King Wenceslaus of Bohemia

WHEN King Wenceslaus of Bohemia became ill in 1297, his doctors and aides agreed that it would be best for him to eat meat during Lent to regain his strength, even though Catholics at that time were forbidden all meat during the forty days of the annual season of penance. The king appealed to Pope Boniface VIII for a dispensation, the only way a person — even the king himself — could violate the rules of abstinence with a clear conscience.

The pope granted the exception on the condition that the king continue to abstain from meat on Fridays, Saturdays and the vigil of St. Matthias — and that he not eat meat in the presence of others or do so with excess.

Lent was so rigorous in the Middle Ages that everyone collectively refrained from meat and from more than one meal a day.

In the 19th century, Dom Prosper Guéranger commented in his famous Liturgical Year, from which this account of the Bohemian king comes, that the gradual adoption of milder forms of abstinence and fasting was due to a “decay of piety, and the general deterioration of bodily strength among the people of the western nations.”

Can you imagine what he might say about “the bodily strength” of Westerners if he visited an average Walmart today?

In 1741, as he recounted, Pope Benedict XIV issued an encyclical to all bishops, warning them of dire consequences:

The observance of Lent is the very badge of the Christian warfare. By it we prove ourselves not to be enemies of the cross of Christ. By it we avert the scourges of divine justice. By it we gain strength against the princes of darkness, for it shields us with heavenly help. Should mankind grow remiss in their observance of Lent, it would be a detriment to God’s glory, a disgrace to the Catholic religion, and a danger to Christian souls. Neither can it be doubted that such negligence would become the source of misery to the world, of public calamity, and of private woe.

Yikes!

If the eloquent Guéranger or prophetic Benedict XIV could see Europe today, they would have every right to say very plainly, “We told you so.”

According to the French monk, writing in the 1840s,

More than a hundred years have elapsed since this solemn warning of the Vicar of Christ was given to the world; and during that time, the relaxation he inveighed against has gone on gradually increasing. How few Christians do we meet who are strict observers of Lent, even in its present mild form!

And must there not result from this ever-growing spirit of immortification, a general effeminacy of character, which will lead, at last, to frightful social disorders? The sad predictions of Pope Benedict XIV are but too truly verified. Those nations, among whose people the spirit and practice of penance are extinct, are heaping against themselves the wrath of God, and provoking His justice to destroy them by one or other of these scourges — civil discord, or conquest. [emphasis added]

The nations of Europe can’t say they weren’t warned.

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