It’s funny how giving things up for Lent has persisted in Ireland as one of the remnants of Catholic culture, while elsewhere, cultural customs originating in Catholicism are much more colourful and celebratory.
The Continent secularised even more rapidly but in Spain, every area has an annual religious procession to celebrate a patron saint. The Holy Week (Santa Semana) processions – with the penitents in tall, pointy hats – are baroque in their extravagance.
France, for all its traditions of laicité, retains the Catholic names for its public holidays, such as le lundi de Pentecôte (Pentecost) l’Assomption, (The Assumption of Our Lady) and la Toussaint (All saints.) However, in Ireland, we have even abandoned Shrove Tuesday in favour of Pancake Tuesday. France, too, has colourful outdoor processions with distinct religious themes that even Marxists participate in. Maybe it’s the better weather?
The St Patrick’s Day festival does not really count as a religious festival, given that we imported so many of the current customs from the US, a bit like the humble turnip carved at Halloween traversing the Atlantic and then returning to us as a pumpkin.
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I was never a fan of St Patrick’s Day in my youth, given that the local parades featured mostly agricultural machinery. However, I did like that Ireland had only 39 rather than 40 days of Lent due to our patron saint’s feast day. In a grave misunderstanding of the idea of sacrifice, my friends and I stockpiled all the sweets we gave up and gorged ourselves on St Patrick’s Day, although some people did abstain until Easter. The idea that acts of sacrifice were meant to benefit others, most particularly by filling the Trócaire box, was not lost entirely – but anything sweet received as a gift went straight into the stash.
It is interesting to speculate what the secular effect of continuing with the tradition of fasting for people aged 14-60 might have been
Sponsored 24-hour fasts to benefit the developing world were popular during my teenage years. When we moaned about fasting despite volunteering for it, my father, who was born in 1917, used to gently mock us with stories about the Black Fast of his early childhood. People abstained completely from food on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. No meat, milk or eggs were consumed during the six weeks of Lent, except for Sundays and of course, St Patrick’s Day.
Not everyone honoured the spirit of the fast. Cornelius Lucey – known as Connie, Bishop of Cork from 1950 to 1980 – issued a decree that a Lenten collation meal (one of two small meals allowed along with a main meal during fast days) could consist of tea with a biscuit. Canny Corkonian bakers, in the days when biscuits were about the size of the top of an egg cup, invented the Connie Dodger – a biscuit the size of a side plate. It is interesting to speculate what the secular effect of continuing with the tradition of fasting for people aged 14-60 might have been. Cutting out meat, milk products and eggs for six weeks annually and meat every Friday of the year could have radically changed both our agricultural production and our climate emissions for the better.
For my generation, the Trócaire box, even if reluctantly fed with pocket money, was a reminder of a wider world in need of solidarity and justice. Now, secular Lent is mostly just self-improvement projects.
There has been a troubling move away from focusing on low-income countries. When JD Vance is not wearing shamrock socks to welcome Micheál Martin, he occasionally discusses Catholic social teaching, most recently, the idea of the ordo amoris. This concept from St Augustine, built on by Thomas Aquinas, discusses the right ordering of love.
Vance’s take on Fox News was that “there is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that ... But we now have a president who will put America first.”
Unsurprisingly, Pope Francis, in an encyclical to the US bishops last month, stated that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups”. He suggested that the true ordo amoris is found in the Good Samaritan, who reaches out in practical compassion to someone completely outside his own community. Pope Francis was building on well-known lefties such as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. Pope John Paul asked us to “adopt an attitude of social solidarity with the whole human family” and avoid “a xenophobia that closes nations in on themselves”.
Pope Benedict stated in Deus Caritas Est that “concern for our neighbour transcends the confines of national communities and has increasingly broadened its horizon to the whole world”. Whatever about importing US customs for St Patrick’s Day, rather than Lent being just about self-improvement, it might be a good time to reflect – and then act – on a wider vision of solidarity.
