EAMON DUFFY:

…In abandoning real and regular fasting and abstinence as a corporate and nomative expression of our faith — by making it optional — the Church forfeited one of its most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a private devotional gesture the action of the specially pious, and the prophetic witness of the whole community, the matter-of-fact witness, repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy.

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