The desert experience of the people of Israel was a difficult time of testing and penance, of getting lost and discovering the way, as the Lord sought to mould them into His covenant people. Yet the later prophets looked back on it as the honeymoon period in the people’s relationship with the Lord. The most

MUMBAI – As the world’s largest Muslim nation heads to the polls on 14 February, which also happens to be Ash Wednesday this year, the country’s bishops are making special provisions to ensure the country’s minority Catholic population can participate in what is shaping up to be a tense election. The bishops are also calling

The Church’s tradition of abstinence reaches back much further than the 1960s, of course. A homily of Pope Gregory the Great is amongst the first sources for the current discipline. This in turn got bound into the earliest collections of the Church’s laws, ended up in the Corpus Iuris Canonici,and later found its way (by means of a reference, at least) into the 1917 and 1983 codes. But with the expansion of the Church’s mission field well beyond the familiar territories (and cuisines) of Europe, the definition of what is and what is not included in abstinence has shifted over time.

The late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, used to point out that religions should be wary of discarding their traditions, because they have a habit of coming back into fashion. There can be no better example than the tradition of giving up meat on Fridays. This was formerly the rule for Catholics, an easily understood and

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

Since October, my father has been unwell in a nursing home and my mother has been keeping him company there. We said that we would see how things are going by spring and my father has looked eagerly out of the window at the skeleton trees for some sign of buds or early birds. As

Lent looms. But for members of Exodus 90, a sort of rigorous abstinence the Desert Fathers might recognise has been a way of life since 17 January

The disciplines of Lent feel different to the depressed than the happy