The excellent Eamon Duffy gives us an article in the Tablet on fasting

There is much of interest here – Duffy deftly lays out the value of fasting against various objections, and discusses the differences between the British and American bishops’ statements in 1967 that dispensed with the Friday abstinence – for once, the Americans come of better, even though the effect has been the same.

For this aspect of tradition – the dimension of symbolic distinctiveness preserved in the ancient patterns of the worship and ritual life of the Church – is at least as central to Catholic identity as many of the doctrinal positions worried about by those who conceive of tradition primarily as a body of authoritative teaching. Indeed, the massive desensitisation to the meaning and value of symbolic gesture and symbolic differentiation in the two generations since the council would not have been possible had Catholics not long since parked responsibility for all that with an abstraction called the Magisterium, thereby absolving themselves from understanding and teaching the value of their symbols and traditional practices. How else could the Catholic people have allowed their pastors to assail and abolish these ancient continuities in the name of convenience and the avoidance of oddity?

The authoritarian narrowing of the tradition to, in essence, a body of doctrines to be believed and orders from above to be obeyed, was a decisive factor in desensitising ordinary Catholics, clerical as well as lay, to the beauty and independent value of their inherited observances – matters over which no authority has or ought to have absolute control. The ordinary members of the Orthodox and Byzantine Rite Catholic Churches have a far less authoritarian mentality than Catholics, a far more widespread and lively sense of the richness of their traditions of prayer and practice, and a far more secure sense of ownership by the people of the symbols which provide continuity with the Christian past and guidance to its future.

A link to Duffy’s excellent work on the Reformation in England