Penance, self-denial helps us focus on our spiritual goals

Father John A. Kiley
Posted

Fewer aspects of traditional Roman Catholic piety have changed more over the past 100 years than the various practices of self-denial that motivated and strengthened the saints and the faithful over the centuries.

A generation which finds it challenging to forego snacks between meals on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and burdensome to plan a meal without meat on the Fridays of Lent is clearly not going to have much appreciation for keeping an all-night prayer vigil like St. Francis of Assisi or sleeping on broken pottery on his bedroom floor like St. John Vianney or nourishing herself for many years solely on the Holy Eucharist like St. Catherine of Siena. It is difficult to believe that our own grandparents or at least our great-grandparents were denied by Church practice the treat of enjoying an egg or cheese or shortening during Lent because these items came from the same creatures that supply meat. The mortifications, penances and self-discipline that were part and parcel of Catholic life from the era of the desert fathers until the early part of the 20th century have sadly faded from popular memory.

A Providence Journal (Jan. 27) article that called attention to Pope John Paul II’s practice of self-flagellation evoked a measure of wonderment among the local faithful who have forgotten, or perhaps who never knew, the important role that asceticism, mortification and self-denial played in the spiritualities of the past. The ancient St. Jerome employed bodily discipline during his long years in the Holy Land. St. Patrick stood with his arms outstretched reciting his prayers in the cold waters of the Irish Sea. Under his religious garb, St. Thomas Aquinas wore a hair-shirt — a rough, scratchy body covering that reminded the wearer all day long that the flesh was always to be subject to the spirit. St. Thomas More maintained a similar practice. St. Ignatius Loyola used the discipline (a whip of cords) on his back as well as a rope around his waist and twine around his knee as daily reminders to let the spirit rule the flesh. More recently the Venerable Matt Talbot was discovered to wear a hairshirt and bodily chains only after his death. St. Padre Pio endured intense suffering through his patient toleration of the Stigmata. Much less dramatically the celibacy maintained by parish priests and the chaste lives of religious brothers and sisters are a time-honored form of self-denial and self-discipline.

The saints had good reason to employ bodily mortification as a means of concentrating on spiritual goals and forsaking material satisfaction. St. Paul himself observed, “I chastise my body and bring it into subjection; lest perhaps when I have preached to others I myself should be castaway" (I Cor. 9:27).” Jesus fasted for 40 days in the desert, spent whole nights in solitary prayer and carried the burden of the cross through the streets of Jerusalem after enduring intense bodily scourging. The bodily mortifications of other recent popes will probably remain a secret but several pontiffs have spoken highly of bodily self-denial. The jolly Pope John XXIII taught that “the faithful must also be encouraged to do outward acts of penance, both to keep their bodies under the strict control of reason and faith, and to make amends for their own and other people's sins.” Pope Paul VI did permit the lifting of the ban of eating meat on Friday but he also advised that some other form of self-denial should replace it. Elsewhere Pope Paul was careful to note that bodily mortification does not imply any condemnation of the flesh but rather a redirection of the flesh from sinful tendencies.

Pope John Paul II is now reported to have practiced flagellation (whipping one’s body) along with other penitential practices like sleeping on a floor and extensive fasting, apparently doing this before important events such as ordinations. After intense suffering from a bullet wound due to an assassination attempt on St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II wrote an apostolic letter on the salvific meaning of suffering entitled “Salvific Doloris.” Obviously the late Holy Father saw redemptive value in the patient endurance of unavoidable physical suffering like disease, illness and incapacitation. But Pope John Paul II also understood the worth of voluntary sufferings such as extended prayer, protracted fasting and bodily discipline as a means of exalting the promptings of the Spirit over the comforts of the flesh, lifting the mind from the pleasures of this world to the consolations of the next world.