Penitential Season

Lent, the great Christian penitential season, began this week all over the world. In Europe, it will scarcely be noticeable: large parts of the Continent have been fasting, wearing sackcloth, and living amid ashes for several years. Even in one of Europe's best-fed countries, Cardinal Bernard Griffin last fortnight told his London archdiocese: "We are free to eat whatever we can obtain."

The Continent's poverty also served better than centuries of papal scolding to subdue the pre-Lenten orgies of Carnival. Fun-loving Italians, hungry or not, could not resist their first chance for many years to don strange hats and masks, plunge into a sea of confetti. But Germany's famed Faschings at Cologne and Munich were canceled. Said a Munich city official: "Fasching needs a carefree spirit and abundance; today there is an abundance of tears, worry and rubble."

But in Latin America Carnival still flourished. In Rio de Janeiro, the army guarded tumultuous streets of richly costumed revelers against excesses. In Quito, Ecuadoreans indulged in a week's frenzy of drenching each other (and especially policemen) with water-bombs and buckets, strewed flour on passersby.

New Orleans rousingly revived its carnival, a wartime casualty, before facing the minor austerities of Lent. U.S. Protestants again showed their increasing interest in Lent as part of "the collective experience of our historic Christianity," took over theaters in many cities to preach Christ's significance to noonday crowds.

Lent or Lockup? The custom of penitential preparation for every feast was inherited by the early Christians from the Jews. Early penitents in the Holy Land observed Lent by eating only two meals a week. But St. John Chrysostom (4th Century) did not urge such Spartan austerity for the multitude of believers.

Medieval Christians confessed their sins on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi gras). Grave offenders were assigned to public penitence (sackcloth and ashes, strict fasting, no baths) until finally absolved of their sins on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. In those days, religion was directly concerned with maintaining public order; lawbreakers were ordered to join the Lenten penitents rather than be thrown into the town lockup.

Lent was also the season in which the church prepared pagans for baptism at Easter. To onetime heathens, Lent (from the Anglo-Saxon word for spring) came naturally: like many primitive peoples, they had observed a springtime period of self-denial to encourage germination of their new-sown crops. Church fathers readily admitted that Lent was in part an adaptation from pagan "natural religion." Then, as now, they also thought it not unfitting to remind Christians that Lenten self-denial is a good spring tonic for body as well as soul.

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