Lent

Lent is the forty-day season of preparation that leads the Church to Easter. It begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on the evening of Holy Thursday, when the Mass of the Lord’s Supper opens the Easter Triduum. The number forty is deliberate. It recalls the forty days Christ spent fasting in the desert before beginning his public ministry, and behind that the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

If you count the days on a calendar you will get more than forty, and that is not a mistake. Sundays are not counted. Every Sunday of the year is a celebration of the Resurrection, so a Sunday is never a day of fasting, even inside Lent. The forty days are the weekdays and Saturdays from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday.

The Church names three things as the work of the season: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. They are meant to be done together rather than picked from. Prayer turns you toward God, fasting loosens the grip of what you want, and almsgiving turns you toward your neighbour. Take away any one of the three and the other two curdle: fasting on its own becomes a diet, and almsgiving on its own becomes accounting.

The colour of the season is violet, the colour of penance and preparation. On the fourth Sunday, called Laetare Sunday, rose may be worn instead, a deliberate lightening halfway through to say that the season has an end and the end is joy. Lent is not sadness for its own sake. It is a clearing out, and what it clears space for arrives at Easter.

These are the rules of the Latin Church. Eastern Catholic Churches keep their own, older and generally stricter discipline.

There are two days of both fasting and abstinence: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. On those days Catholics who are bound eat one full meal, plus up to two smaller meals that together do not add up to a second full meal, and no meat.

Every Friday of Lent is a day of abstinence from meat.

Fasting binds those from their eighteenth birthday until their fifty-ninth. Abstinence from meat binds everyone from the age of fourteen onward. Illness, pregnancy, nursing, heavy physical work, and other serious reasons excuse a person, and no one is expected to damage their health to keep a discipline. If you are unsure whether something excuses you, ask your parish priest rather than guessing in either direction.

The rules are a floor, not a ceiling. They mark the minimum the Church asks of everyone, and most people who keep Lent well add something of their own on top.

Print the fasting and abstinence card for Lent 2027: who fasts, which days, and the March 19 exception, on one page.

In Spanish, with the Mexican bishops’ rules: Cuaresma 2027.

In Portuguese, for Brazil: Quaresma 2027.

The most common mistake is choosing something enormous on Ash Wednesday and abandoning it by the second week. Pick something small enough that you will still be doing it on Palm Sunday, and specific enough that you know each night whether you did it.

Giving something up works best when the thing you give up was actually taking something from you. Cutting out a habit you barely have is a gesture. Cutting out the thing you reach for when you are bored or anxious is a Lent, because every time you reach and stop you are handed a small moment you did not have before, and that moment is what the season is for.

Taking something on is the half people forget. A fixed ten minutes of prayer at the same hour each day will do more over forty days than an hour attempted whenever you feel moved. Daily Mass one extra weekday, a decade of the Rosary on the commute, the Stations of the Cross on a Friday, confession once during the season: any one of these, kept, is a real Lent.

Almsgiving does not have to be money, though money is the cleanest form because it costs you something you cannot get back. Give what you would have spent on the thing you gave up. If it is not money, give time to a person who cannot repay you.

And when you break it, and most people do, start again the same day rather than waiting for the next Sunday. The season is a training ground, not an examination.