On occasional Sundays Heritage Standard will pick cultural or Catholic traditions that used to be ordinary and are now mostly gone.
Our civilisation was held together by the collection of these small and grand ideas. Vestments, processions, customs, recipes, crafts, feast days observed in one place and nowhere else. Most of them faded or stopped being taught.
Not everything will come back. Some things ended for pragmatic reason. But you cannot decide what to want to keep or let go if you have never even heard of it.
Soon autumn will start again, and historically Catholics fasted at the start of every season to reset….
Yet even most Traditional Catholics nowadays have never kept the Ember Days. The practice was already very lax during the Pacellian Pontificate, when fasting before Mass was changed from midnight to just 3 hours… But that is a story for another time…
So.. what are Ember Days?
Four times a year, at the turning of each season, the Catholic Church historically set aside 3 days for fasting, prayer, and gratitude.
The logic behind this being a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are:
Our Lord was betrayed on a Wednesday
Our Lord was crucified on a Friday
Our Lord was in His Tomb on Saturday
The autumn Ember Days fall in the week after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is on September 14th. They have fallen after this Feast since at least the fifth century.
Before that, the Romans kept seasonal fasts around the same turning points. The Catholic Church did not invent the impulse, but consecrated it, and made it part of the liturgical year.
The Latin name is Quatuor Tempora: the four seasons of the year. And the days had a threefold purpose:
To thank God for the gifts of the season
To learn how to use them in moderation.
To remember the poor, who feel the turning of the year more than anyone.
These 3 pillars are often forgotten nowadays by Catholics… who spend all days consuming, buying stuff they do not need, engaging in conversations that waste time…
Most consumption today is conspicuous consumption as Veblen would call it. So that traditional priests are not more radical about these days is beyond me… It is an antidote to the sick, wicked times we live in.
For over fifteen hundred years the Ember Days were obeyed in every diocese of the Western Church without interruption.
But on 17 February 1966, Pope Paul VI’s decree Paenitemini excluded the Ember Days as days of fast and abstinence.
The 1969 calendar revision left their observance to each national bishops’ conference. Yet Novus Ordo does not even have liturgy for these days anymore… so how can one expect people to know them?
Most dioceses let them go without announcement. The American bishops declared that existing Days of Prayer already counted. The Dutch bishops said nothing, the practice just died out.
The Ember Days disappeared inside a bureaucratic reclassification that nobody noticed and seemingly nobody mourned.
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal
Paragraph 45, Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar:
“On Rogation and ember days the Church is accustomed to entreat the Lord for the various needs of humanity, especially for the fruits of the earth and for human labor, and to give thanks to him publicly.”
Paragraph 46, Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar:
“In order to adapt the rogation and ember days to various regions and the different needs of the people, the conferences of bishops should arrange the time and plan for their celebration.”
Paragraph 394, General Instruction of the Roman Missal:
“In the drawing up of the Calendar of a nation, the Rogation Days and ember days should be indicated.”
For some magical reason The General Instruction of the Roman Missal still mandates their celebration in every diocese. State plainly in paragraph 46 that conferences of bishops ‘should arrange the time and plan for their celebration.’ Paragraph 394 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal states that Ember Days ‘should be indicated’ in every national calendar. Should… Not ‘may’!
What was lost in our society was not a superficial devotional curiosity. Fasting, unlike what health influencers tell you, is spiritual, and not for vanity.
It was the only structure that connected our body to the rhythm of the year. The light in September is different from the light in June. The coldness of autumn is not the same cold as in February. Our body knows the season. And for fifteen centuries the Catholic Church gave you a form for responding to that knowledge.
Catholicism embodied the WHOLE life, so not just what one does on a Sunday morning weekly or occasionally.
Without this, the season passes. You notice the light is different, and you feel something shifting… Yet people completely lost the seasons.
People have stopped dressing for the season, eating for the season, or noticing the season at all.
I can name more of these examples of how people have become blind and numb for seasonal differences… like eating strawberries all year, buying flowers in winter etc.
If you are reading Heritage Standard, you probably do not want all that consumerism in your life… So… why not start implementing this practice next week?
You can still keep these days... You can do it for yourself, or with others, but do not make a thing of it. Fasting is spiritual, not a vanity object.
Fast on Wednesday. Fast on Friday. Fast on Saturday. Sit in silence for twenty minutes and thank God for what the summer gave you and what the coming winter will require.
Ember Day Abstinence Rules:
Have 1 meal maximum (Not a strict rule, but additional ‘trad’ fast until 3PM)
Abstain from all meat and meat derived products (like broth, lard etc.)
Only water as beverage (even coffee, ‘calorie free’ stuff, fruit juice, and milk were previously never allowed!)
If you are still hungry… maximum 2 additional small(!) snacks, like an apple. Important: the 2 snacks should not constitute the size of a meal!
No bishop or priest in your local parish will announce this anymore. But the season is still turning. Summer is sadly over… so do what your ancestors did. Our Faith and society as a whole are bigger than the 1900-1970 lunacy.
The winter Ember Days fall after the feast of Saint Lucy, December 13. More on that later.
Your year has a shape. It always did.
Now give that shape back.
-Robbert
Our Bishop has made the fall ember days into days of fasting for vocations. No special liturgy or anything, just announcements by the priests after mass.
I love the Ember Days...just another treasure uncovered for me when I discovered the Traditional Latin Mass. Thank you for another excellent article!