Most Americans these days know Advent as a sort of countdown to the Christmas-shopping deadline, fueled by Christmassy songs on the radio and in stores and punctuated by office parties and reminders to buy a Christmas tree.

But historically in the Catholic Church, which established Advent in the first place, the season emphasized self-denial to prepare spiritually for the coming of Jesus.

In former times the Church required Catholics to practice penance in the form of fasting (eating less food or no food) and abstaining (avoiding certain foods, such as meat). Now, penance is by invitation. But it hasn’t totally fallen out of fashion.

Advent includes “an element of penance,” says the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “in the sense of preparing, quieting, and disciplining our hearts for the full joy of Christmas.”

Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik told the Register that Advent is “a season rich with meaning and purpose” that is active and doesn’t just mean waiting for Christmas.

“While it is often viewed as a time of joyful anticipation, it is equally a season of penance and preparation, carrying the dual themes of hope and repentance. Just as Lent prepares us for the glory of Easter, Advent calls us to ready our hearts for the coming of Christ — not only as the baby born in Bethlehem but also as the King who will come again,” Bishop Zubik said by email through a spokesman.

What Is Advent?

The easy part is the Latin. “Advent” is derived from the Latin words ad (meaning “to”) and venire (meaning “to come”) — or, literally, “to come to.”

What is being “come to”? Christmas, of course, the feast of the birth of Jesus, celebrated on Dec. 25. But not just Christmas.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a French Cistercian monk and doctor of the Church, spoke of “three comings” of Jesus: in the flesh, in first-century Judea; now, to believers who “see the Lord within their own selves”; and at the end of time, when Jesus will come “in glory and majesty.”

St. Bernard advised listeners (in his “Sermon 5” on Advent) to focus on the coming of Jesus into their hearts.

“Because this coming lies between the other two, it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last,” St. Bernard said. “In the first, Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will appear as our life; in this middle coming, he is our rest and consolation.”

Advent Penance?

That road once included a lot of empty stomachs.

The early Church in Ireland called Advent “Winter Lent,” according to an article in the February 1881 edition of Irish Ecclesiastical Record. St. Leo the Great, pope during the fifth century, called it the “winter fast.”

“When the body therefore fasts from food, let the mind fast from vices, and pass judgment upon all earthly cares and desires according to the law of its King,” St. Leo said in a sermon about Advent and other liturgical periods of discipline.

St. Gregory of Tours, sixth-century bishop of Tours in what is now central France, said in his History of the Franks (Book 10, Paragraph 6) that his fifth-century predecessor St. Perpetuus implemented a three-times-a-week fast from Dec. 12, the day after the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, until Christmas Eve. That’s 43 days, or around the length of Lent.

While details varied, Advent remained a time of formal penance into the early 20th century. Abbot Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), a French Benedictine priest and monk, wrote in his 1870 book The Liturgical Year that Advent is “a time of preparation, properly so called, for the Birth of our Saviour, by works of penance” (p. 23).

Fasting was required on Wednesdays and Fridays during Advent in the United States until 1840, when Wednesdays went away, according to Matthew Plese’s 2023 book The Definitive Guide to Catholic Fasting and Abstinence (p. 52). Mandatory fasting on both Wednesdays and Fridays during Advent disappeared everywhere when the 1917 Code of Canon Law left it out.

Even so, memories lingered. In 1942, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in Advent:

But here in the Advent-darkened room

Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea

Of penance will charm back the luxury …

The poem calls to mind a period in the Church when fasting and abstinence were year-round requirements for Catholics, as the Register reported in April 2023. Some U.S. bishops have recently shown interest in restoring the Church’s pre-1966 rule of no meat on Fridays throughout the year, as the Register reported in November 2024. Yet a more common question for bishops is whether they’ll temporarily lift the rules the Church has in place now, such as when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday during Lent.

As for Advent, the Church currently sets aside no single day during the season for either going without food or avoiding certain foods or any other kind of sacrifice.

The current Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1983, defines the “penitential days and times in the universal Church” as “every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent” (1250), subject to alteration by national bishops’ conferences (1253). That doesn’t include Advent.

From Required to Voluntary

In past generations, Advent had a built-in back door for formal penance, in the form of Ember Days, required days of fasting and abstinence that occurred four times a year over the course of three days, always a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

One set of Ember Days occurred during Advent, always after the feast of St. Lucy on Dec. 13.

In 2024, those days fall on Wednesday, Dec. 18; Friday, Dec. 20; and Saturday, Dec. 21.

But Ember Days aren’t on the universal Church calendar because of changes during the 1960s.

In February 1966, St. Paul VI left it up to national bishops’ conferences to decide which days outside of Lent and Good Friday should be fasting and abstinence days, in his apostolic constitution Paenitemini (Chapter 3).

In November 1966, the U.S. bishops removed the no-meat-on-Fridays rule, outside of Lent and Good Friday, and also noted that vigils of feasts and Ember Days “no longer oblige to fast and abstinence.”

“However, the liturgical renewal and the deeper appreciation of the joy of the holy days of the Christian year will, we hope, result in a renewed appreciation as to why our forefathers spoke of ‘a fast before a feast,’” the U.S. bishops said.

“We impose no fast before any feast day,” the bishops added, “but we suggest that the devout will find greater Christian joy in the feasts of the liturgical calendar if they freely bind themselves, for their own motives and in their own spirit of piety, to prepare for each Church festival by a day of particular self-denial, penitential prayer, and fasting.”

Bring It Back?

Some Catholics would like to see a more emphatic spirit of penance restored to Advent.

Plese, in his book, describes a sodality called the Fellowship of St. Nicholas, which invites Catholics to make a private commitment to abstain from meat from Nov. 12 until Christmas Day, which includes all of the current Church season of Advent.

Exodus, the Catholic organization that sponsors the popular Exodus 90 three-month program of physical and spiritual detoxification leading up to Easter, offers an Advent challenge for Catholic men featuring spiritual readings and Advent traditions meant to help them “overcome the consumerism and shallow entertainment that so often trivialize this beautiful season.”

John Grondelski, a theologian and former associate dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University, told the Register that bringing back formal penance in the weeks leading up to Christmas would amount to what he called “solid pastoral care.”

“The problem with Advent, especially in an American context, is that December becomes an ‘anticipation of’ rather than a ‘preparation for’ Christmas,” said Grondelski, a Register contributor, by email. “The result is that we front-load the celebration but never do any preparation.”

“And the whole reason for the season is ‘for us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven,’” Grondelski said, referring to the Nicene Creed, “which means there was something we needed to be saved from, that threatened us. We know from revelation what it is — sin — and whose fault it is — ours. So we should not give Advent short shrift or turn it into a mini-Christmas so that, by Dec. 26, it’s all over.”

Advent and Confession

Even without a Church rule requiring it, penance is always an option, of course.

Author Jay Richards asks rhetorically in his 2020 book Eat, Fast, Feast what would happen if Christians “freely started marking Advent” with fasting.

“What if the Church encouraged this, without requiring details?” he writes.

And when it comes to penance, there’s always the sacrament known by that name.

Going to confession is a vital way to observe Advent, said Bishop Zubik, of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, where every church plans to offer the sacrament on Wednesday, Dec. 11.

The best preparation for preparation for Christmas isn’t cooking, baking or shopping, but making amends with God.

“The Church encourages us to reflect on our lives, to seek reconciliation, and to deepen our relationship with God during this time. This penitential aspect highlights an opportunity for humility and conversion — a reordering of our priorities to make room for Christ,” Bishop Zubik told the Register. “Advent reminds us that true joy comes from a heart transformed by God’s love, and this transformation begins with a spirit of penance.”