The Meaning of Lent.
The Christian tradition records a preparatory period for the celebration of Easter: it is Lent (Quadragesima). These are forty days in which the Christian exercises himself, especially, in the three biblical works already practiced by the Jewish people: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. In reality, they are works destined to mark the ordinary life of a believer, but which during the Lenten period acquire a special value; they are arranged so that the remembrance of the death and resurrection of Jesus does not result in a mere recollection, but rather is lived in the supernatural realm of Faith.
In the current time of the darkening of Christian culture, those Lenten works are illuminated by the preaching of the Church and are projected onto the life of the world with a new value. Precisely, the Christian experience of Lent is ordered toward the recovery of the sense of Redemption. The loss of the sense of Redemption and its necessity leads to the loss of the sense of Creation. That man is a being created by God and redeemed by Christ allows one to recognize the reality of sin. The biblical account of the origins of humanity explains the facts that pit some men against others, some peoples against other peoples, and which the media record without revealing their profound meaning and the reality of their origin. It will be useful to review the Lenten works, projecting their value for understanding history, the roots of the present, and the culture of peoples.
Prayer is, first of all, a human reality in which the being of man created by God and redeemed by Christ is recognized. Saint Augustine, in the first chapters of his “Confessions,” shows the outlines of prayer as a human value in the life of infants, then children, and finally adults in their relations with God, in which who the human being is is discovered. Prayer binds man to God and reveals to him who man himself is. One of the main causes of human conflicts is that man believes himself to be a god.
Fasting does not consist, fundamentally, in the deprivation of food, but first of all in the deprivation of vices; it orders man with himself, putting in place the different dimensions that constitute him. The name “almsgiving” comes from Greek and is simply translated as “mercy.” It is what is lacking in today’s culture; the exclusion of mercy is the first cause of the confrontations that the media record without being able to express their meaning.-
+ Héctor Aguer
Archbishop Emeritus of La Plata.
Buenos Aires, February 20, 2026.
Friday after Ash Wednesday. –