MERGED: When does Ash Wednesday fast end?/Schedule for fasting/abstinence?

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Monica4316

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Hello, I was just wondering… when does Ash Wednesday fast end, is it at midnight, or in the morning? thanks 🙂
 
I would say Midnight since 12:01 would technically be Thursday.

I know I have attended bull roasts on Friday’s during lent and waited until 12:01 to enjoy a sandwich.
 
The topic heading is probably a bit confusing. I’m a relatively new Catholic, this being my second Ash Wednesday. I didn’t realize until the day had started the meaning of fasting and abstinence, but despite learning those defintions I still have one big question about fasting and abstinence days in general:

At midnight on a fast/abstinence day, is the obligation to fast and/or abstain still in effect?

For example, Ash Wednesday would (I assume) start at the very end of Tuesday, specifically, midnight Wednesday or 12am. Would the obligation end at the end of Wednesday, i.e. midnight/12am Thursday?
 
Since a day is considered to start at 12:00 am and ends at 11:59 pm, the obligation is no longer in effect. Midnight starts a new day.
 
Yes, that’s right.

Nevertheless, the idea of average, individual people being able to keep accurate time to within the minute is pretty much a fact of only the last hundred years or so. You’d be justified, I think, in simply treating the matter as turning on the “human day” of whenever you get up to whenever you go to bed. If you are looking for more precise guidelines, or if you work a weird shift or something that means your “days” overlap bizarrely with calendar days, then by all means you can use midnight-to-midnight.
 
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