of 18 and 60 can eat only once and take food with them twice more. In Hungary, this rule has become established in the formulation that you can eat three times and be full once. On these two days and the other Fridays of Great Lent, the church asks its members over the age of 14 not to eat meat as part of the fasting discipline.
In the Greek Catholic Church, the Lent period begins on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, they added.
On the first day of Great Lent, Ash Wednesday, Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest will celebrate Mass at 5:00 p.m. in the Esztergom Basilica, Győr County Bishop András Veres, president of the MKPK, at 6:00 p.m. in the Assumption Cathedral in Győr.
(MTI)
Picture: MTI/Attila Balázs
