Sundays in Lent: Part IV

A reader writes:

For whatever it may be worth…

Ash Wednesday (inclusive) through Holy Saturday (inclusive), less Sundays, would yield a count of 40 days.

So, if you’re skipping Sundays (dealt with in another post), you could say that there are 40 penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Note, though, that this little system would consider the Solemnities of Saint Joseph and the Annunciation as 2 of the 40 days – hardly days of penance in most minds.

I appreciate the effort and ingenuity involved in this solution, but it does not appear to correspond to the Church’s law. It is true that "if you’re skipping Sundays (dealt with in another post), you could say that there are 40 penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter," but one would be making up one’s own rules to get this total. The Church’s law is different on this point. According to the Code of Canon Law:

The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent [Canon 1250].

The limits of the season of Lent are defined as follows:

"Lent runs from Ash Wednesday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper exclusive [General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar 28].

This means, as we saw below, that Lent includes forty four days of penance. If you want to have the number of "penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter," then the total will be forty five because Good Friday is also a day of penance under Canon 1250. (Holy Saturday, while it is a day on which fasting is recommended, is not technically a days of penance in the law.)

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

One thought on “Sundays in Lent: Part IV”

  1. The current Law may be unclear, but excluding Sundays to reach the 40 days of fasting is the Church’s tradition.
    I’ve posted this on a couple of other pages in this discussion, but again, from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopeida:
    “From what has been said it will be clear that in the early Middle Ages Lent throughout the greater part of the Western Church consisted of forty weekdays, which were all fast days, and six Sundays.”
    The Middle Ages took their fasting VERY seriously, so I think we can take them as a good exemple.
    So yes, more than 40 days in Lent, but only 40 fasting days.

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