Dale, one of the things that infuriates me about the Catholic approach to fasting is that far too many Catholics act like children. You know, "I'll give up chocolate-chip cookies for Lent and pick them up after Easter, regardless of my spiritual state."
Of course, the bishops encourage this nonsense with their reductionistic, legalistic view of fasting (you know, regulations about what constitutes a "full meal" and all that rot). As a consequence, the laity by and large adopt that same reductionistic, legalistic approach.
Mind you, I'm not criticizing fasting as such, just the "lowest common denominator" approach taken by the Church as a whole.
The Church has a wealth of spiritual exercises and disciplines for Lent. Why don't the bishops (or "religious educators" or anybody else) recommend those?
I'll tell you why. First, the bishops are spiritually ignorant themselves, apostolic succession notwithstanding. Second, they don't want the laity to improve spiritually. They want to keep treating the laity as mushrooms. They want to "maintain order," i.e. the power, by refusing to develop Catholics who just might challenge them in ways that will make them uncomfortable.
Well, we "good Catholics" can't have that, can we?
Maybe because fasting and abstaining during Lent are the practises common to all Apostolic Christians? Other disciplines have their place, but it is the asceticism of fast and abstinence which unites all apostolic Christians.
In other words, you have it bass-ackwards.
(See Dale, I didn't mention that he's itching to kill innocents by the millions, sticking instead to the error at hand.)
Joe:
Yeah, the bishops need to teach this better. They need to teach a lot of things better. Two generations of Catholics have been lost to Groomean edu-fluff.
But it isn't all the negligence of the teaching office and American Catholic educational establishment, either. The negative side of American individualism is that it breeds narcissism like a hive breeds bees (yes, the simile clashes, but bear with me). The concept of sacrifice is not exactly drummed into our heads by the culture, either. The response to 9/11 wasn't "build four more infantry divisions and cut our dependence on madrassah-building oil," it was "spend more or the terrorists will have won." That's corrosive to any Christian understanding of Lent.
And it isn't too hard to learn what fasting requires and means, either. When I came into the Church in 1999, it was through a pretty decent RCIA program. Despite that, I was pretty much self-taught.
Dale, you can't compare the response to 9/11 with American narcissism during Lent. Remember that the purpose of terror is to frighten people into inaction and inertia (in the case of 9/11, it was also to paralyse the American economy, as the attack on the World Trade Center demonstrated and as the financial markets reflected immediately afterward). Asking Americans to do one of the things they do best, spend, was a way to keep them from falling into the kind of apoplexy that terrorists want their victims to feel. It's like the British determining to persevere and not knuckle under to Hitler during the Blitz.
War isn't just about troops and money. It's about attitude and national will.
Besides, Dale, the fact that you taught yourself about fasting even after an admittedly good RCIA class reinforces my point. It's also as damning an indictment of current Church attitudes as anything I could say.
In the previous post, replace the word "apoplexy" with "paralysis." That illustrates the point better.
Joe:
Here's the thing--we've been told (correctly) that we are faced with a generational war unlike any other. And what sacrifices have we been called to make? I remember my grandma (God rest her soul) talking about WW2, with the rationing, women moving into the workplace and kids collecting scrap metal for the war effort. Once the fear of immediate economic paralysis passed, what were we called to do? There was a failure of leadership on that which persists to this day.
And you have a point about RCIA classes. But learning is a two way street--students have to want to learn and make the extra effort. There's culpability there, too.
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