The purpose of Lent...is to keep alive in our consciousness and our life the fact that being a Christian can only take the form of becoming a Christian ever anew; that it is not an event now over and done with but a process requiring constant practice.
From "Lent" (originally published in 1970), in Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005, 280.
