What Lent is
Lent — in Latin Quadragesima, ‘the fortieth’ (day) — is the season of penance that prepares for Easter, echoing the forty days Christ spent fasting in the desert. Its three great works are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving: turning to God, mastering the body, and turning to the poor. Its colour is violet, and its mood is sober; the Alleluia falls silent until Easter, and the Gloria is heard only on solemnities and feasts.
The season begins on Ash Wednesday, when ashes are traced on the forehead with the words ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ On the fourth Sunday — Laetare, ‘Rejoice’ — the violet may lighten to rose, a glimpse of the Easter joy toward which the whole season leans.
The chant of Lent
The refrain of Lent is Attende Domine — ‘Hear us, O Lord, and have mercy, for we have sinned against Thee’ — a plea the whole assembly can carry, by tradition more than a thousand years old. Beside it stands Media Vita, the stark antiphon that remembers we are in the midst of death, and, from the Mass for the dead, the great sequence Dies Iræ, which sets the day of judgment before the soul.
This is music that does not soar but kneels. Sung in its grave modes, the chant of Lent is the sound of a people turning back — which is the essential act of the forty days.
How to keep it
Keep Lent by taking something up as much as giving something up: more prayer, real fasting, and concrete almsgiving. The Stations of the Cross, the reading of the Passion, and a plainer life are its native disciplines. Lent is not an end in itself; it is the long road cleared so that Easter can arrive.
When it falls
The dates shift each year with the date of Easter.
Why the Church fasts at all — and what she actually asks — is set out under Why Catholics fast.
Last reviewed for accuracy on , against the Douay-Rheims Bible and the Church's own documents.