By every modern metric, the older Catholic world seems brutal when it comes to fasting.

Men worked construction sites through Chicago winters while fasting. Families structured calendars around abstinence days. Laborers stayed hunger through entire workdays during Lent. Children woke before sunrise for Mass while following the Eucharistic fast from midnight onward.

And somehow, amid all that hardship, those communities built families, parishes, schools, hospitals, trades, and cultures with astonishing resilience.

During a conversation with Heroic Men, Catholic author and researcher Matthew Plese described that older world as far more disciplined, duty-bound, and spiritually serious than modern Catholic life. His work centers on forgotten Catholic customs, fasting traditions, and practices that once shaped daily life across Christendom.

“When Christianity reached its apex during the High Middle Ages,” Plese explained, “about half the year involved mandatory abstinence, and roughly a third of the year involved fasting.”

That reality sounds extreme through modern ears.

For centuries, Catholics accepted it as ordinary life.

Lunch Breaks… Without Lunch

One story especially stayed with the interviewers.

Plese recalled hearing a priest describe Italian Catholic workers during the 1930s and 1940s. During fasting days, many laborers arrived at work carrying no lunch.

“They couldn’t eat,” Plese said. “So they sat during their lunch break, rested, then returned to work hungry.”

The image feels almost impossible within modern American culture, where convenience drives nearly every habit. Yet Plese argued that earlier generations viewed sacrifice differently.

Duty mattered. Duty toward family. Duty toward community. Duty toward God.

“If the Church says you fast and abstain, they did so,” Plese explained.

That mindset created communities capable of enduring hardship without endless complaint or negotiation.

Where modern culture often treats discomfort as failure, earlier Catholic life treated sacrifice as formation.

“Things Can Be Hard”

Throughout the discussion, Plese returned repeatedly toward discipline. “Things can be hard,” he said, “but that doesn’t make them bad.”

He pointed toward modern fitness culture as evidence that many younger men hunger for challenge again. Cold plunges, endurance training, saunas, and intermittent fasting all reveal a growing fascination with voluntary hardship.

Plese believes traditional Catholic fasting fits naturally within that renewed search for discipline.

“You can take intermittent fasting and layer it onto what the Church traditionally required,” he said. For him, fasting serves far more than physical health.

It trains focus.
It strengthens discipline.
It redirects attention toward prayer.
It weakens compulsive appetites.
It reminds people that suffering can be meaningful.

“Our Lord said some demons are driven out only by prayer and fasting,” Plese adds.

The Three Purposes of Fasting

Drawing heavily from St. Thomas Aquinas, Plese outlined three historic reasons Catholics fasted.

First, fasting bridles bodily passions.
Second, fasting frees the mind for contemplation.
Third, fasting offers restitution for sin.

Plese emphasized that fasting without spiritual intention becomes little more than dieting.

He also described practical effects that emerge from disciplined fasting.

Men struggling with lust often benefit from greater bodily discipline. Families develop stronger habits around prayer. Many people discover greater mental clarity.

From Pandemic Boredom to World Marathons

Ironically, Plese never saw himself as being athletic.

Before 2020, distance running played little role within his life.

Then came the pandemic. “I was getting bored,” he recalled. “So I thought I’ll go on some runs.”

Those runs eventually became marathons. Then more marathons.

His first race involved the Chicago Marathon itself.

Since then, he has completed major races across several cities worldwide, including Boston, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and upcoming races across Australia.

Endurance running, he explained, revealed the same lesson fasting teaches.

“The mind is really the limiting thing in so many instances,” Plese said.

Long-distance training became a school of persistence for him.

St. Patrick and the Easter Fire

When asked about heroic figures, Plese immediately named St. Patrick.

Modern culture often reduces Patrick into green decorations, parades, and novelty shirts. Plese described a far fiercer figure.

According toward him, Patrick entered a pagan Ireland shaped through druidic religion and human sacrifice.

Patrick’s famous Easter fire carried enormous symbolic force.

“It was almost like declaring war on the Druids,” Plese explained.

Patrick endured slavery, violence, assassination attempts, and relentless hardship during his missionary work.

Plese especially admired the saint’s life of penance. Ancient accounts describe Patrick praying the Psalms through severe physical austerities, including long hours kneeling and praying within freezing water.

A Forgotten Inheritance

Modern Catholics inherited a massive spiritual tradition that many barely understand anymore. Plese described discovering widespread confusion even among clergy regarding older fasting customs.

Many Catholics, he explained, struggle even imagining practices once considered ordinary:

Christmas Eve fasting.
Wednesday abstinence.
Forty-day preparation before Christmas.
Extended Eucharistic fasting.
Seasonal vigils.
Ember Days.

Many disappeared gradually across generations.

Plese believes recovering even portions of those practices could reshape family life, discipline, prayer, and spiritual seriousness.

“You can be much more than you think you are,” he said.

For earlier generations of Catholics, fasting was part of ordinary life.

Plese believes modern men still hunger for it.

Why Catholic Men Used to Fast Half the Year…