1. What is Ash Wednesday?
Ash Wednesday is the day Lent begins in the Catholic faith. It occurs 40 days after Good Friday.
From the Montgomery Advertiser’s Q&A as noted by Get Religion.
Even stranger is that they list at the bottom of the article.
Source: James Azrin of the Nazareth Resource Library
No not James Azrin, who they are referring to is Jimmy Akin’s old site the Nazareth Resource Library and his page on Ash Wednesday. Though on his page it says. "It occurs forty days before Good Friday." It is quite obvious they lifted their whole FAQ From Jimmy’s site, though they paraphrased from much if it. As Get Religion also noticed they framed frame Ash Wednesday as pertaining to Roman Catholics only. In recent years though it has been much more common for Protestant churches to have Ash Wednesday services.
5 comments
This is an excellent website, so I am adding it to my blog.
http://englishcatholicism.blogspot.com/
They quoted it wrong and the information is wrong. Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter Sunday. As I was told, Sundays don’t count in lent. Someone told me that at somepoint, the Church didn’t want people to abstain and mortify on the day of rest. Thus, we have 40 days of penence plus six Sundays in lent. I wish this to be a record and I want to publicly proclaim that I was right and James Akin was wrong. I had to extreme clarity and prescence to see through the muddled stuck-in-the-ruts thinking. This is probably the ONLY time I’ll be able to do correct Mr. Akin. I’ve emailed him to make him aware of the extent of his errors, corrected him and invited him back in to the fullness of the universal Church. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a class to teach about the virtue of humility.
My gloating is over; the crow is served. It seems that the LONG discussion is taken up at http://www.jimmyakin.org/2004/03/the_length_of_l.html and there’s this link http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09152a.htm which says, “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.”
So, is what I said right? Answer: It’s debateable.
So, not only did they get the ‘before/after’ thing backwards, they got Jimmy’s name wrong as well? Hilarious!
Anybody tell Mr. Azrin about this? 🙂
ordinary Sundays are like mini-Easter Sundays. iirc, fasting or mortification on sundays are forbidden. anyone know more about this?