Today is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and it sets a clock running. This Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth of September, are the September Ember Days. For most of the Church’s history they were one of the four fixed penitential seasons of the Roman year, as ordinary and as unremarkable as Lent.
It is overwhelmingly likely that nobody will mention them to you.
That is not an accident, and it is not quite a conspiracy either. The Ember Days were never abolished. Something more interesting happened to them, and it is worth tracing carefully, because it is a small case study in how a practice can remain perfectly intact on the books and still vanish completely from the life of the Church.
Four times a year
The Latin name is Quatuor Tempora, the four times. Each set falls on a Wednesday, a Friday and a Saturday, and the four sets are anchored to four fixed points in the year. Gregory VII, at some point in his pontificate of 1073 to 1085, settled the reckoning the Latin Church has used ever since: the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday after 13 December, the feast of St. Lucy; after Ash Wednesday; after Whitsunday; and after 14 September, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
English-speaking Catholics inherited a rhyme for it, Fasting days and Emberings be, Lent, Whitsun, Holyrood, and Lucie, and a shorter mnemonic still in circulation: Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy.
The English name itself is a small puzzle worth clearing up, since parish bulletins get it wrong every year. The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia states flatly that “Ember” is a corruption of Quatuor Tempora by way of the German Quatember. English lexicographers generally disagree and derive it from the Old English ymbryne, a circuit or a running-around, from ymb, round, and ryne, a course; the Oxford English Dictionary allows that the Latin may have influenced the form without being its source. Either way, the days have nothing whatever to do with embers or with fire, which is a pity, because that would have made a better sermon.
Older than the rule that fixed them
Gregory VII fixed the dates. He did not invent the practice, which was already ancient when he regularised it. Leo the Great, who died in 461, preached on these fasts and regarded them as an apostolic institution. Gelasius, pope from 492 to 496, is the first witness to all four seasons together; before him the Roman Church seems to have kept fasts in June, September and December, with the exact days announced by the clergy rather than fixed in advance.
Where did they come from? The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the answer without the slightest embarrassment: from Rome’s own agricultural calendar. The Romans held religious observances at the sowing, the harvest and the vintage, the feriae sementivae, the feriae messis and the feriae vindemiales, and the Church took the rhythm and put it to Christian use.
Some Catholics get nervous when they hear this, and they should not. A religion founded on the doctrine that God took a human body, in a particular province, under a particular governor, is not going to be squeamish about baptising a farmer’s calendar. The alternative to sanctifying the year people actually live in is a liturgy that floats free of it, which is a fair description of the problem we have now.
What they were actually for
The stated purposes were three, and they are worth reading slowly: to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to use those gifts in moderation, and to assist the needy.
Then there is the fourth purpose, the one that ought to stop a modern reader cold. Gelasius permitted the ordination of priests and deacons on Ember Saturdays, which had previously been restricted to Easter. From that point on, Ember Saturday was ordination day. Which means that four times a year, the entire Latin Church fasted for three days, and at the end of the third day her bishops laid hands on new priests.
Consider what that arrangement assumes. It assumes that ordinations are the business of everybody, not of the seminary and the family. It assumes that the right preparation for receiving new priests is for the whole body to go hungry first. It assumes that vocations are asked for rather than recruited. We currently have a vocations crisis and a great many programmes, and we have quietly stopped doing the thing the Church did about it for fifteen hundred years.
How they vanished
Here is the part that surprises people. There is no document suppressing the Ember Days.
What there is, is a sequence. In 1966, Paul VI’s apostolic constitution Paenitemini rebuilt the Church’s penitential discipline around a far simpler frame: abstinence on Fridays, fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, with broad authority given to episcopal conferences to transfer the days of penance and to substitute other forms of penance in whole or in part. The Ember Days are not mentioned anywhere in it.
Then, in 1969, the General Norms for the Liturgical Year addressed them directly, and the wording is the whole story:
On rogation and ember days the practice of the Church is to offer prayers to the Lord for the needs of all people, especially for the productivity of the earth and for human labor, and to give him public thanks. In order to adapt the rogation and ember days to various regions and the different needs of the people, the conferences of bishops should arrange the time and plan for their celebration.
General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar (1969), nn. 45–46
Read that as a lawyer would. The observance is affirmed. The dates are removed. The duty to supply new dates is assigned to a committee. And in most of the world that committee never took the subject up, or took it up and produced nothing, so no dates were ever set, so nothing was ever scheduled, so nothing ever happened.
That is how a fifteen-hundred-year-old practice ends. Not by suppression, which would have provoked an argument and left a document to point at, but by devolution to a body under no deadline. A duty that belongs to everyone in general belongs to no one in particular. The Ember Days were not abolished. They were referred to committee.
What the old discipline actually asked
If you want to keep them, it helps to know what keeping them meant, because the answer is a good deal more moderate than the reputation suggests.
Under the 1917 Code, canon 1252, the Ember Days were days of both fast and abstinence. The mitigation most American Catholics would have grown up with came later and was particular rather than universal: following a ruling of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, the bishops of the United States issued modified regulations in January 1949, standardised in 1951, under which Ember Wednesday and Ember Saturday carried only partial abstinence. Partial abstinence meant that meat, and soup or gravy made from meat, might be taken once in the day, at the principal meal. Ember Friday kept complete abstinence, like any Friday of the old discipline. The fast itself, binding those between twenty-one and fifty-nine, meant one full meal with two other meatless collations that together did not add up to a second full meal, and no eating between them.
That is one ordinary dinner, three days running, four times a year. It is not the desert fathers. Any healthy adult can do it, and nobody needs permission to try.
The case for keeping them
Three reasons, in ascending order of seriousness.
The first is that they are seasonal and we are not. That 1909 line about giving thanks for the gifts of nature and learning to use them in moderation reads far better in 2026 than it did when it was written. We eat strawberries in January and have no idea when anything is harvested. A calendar that makes you notice the sowing and the vintage is not nostalgia; it is a corrective to a genuine derangement.
The second is the ordinations. Fast on the September Ember Days and pray for priests on the Saturday, and you are doing precisely what those days were instituted to do, in a year when the Church needs it rather badly.
The third is that they are free, and this is the point most worth making to a Catholic who feels the tradition has been taken away from him. Nobody has to give you permission to eat less on a Wednesday. There is no rubric to violate, no faculty to obtain, no parish to petition, no bishop to persuade, no permission that can be withdrawn. The Ember Days are, at the level of what you personally do about them, entirely within your own gift.
The next set falls in Advent: Wednesday the sixteenth, Friday the eighteenth and Saturday the nineteenth of December this year, following St. Lucy’s day on the thirteenth. That is three months from now, which is exactly long enough to forget, so put it somewhere you will see it.
There is a habit in traditional circles of narrating every loss as a theft, and it is worth resisting, because it is frequently not accurate and it is never useful. The Ember Days were not stolen. They were handed to a body that had a great many other things to do, and they fell through the floor.
The good news buried in that unglamorous diagnosis is that nothing needs to be undone before you can keep them. A practice suppressed would require a decree to restore. A practice devolved and forgotten requires only that somebody remember.
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. Four times a year. Give thanks for the harvest, use less than you could, give something away, and pray for the men being ordained. That is the whole of it, and it has been waiting there the entire time.
References
- F. Mershman, “Ember Days,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), for Gregory VII’s fixing of the four sets, Leo the Great and Gelasius, the Roman agricultural precedents, and the three stated purposes.
- Paul VI, apostolic constitution Paenitemini, 17 February 1966: the reordered penitential discipline and the faculties granted to episcopal conferences. The Ember Days are nowhere mentioned in it.
- Calendarium Romanum (1969), General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, nn. 45–47, quoted verbatim above from the standard English translation.
- 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici, c. 1252, on the days of fast and abstinence. The reduction of Ember Wednesday and Saturday to partial abstinence was a particular discipline, not a universal one: the United States bishops’ modified regulations of 28 January 1949, following a ruling of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, standardised in 1951.
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ember day,” on Old English ymbryne and the possible influence of quatuor tempora on the form of the word.
- September 2026 Ember Days: Wednesday 16, Friday 18, Saturday 19 September, following the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on Monday 14 September. Advent 2026: Wednesday 16, Friday 18, Saturday 19 December, following St. Lucy on Sunday 13 December.
On other things the reforms set aside without quite abolishing, see what was lost: the prayers that were removed. Our wider coverage of the traditional movement and its questions lives at Traditional Catholicism.