Letter 28
To my beloved brother in Christ,
You ask about the enforcement of fasting regulations and whether leniency is ever appropriate. This is a pastoral question of genuine delicacy.
The disciplines of fasting — the Ember Days, the Lenten fast, the Friday abstinence — are not arbitrary impositions. They have a genuine spiritual function: they train the will, they express solidarity with the poor, they create a rhythm of seriousness that prevents the Christian life from becoming entirely comfortable and unreflective. A church that abandons its penitential disciplines soon finds that it has abandoned the penitential spirit along with them.
At the same time: the regulations were made for people, not people for the regulations. A nursing mother, a man laboring in the fields, a person recovering from illness — these are cases where rigorous application of the fasting rule does more harm than good and where any reasonable pastoral application allows for dispensation.
The problem is that "reasonable pastoral application" can expand to cover almost any inconvenience if the bishop is not careful. I have known clergy who effectively allowed the entire fast to become optional by being endlessly flexible about who qualified for exemption. This is not compassion; it is the erosion of discipline under the disguise of compassion.
My practice: hold to the rule, apply it with genuine pastoral judgment in genuine cases of hardship, be consistent enough that people know what to expect, and be willing to explain the reasons for the discipline to those who ask. A congregation that understands why it fasts will keep the fast much better than one that simply obeys.
Braulio
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.