Evil exists. The Evil One exists. And Lent is a time to renew our fight against them.

There are many in the world today who doubt what I have just typed. There are many in the Church today who doubt what I have just typed; and it is rare to hear such things in a homily. Such ideas are apparently even more unpalatable to the modern world than the radical teachings of Christianity.

Ironically, even the institutional Church itself would seem to be shrouding such ideas in more favourable language. At an instruction class last week in our parish the translation of prayers came up; consider these two translations of the Collect for Ash Wednesday:

From the Latin typical edition of both the Breviary and the Missal (published in 1970):
Concéde nobis, Dómine,
præsídia milítiæ christiánæ sanctis inchoáre ieiúniis…

From the Breviary, to be used in the Divine Office (translated in 1974):
Support us, Lord, as with this Lenten fast
we begin our Christian warfare…

From the Missal, to be used at Mass (translated in 2010):
Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting
this campaign of Christian service…

One does not have to be a Latin scholar to recognise that præsídia milítiæ christiánæ is not best translated as a campaign of Christian service. A strict literal translation would be the garrisons of the Christian army. This is more closely reflected in the older (1974) translation, but who or what are we going into battle against? That prayer goes on to give us an answer: the spirit of evil/spiritual evils. In this we must see the person of the Devil.

The Catechism writes (CCC 2851) of the line in the Our Father, but deliver us from evil, that “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God.” In combatting his influence in our lives and in our world, we bring ourselves closer to God; because we reject and fight against not just him, but all evil. St Augustine described evil as “an absence of good;” anything which stems from God is good, anything which lacks God’s goodness is the work of the Devil. As the Catechism continues (CCC 2854), “When we ask to be delivered from the Evil One, we pray as well to be freed from all evils, present, past and future, of which he is the author or instigator.”

This has been the view of the Church from its earliest days and only recently has evil seemingly become a term to be avoided. Some early Christian examples include St Peter, who wrote (1 Pet 5:8) to suffering Christians, “your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith;” and St Paul, who blamed the devil for preventing his visit to Thessalonica (1 Thess 2:18) – “we wanted to come to you… but Satan hindered us.”

The effect of evil in our day to day lives as Christians is of course sin – those times when we turn away from God and give in to the temptations of false happiness offered by the Father of Lies. Fortunately the Church offers us the spiritual weapons needed to fight against such temptation, and insists on our use of them in the Holy Season of Lent.

The word insists in the last sentence may seem authoritarian, but the Church does exercise her authority in this. The Church has five precepts, which I will again turn to the Catechism to define (CCC 2041): “The precepts of the Church are set in the context of a moral life bound to and nourished by liturgical life. The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by the pastoral authorities is meant to guarantee to the faithful the very necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort.” (Emphases are my own)

The fourth precept of the Church binds us to observe the times of fasting and abstinence laid down by the Church (CCC 2043). While there are days of defined fasting and abstinence, the spirit of self-denial extends to all of the days of penance, which includes “every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.” (CIC 1249-50)

Along with Prayer and Almsgiving, Fasting is one of the weapons with which we are called to battle sin during Lent. It is the inward facing weapon with which we battle temptations in the depths of our heart. We deny ourselves in imitation of the Lord in the desert, as we will hear about in the Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent (Mt 4:1-11); after his time of fasting the Lord was able to reject the temptations of the Devil. Some would say that the Lord’s rejection was a foregone conclusion because of his divinity, but that was not the case; his humanity caused him to feel temptation just as we do. What is more, there were no witnesses save the Lord and the Devil, and yet the Lord felt his time of fasting and temptation was important enough to later recount it to the Apostles, who passed it into the Gospels.

Some would point to the Gospel of Ash Wednesday (Mt 6:1-6,16-18) and say that fasting is not something to be talked about. I would certainly agree that it is not to be boasted about, especially not in the seeking of recognition or adulation; but that is not to say that it should not happen at all. Indeed, the words that the Lord uses, When you fast… suggests an assumption that fasting definitely will take place; and if fasting must take place, then at the least there must be a discussion of what it involves, or no one new to the faith (as a child or an adult) would ever learn about it.

Fasting is a form of self-discipline. Whatever we fast from, it must be something we will miss. This principle is understandable even to the very young. Children will often joke that they will give up broccoli or some similarly disliked food, usually with the full knowledge of the humour they are sharing by apparently missing the point of a fast. What we are doing when we fast is denying ourselves something morally neutral, so that we can be confident in our ability to deny ourselves things which are attractive. Then when things morally evil come along, we can be confident in our ability to deny them too; and with them, the author of all that is evil – that same Satan that tempted our Lord. In this way we prepare ourselves worldly to celebrate the liturgies of the Holy Triduum, and spiritually for the eternal reward won for us in the Paschal mysteries.

By way of a summary, I will give the final words here to the Prayer over the Offerings for Ash Wednesday:

We entreat you, O Lord,
that, through works of penance and charity,
we may turn away from harmful pleasures
and, cleansed from our sins, may become worthy
to celebrate devoutly the Passion of your Son.
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.