Although Ash Wednesday is not a Catholic holy day of obligation, it is an important part of the Lenten season. The first clear evidence of Ash Wednesday is around 960, and in the 12th century people began using palm branches from the previous Palm Sunday for ashes. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the forty days of Lent

The rules of fast and abstinence

During Lent, we as Catholics are all called to the threefold works of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. May God continue the good work in all of us and bring it to completion.

Fast & Abstinence

Fasting

The law of fasting requires a Catholic from the 18th Birthday [Canon 97] to the 59th Birthday [i.e. the beginning of the 60th year, a year which will be completed on the 60th birthday] to reduce the amount of food eaten from normal. The Church defines this as one meal a day, and two smaller meals which if added together would not exceed the main meal in quantity. Such fasting is obligatory on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. The fast is broken by eating between meals and by drinks which could be considered food (milk shakes, but not milk). Alcoholic beverages do not break the fast; however, they seem contrary to the spirit of doing penance. Those who are excused from fast or abstinence Besides those outside the age limits, those of unsound mind, the sick, the frail, pregnant or nursing women according to need for meat or nourishment, manual laborers according to need, guests at a meal who cannot excuse themselves without giving great offense or causing enmity and other situations of moral or physical impossibility to observe the penitential discipline.

Abstinence:

The law of abstinence (refraining from eating of flesh-meat: beef, poultry or pork and/or soup made from meat) binds those who have completed their fourteenth year of age. The law of fasting, however, binds all those who have attained their majority [i.e., those who have completed their eighteenth year of age] until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Nevertheless, pastors of souls and parents are to take care that minors not bound by the law of fast and abstinence are also educated in a genuine sense of penance (Code of Canon Law, canon 1252).