Why I picked this up
I've been on fire for the Catholic faith lately — not lukewarm, not "Catholics are just Christians, whatever." I wanted to know what the saints actually believed. What did the early Christians, the early martyrs, do when it came to fasting and abstinence? Matthew Plese's book is in its second edition and it bills itself as the definitive guide. Based on how many pages I've earmarked and underlined, that's not marketing — it's accurate. I came away genuinely shocked at how vigorous early Catholic fasting was, and how far we've drifted from it.
The black fast was the baseline, not the exception
For most of Church history, the standard fast — the "black fast" — was one meal after sunset. No meat, dairy, eggs, wine, or oil. Water only until then. That wasn't a Lenten special occasion. That was every Wednesday and Friday, commemorating the betrayal and the crucifixion, and it wasn't optional. In some regions, Catholics were fasting more than 100 days a year — roughly a third of the calendar was feast days built around fasting and prayer. When people today say "I'm not doing that on a holiday," they've got it backwards. Holy days were built for exactly the opposite of indulgence.
You might also like
I stopped eating breakfast on Sundays
The one piece I've actually put into practice: the book lays out how the Eucharistic fast used to start the night before — Saturday sundown to Sunday Communion, nothing in between. I've been doing a version of this for months now, since coming back hard into the faith: no breakfast Sunday, nothing until after I've received the Eucharist. It sounds small. It isn't. Going into Mass hungry changes what you're actually paying attention to. You stop showing up for comfort and start showing up for reverence.
Fasting was never a wellness hack
This is the line that reframed the whole book for me: the early Church never fasted for health. Health was a side effect. The point was sacrifice — offering up something as basic as hunger to get closer to God, to do penance, to unite with what Christ did on the cross. Aquinas put it plainly: fasting curbs disordered desire, clears the mind to contemplate God, and satisfies for past sin. Today we've flipped that. We fast for biomarkers and abs, and if it happens to be spiritual, great. That reframing applies past fasting — it's the same trap with a lot of discipline. If the "why" is self-improvement instead of something bigger than yourself, it doesn't hold up once it gets hard.
What actually broke it
The Reformation is the hinge. Luther said fasting should be "left to the individual conscience" — not the whole Church moving together. That one line did more damage than people realize: it turned a communal, unifying practice into a private, subjective one. Trent pushed back and reaffirmed it, but the real unraveling came later — industrialization moved people off the land and into factory shifts where the old rhythm didn't fit, and by 1966 Paul VI cut the obligation down to Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Before the 1960s, fasting was public, cultural, something your whole town did together. After, it became personal and basically optional, and it shows: nobody preaches it, nobody asks about it in confession. Jesus said certain things only come out through prayer and fasting. Worth noticing that half of that sentence quietly disappeared from a lot of modern Bible translations.
Where to start
The back of the book has a tiered system for actually rebuilding the practice instead of just admiring it. Grab a pre-1962 liturgical calendar, start with tier one — simple one-day fasts — and build from there. I'd also steal the book's point about not keeping it totally private: tell someone why you're fasting. Offering it up for a specific person or intention is the opposite of the "it's my own business" instinct we've all absorbed, and it's closer to what the early Church actually did.
Who should read this
Anyone who wants Catholicism with the discipline left in, not the version that's been sanded down to "just go to confession." If you're already fasting on your own and wondering whether you're doing too much or too little, this gives you the actual historical baseline instead of a guess.
0 Comments
Log in to comment
Not a member yet? Join the community
Pick a meme
KlipyHave a great take?
Drop your email — we'll send a magic link so you can post it. No password.
Not a member of the community? Join today.
Join the community →