[Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican
II), fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more
seriously than the Irish.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE IRISH FASTING TRADITION  
[[link removed]]


 

Livia Gershon
April 17, 2023
JSTOR [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican II),
fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more
seriously than the Irish. _

A Trappist monk in the cloisters of a monastery in County Waterford,
Ireland, 1935, Getty Images

 

The Christian observance of Lent and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
[[link removed]]
overlapped from March 22 to April 6 this year, and many people around
the world engaged in some type of religious self-denial. Irish studies
scholar Marjorie Deleuze describes the long history of this kind of
practice in Ireland
[[link removed]].

Starting in pre-Christian times
[[link removed]],
Deleuze writes, fasting was a method of resolving legal disputes. A
person might sit in front of the house of someone who had wronged
them, either seeking support from the gods or threatening to curse the
enemy by dying on their doorstep.

By the seventh century, Irish monks described strict rules regarding
fasting, mainly for their own orders but sometimes also for the laity.
Fasting was both a form of penitence and a way of communing with God.
Catholic authorities believed that excessive eating dulls the senses
and prevents the mind from focusing on the sacred.

For centuries, Catholic authorities in Ireland called for ordinary
people to fast in some way for between a third and a half of the year.
Along with strict fasts during certain seasons like Holy Week, they
abstained from meat, eggs, and dairy three days a week year round—a
practice that gave several days of the week their names in Irish: Dé
Céadaoin (Wednesday) is “the day of the first fast,” Déardaoin
(Thursday) is “the day between the fasts,” and Dé hAoine
(Friday), is “the day of the main fast.”

Fasting was balanced by a tradition of feeding the hungry and
hospitality in general. One medieval tract praises “godly” and
“human” feasts that fit this tradition, but it decries the
“demon feast,” a meal immorally prepared for “jesters,
satirists, beggar-poets, farters, clowns, bandits and pagans, whores,
and other bad people.”

Deleuze suggests that the Irish Catholic devotion to fasting may have
been partly a response to the country’s colonization by Protestants
[[link removed]].
Fasting was a way to assert a distinction from, and superiority to,
Protestant converts. Deleuze quotes sociologist Tom Inglis’s
assertion that “these practices became the base of a religious sense
of self that revolved around self-mortification and denial.”

Irish Catholics also kept fasts as a magical practice to win favors
and protection from God. While this was contrary to official church
doctrine, some Catholic officials embraced it. In 1847, during the
Great Hunger, Dublin Archbishop Daniel Murray suggested that God might
be inflicting the suffering “to awaken our alarm, and simulate us to
compunction.” Even during that Famine, the church urged those who
were able to do so to continue to fast.

In the twentieth century, Irish political activists brought back the
tradition of fasting to obtain worldly justice, using hunger strikes
to galvanize support and shame the British colonial government. But
fasting as a religious tradition broke down quite quickly in the 1960s
after the Second Vatican Council greatly relaxed official Catholic
rules. These days, Deleuze finds, its last vestige among Irish
Catholics is the Lenten practice of giving up chocolate, alcohol, or
other treats.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]