• Introduction
• What would happen if . . .
• What are we supposed to do there?
• Taking it easy?
• RSVP

Sunday is the most demanding day of the week for me. Usually I have two Masses at two different places. (When I was a younger bishop I used to schedule three engagements on a Sunday, but I find that I’m not up to that any more.) The Sunday engagements on my calendar are sometimes confirmations, sometimes parish anniversaries, sometimes the dedication of a new parish facility. Occasionally, during my slack season, I substitute for a vacationing pastor and celebrate ordinary parish Sunday Masses. What with travel and preaching and celebrating in unaccustomed surroundings, I’m tired by the time Sunday evening comes around.

But I find that, by the end of a Sunday, I have a greater sense of identity as a church member and church minister than I have at any other time of the week. I am much more intensely aware of who and what I am in my relationship with the Lord and more joyful in my relationship with the other members of the church. My Sunday activity reassures me and comforts me and strengthens me in my life as a Christian believer. It makes me glad to be a church minister, glad to be a church member. I am grateful for Sundays, and I don’t like to think of what my life would be without them.

Last year I was invited to give an address on the Sunday Eucharist in the diocese of Greensburg, PA, where they were engaged in a three-year program of instruction and reflection on the Eucharist in general and on the Sunday Eucharist in particular. I worked hard preparing my presentation, but when it was finished, I was grateful for the effort I had expended because it helped me to clarify my own thinking about and appreciation of what the celebration of Sunday is really about.

In 1998 I offered some reflections about Sunday Mass to the readers of The Catholic Telegraph in my “Practicing Catholic” series, because going to Mass on Sunday is an important part of being a practicing Catholic. (That whole series, is now available in book form from Saint Anthony Messenger Press.)

On May 31, 1998, our Holy Father issued an apostolic letter entitled Dies Domini (“The Day of the Lord”) which was dedicated to keeping the Lord’s day holy. It’s a fine letter and one that can be read without too much difficulty in an hour or so. I recommend it to the faithful of our archdiocese.

As I remembered what I had presented in Greensburg and what I had written in The Catholic Telegraph lenten series, and particularly as I mulled over the Holy Father’s letter, I became aware that I still had more to say to the people of our local church about Sunday. So I decided to write this reflection on the observance of the Lord’s day.

The purpose of this series is certainly not to replace the pope’s letter or to suggest that the people of the archdiocese shouldn’t bother reading it. On the contrary, the pope’s letter seemed to offer an invitation to me to make an attempt to convey to you in a more personal way your bishop’s enthusiasm about Sunday — with the hope that those who read these articles might grow in awareness and gratitude for the gifts that it offers us.

The pope speaks of Sunday as “the fundamental feast day” and “an invitation to joy.” (Dies Domini 1 f.) It is my hope that what I offer to the faithful of our local church in these reflections will help them to a more jubilant celebration of the fundamental feast day and a more generous response to the invitation to joy.

I said that I don’t like to think about what my own life would be without Sundays. But what about the life of the church? What would happen if there were no Sundays, specifically no Sunday Eucharist, in the church?

Nothing.

I don’t mean that everything would still be the same and that nothing would change. On the contrary, I mean that if there were no Sunday Eucharist, little or nothing would go on in the church at large. Its activities would soon cease and before long there would be no church. Unless there is a Sunday Eucharist, nothing will happen in the church. The Holy Father calls Sunday “an indispensable element of our Christian identity.” (Dies Domini, no. 30)

We need Sunday Eucharist in order to continue to be who and what we are. Without it, we would lose our identity as the people of the Lord. The Sunday gathering is the most character istic and distinctive Christian religious practice after baptism and the Eucharist and is a necessary consequence of each. And it has always been so.

Already on the first Easter Sunday evening we find “the eleven and those with them . . . gathered together . . . saying, ‘The Lord has been raised and has appeared to Simon.’ ” (cf. Luke24.33 f.) A week later they were together again when Jesus appeared to invite Thomas (who had been absent the Sunday before) to a deeper level of faith and commitment. (cf. John 20. 26 f.) Within the very first days after the resurrection, the Sunday gathering had become a custom for the community of believers. And it remained so.

A few years later we find Paul telling the Corinthians to take up a collection “on the first day of every week” (cf. I Cor. 16.2). Shortly thereafter Paul is in Troas at a gathering that included instruction and the breaking of the bread “on the first day of the week.” (cf. Acts 20.7-12)

About 50 years after that, the Didache (14) invites believers to “come together on the Lord’s day, break bread and give thanks.” At roughly the same time, Ignatius of Antioch seems to find in the Sunday assembly the distinguishing sign of the Christian believer: “Those who used to live according to the old order of things have attained to a new hope and they observe no longer the Sabbath but Sunday, the day on which Christ and His death raised up our life.” (Ad Magnesios 9)

From two centuries later comes the wonderful story of the martyrs of Abitina (in modern Tunisia). Thirty-one men and 18 women were arrested and charged with illegal assembly. Saturninus, a priest, told the proconsul, “We must celebrate the Lord’s day. It is a law for us.” Emeritus, in whose house the group had assembled, said, “Yes, it was in my house that we celebrated the Lord’s Day. We cannot live without celebrating the Lord’s day.” And Victoria, a virgin, simply said, “I attended the meeting because I am a Christian.”

What is the characteristic action of the followers of Christ? From the very beginning it has been going to the assembly on Sunday.

But why do Christians gather on Sunday? They gather to meet Jesus, to make contact with the risen Christ and in the process to make and experience church.

Notice that the point of the Sunday assembly is not primarily to remember or commemorate the resurrection, but to experience the risen Lord, even as the eleven experienced Him on those first Sundays that we read about in the gospels. That’s what makes the day holy.

The way in which we experience the risen Lord is different from the way the eleven experienced Him on the first Easter. They saw Jesus and touched His wounds. We come into contact with Jesus in His words and in His sacramental sacrifice, but the contact is no less real.

But there’s more than just contact. The purpose of the Sunday assembly is not just to provide a nice religious experi ence for people. It is a gathering with an agenda. The Sunday agenda is to make people aware of their own participation in the life of the risen Christ in order to perceive the urgency of ongoing assimilation of Christ’s new creation in themselves, to refocus their activity on the new world that Christ founded, and to consecrate themselves to helping to build up that new world in holiness and justice. Our contact with the risen Christ on Sunday is not a social engagement that offers us a chance to visit with the Lord and with each other, but an urgent strategy session in which we get our orders for the week.

Another dimension of the significance of the Sunday assembly is the consecration of time. One might call the assembly the sacrament of time. (This is a major theme in Dies Domini. Cf. nos. 2, 60, 73 ff.)

Like all sacramental realities, Sunday offers us a memory of the past (the life, death and resurrection of Jesus), a saving action in the present (the word and action of the risen Christ in our midst), and the proclamation and promise of a future (the final fulfillment of creation in Christ’s coming again in glory). The Sunday encounter with Christ is what gives meaning to all other days, past, present and future.

In sum, we are a people who come into contact with the risen Christ each Sunday in order to stay aware of who and what we are, in order to remain attentive to our calling as sanctifiers of the world and sanctifiers of time.

There are lots of ways in which the church highlights the vital importance of Sunday. The first and most familiar is the grave obligation that the church imposes on all its members to participate in the Eucharistic celebration every Sunday unless they are dispensed or excused for a grave reason (cf. Code of Canon Law 1246 ff. and Catechism of the Catholic Church 2181 ff.). Why? The Catechism says that attendance at Sunday Mass is a testimony, a testimony of belonging to Christ and the church, a testimony to God’s holiness and to our communion in faith, hope, and charity, as well as a source of strength that we receive from one another. This makes it clear why deliberate absence from Sunday Mass is sinful: it is a refusal to give testimony to our Christian faith. Going to Mass on Sunday, therefore, is not so much a matter of fulfilling an obligation as a matter of maintaining an identity. It’s the way we stay Catholic Christians.

A second context in which the church indicates what level of importance it assigns to Sunday is also in The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 2179). I am much enamored of the Catechism, and one of my favorite theories about it is that the positioning of the material is often as instructive as its content. As far as I have been able to determine, there is only one paragraph in the whole Catechism about parishes, and that paragraph occurs in the section on the Sunday Eucharist. After citing the definition of parish from the Code of Canon Law, the text goes on to say that the parish “is the place where all the faithful can be gathered together for the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist.” It then goes on to speak of other parish activities, but they are clearly secondary to the Sunday Eucharist. The point seems to be that the Sunday Eucharist is not one more activity that parishes have to provide for their people, but that the Sunday Eucharist is the fundamental purpose for having parishes at all.

The third context in which the church manifests its concern for Sunday is in one of the more obscure portions of the Second Vatican Council, namely the Appendix to the decree on the liturgy. Here the council is talking about calendar reform, and it says, in effect, “The church is open to celebrating Easter on any Sunday that everyone will agree to. It doesn’t have to be the Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. We’re even open to the establishment of a perpetual civil calendar, provided that it maintains a seven-day week with a Sunday. We can go along with practically anything, but we won’t consent to messing with Sunday. It’s too important for us.”

The Sunday assembly, therefore, is the characteristic practice of the Christian church. We are a people called to a joyful encounter with the risen Christ each week, on Sunday. It was so in the beginning, is so now, and will be so as long as the church is the church. We wouldn’t be ourselves without it.

For reflection and discussion...

1. Archbishop Pilarczyk states that Christians gather on Sunday to meet Jesus, to make contact with the risen Christ and to make and experience church. This would seem to imply that church is not some place where we go, not even some organization we belong to, but that church is fundamentally who we are and what we do. How do you understand this meaning of church?
2. Why do you personally respond to the church’s invitation to gather on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist? What motivates you to gather with the rest of the community to celebrate Eucharist on Sundays?
3. If the Sunday gathering is a “strategy session in which we get our orders for the week,” in what ways does your experience of Sunday affect the rest of your week?
4. In what ways does your parish community communicate that Sunday is the fundamental purpose for its, the parish’s, existence?

The assembly of the faithful for the Sunday Eucharist is the action that gives the church its identity. But what are the faithful supposed to do when they get there? Is it enough just to be present as if for some sort of roll call? Is it enough just to show up? Lots of people seem to think so, but I am convinced that the “showing up for roll call” mentality is why so many people find going to Mass on Sunday to be a burden instead of a joyful experience of the risen Christ. We are not there just to be there. We are there to do.

The Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (no. 106) describes what is supposed to happen on Sunday, and it lists four elements. “On this day Christ’s faithful should [1] come together into one place so that, [2] by hearing the word of God and [3] taking part in the Eucharist they may call to mind the passion, the resurrection, and the glorification of the Lord Jesus, and [4] may thank God who ‘has begotten us again, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto a living hope’ (I Peter 1.3).”

Vatican II’s approach to “the Sunday obligation” is considerably richer than what we had before the Council. Before the Council, the church seemed to demand only that the individual be present for the offertory, the consecration, and the (priest’s) communion. The obligation did not include being present for the liturgy of the word, and there was little or no stress on the communitarian dimension of the liturgy. It was a matter of being minimally present for a minimum of actions by the presider. I think that some of this mentality is still with us, with the result that some people think that they are being imposed on if more is now expected of them than mere presence, while others think that the obligation of just being there is not enough reason for them to go. The Council’s teaching has given us a lot more to work with than we had previously.

Let’s look at each of the four components of the Sunday assembly to see what we are being invited to be present for, and what response that invitation involves.

First, the gathering. Why do we gather? We gather because God has called us, because we are Christians, because there can be no Christians without church, because there can be no church without an assembly. We gather to offer and receive pardon and reconciliation. We gather to express both the unity of God’s people in Christ and the diversity of service that Christ has given to the church. We gather for a joyful encounter with the risen Lord and with those who live in Him.

The author of the early third-century Teaching of the Apostles (ch. 13) says, “Let no one deprive the church by staying away; if they do they deprive the Body of Christ of one of its members. . . . Do not, then, make light of your own selves, do not deprive our Saviour of His members, do not rend, do not scatter His Body.”

Going to Mass on Sunday makes a lot more sense if we go with the proper expectations and the proper motivations. We don’t come together just to be together. We don’t come together to smile and nod to one another or to engage in small talk. We come together because we need the risen Christ, because the risen Christ has chosen to need us and because we need each other. This is the mindset that we are supposed to bring with us when we come.

The second component of the Sunday assembly is the proclamation and hearing of the word of God. Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, (no. 2) says that through revelation, the invisible God, out of the abundance of His love, speaks to us as His friends and lives among us so that He can invite and take us into fellowship with himself. That’s what happens in the liturgy of the word at the Eucharist. God speaks to this congregation, here and now, as His friends, through His written word of Scripture and through His minister, and offers them contact, fellowship and meaning for their lives. Jesus says that those who hear His word and believe have eternal life (cf. Jn. 5.34).

The Liturgy of the Word in Eucharistic assembly offers us God’s word, and God’s word is not just instructive but also creative. Every time we hear and heed God’s word, God says again what He said at the very beginning (cf. Genesis 1.3), “Let there be light, and light was made.” Without the word of God, we dwell in darkness.

Of course hearing and heeding are not exercises in passivity. We have to tune ourselves in if God’s word is going to have its effect in us. We have to extend the antennae of our minds and hearts to receive what the Lord has to offer us. God can’t do His part if we don’t do ours.

One of the more frustrating aspects of preaching for me personally is inattention on the part of some of the members of the congregation. The drooping eyes, the bowed head, the surreptitious glances at a wristwatch all make it very difficult for the preacher to be enthusiastic and energetic in his preaching. Of course, I acknowledge that my preaching may not always be everything it could be, but I sometimes wonder whether people realize how much they contribute to the preaching they hear by their own receptivity.

The third component of the Sunday celebration is the Eucharistic sacrifice proper. In the context of the community assembly and of God’s word, the congregation is brought into contact with the death and resurrection of Jesus — not as those who watch or those who remember but as those who participate. Through the celebration of the Eucharist we come into contact with the central realities of Christian existence: the death of Christ and His risen life, a contact that both gives meaning to the world that is and offers a guarantee of the world to come.

In the Eucharistic celebration we are part of the most momentous happenings of all time, the most momentous happenings of all eternity. Here again, attentiveness and receptivity are essential. We need to make a conscious offering of ourselves and our lives in union with the sacrifice of Christ. We need to open ourselves to the growth in generosity and faithfulness that Christ offers us by making us participate in His generosity and faithfulness, a participation that reaches its fullness when Jesus gives us himself in Holy Communion.

It has occurred to me that being present on Calvary meant one thing for Mary and the Beloved Disciple, and something quite different for the Roman enlisted men who were probably just waiting to get off duty. Merely being there wasn’t the important part.

The final component of what is supposed to happen at the Sunday assembly, according to The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is thanksgiving. This is the component that gives the celebration its name: eucharistia.

Thanksgiving is the heart of what we are supposed to do at the Sunday assembly as we hear God’s word and celebrate the sacrifice and resurrection of the Lord. One of our wise pastors here in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati tells his people that they never have to come to Mass on Sunday — except when they have something to be thankful for. Whenever they do have something, anything, to be thankful for, they belong at Sunday Mass.

Gratitude is also what we are supposed to take away from the assembly: a sense of having been gifted by the community, of having been enlightened by God’s word, of having been strength ened by contact with the risen Christ, the appropriate response to all of which is gratitude. As The General Introduction of the Roman Missal (57 b) puts it, the dismissal of the assembly “sends each member back to doing good works, while praising and blessing the Lord.”

I’ve wondered occasionally how the members of the congregation would react if the priest entered the sanctuary at Sunday Mass time and just sat down, without doing anything. They would know that something wasn’t quite right. But the members of the congregation have their part to play, too, in the Sunday celebration. If they find being there burdensome and joyless, it may be because they’re not doing what they’ve been called there to do.

For reflection and discussion...

1. How does your participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus at Sunday Eucharist enable you to experience Jesus’s dying and rising in your life in the world, ie. in your family, at work, in relationships?
2. We come together because we need the Risen Christ and we need each other. In what ways do you need your brothers and sisters in Christ?
3. In our fast-paced, materialistic and cynical culture, in which being in control is highly esteemed, how do you cultivate and maintain a grateful heart, the realization that, despite our most serious efforts, all is really gift?

There’s another facet to the Sunday observance, one that I never thought much about until recently: the part about the Sabbath rest. I remember being taught, of course, that we were supposed to abstain from “servile work,” which was interpreted to mean that we ought not to do on Sundays the same things that we do on other days of the week.

It was supposed to be different. You didn’t go to work on Sunday unless you had to. You didn’t paint your house or wash your car on Sunday. It was supposed to be a day of rest and recreation, but this aspect of Sunday was always secondary to getting to Mass, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to its real meaning.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that the original third commandment about keeping holy the Lord’s day (cf. Ex. 20.8-11 and Deut. 5.12-15) had nothing at all to say about getting together to pray and worship. God’s command only called for rest, nothing else, and the reason God’s people were called to rest on the Sabbath was to recall that the Lord Himself rested after the sixth day of creation and that God had liberated His people from a life of unceasing toil in Egypt. When the Christian community made Sunday the day of Sabbath, it also took over the idea of a day of weekly rest, a secondary element to the remembrance of the resurrection of Jesus and the celebration of His Eucharist, to be sure, but not for that reason an inconsequential element.

The Holy Father points out (Dies Domini no. 66) that one reason for the Christian legislation about resting on Sunday was to provide some relief to people like servants and laborers for whom daily work is burdensome and for whom a day off each week would be the only relief they got from an endless round of work. God wants people to have a time to rest and recoup their energies.

Some Christian communities went after this aspect of the Sunday observance with a vengeance. One thinks of the Puritan Sabbath on which practically everything was forbidden apart from going to church. King James I of Great Britain caused a great stir among his Puritan subjects in 1618 when he issued a decree (The Declaration of Sports) that dancing, archery, and games were to be permitted on Sunday. The stir was so great that he had to withdraw his command. The Puritans were not having any of that sort of recreational nonsense on Sundays! God called for rest on Sunday, and rest there would be!

Sometimes one gets the impression that we moderns have gone to the other extreme. Perhaps we don’t work on Sunday, but sometimes it seems that we don’t rest much, either. People’s time seems so totally committed to sports and shopping and getting caught up that resting or even spending quiet time with family and friends have simply gotten lost.

Yet the basic purpose of the Sunday rest is not so much to get people to refrain from their ordinary occupations as to get them to spend time on special kinds of other things that they might not otherwise have an opportunity for. It’s not a day to do nothing, nor a day to do “everything else,” but a day that gives people a chance to reflect and to appreciate, to highlight aspects of their lives that don’t get enough attention otherwise.

This seems to be what the Lord had in mind in Exodus when He commanded His people to rest on Sunday because He himself had rested on the Sabbath. God didn’t rest because He was tired and needed a day off. He rested because the work of creation was finished, because the work of creation was good, and because God appreciated what He had done.

That’s what’s supposed be lie behind our own observance of Sunday rest. Sunday isn’t supposed to be a day on which we simply do other things than we do during the rest of the week. It’s not supposed to be a catch-up day on which we clear away all the loose ends of the week so that we can work more efficiently during the week that is to come. It’s not even simply a day of rest and recreation. It is supposed to be a day of refocusing our lives, of counterbalancing ceaseless activity with grateful attention to the Lord’s goodness to us.

The Holy Father speaks of Sunday as a day of remembrance (Dies Domini no. 16) on which we are called to remember God’s grand and fundamental work of creation, on which “the faithful are called to rest not only as God rested, but to rest in the Lord, bringing the entire creation to Him, in praise and thanksgiving, intimate as a child and friendly as a spouse.” Similarly, God’s people are called to remember their liberation from slavery. “The main point of the precept [of rest] is not just any kind of interruption of work, but the celebration of the marvels which God has wrought.” (Ibid., no. 17)

The pope gives lots of practical suggestions about how we can carry out this aspect of Sunday observance: by relaxing in a spirit of Christian joy and fraternity (no. 7) and by spending time in explicit prayer (no. 15). He praises Sunday catechetical sessions (no. 52), spending time with the “marvelous and mysterious” harmonies of nature (no. 67), devoting ourselves to works of charity and mercy (nos. 69 f.), visiting the sick and the elderly (no. 72).

I don’t think it is the pope’s intention in his apostolic letter to set down some official list of approved activities for Sunday, implying that anything different from that is unaccept able. He is giving us a kind of outline of how we can make the best use of this weekly break in our routine. Sunday is a day to do different things than we do during the rest of the week, more spiritual things, more reflective things that will keep us aware of our own giftedness and our own debt of gratitude to our generous Father, things that will bring us joy.

There’s still another aspect of the Sunday rest that I find appealing. When Christian practice changed the weekly observance from Saturday, the last day of the week, to Sunday, the first day of the week, it involved a significant change of perspective. The observance of Saturday suggested looking backward to what God had done in His great work of creation. The observance of Sunday suggests looking forward to the final conclusion of the work that Christ began in His resurrection, looking forward to the conclusion of creation that is still to come when the Kingdom of God arrives in its fullness.

The Holy Father speaks of Sunday as “the day of Christian hope” (no 38). In a world in which many people lead lives of quiet desperation, in which many people spend day after day struggling to survive, in which men and women all over the world find themselves wondering whether their lives and their work make any kind of difference, it makes a lot of sense to dedicate one day a week to conscious confidence in the goodness of God and explicit hope in His providence.

Nobody wants to return to the Puritan-type Sunday, when any kind of fun was suspect. Likewise, the former church precept of merely avoiding “servile work” doesn’t seem to reflect all the richness that the Sunday rest is supposed to involve.

My favorite image of Sunday comes from the gospel of Luke in the narrative about the two disciples walking to Emmaus on the first Christian Sunday (cf. Lk. 24,13-35). They were taking comfort in each other’s company and discussing their common concerns as they walked along. Soon they found themselves joined by someone else, and they walked in the company of the Lord. The meaning of their being together became clear when they sat at supper together and Jesus broke bread with them. The breaking of the bread, walking with the Lord, spending time together: That’s what Sunday is supposed to be about.

Some years ago, Harry Golden published a collection of his little essays entitled Enjoy, Enjoy! Golden explains in the introduction that his mother was an immigrant who cooked and sewed for her family and who worked as a seamstress at night. Consequently, she never had a chance to learn English. The only words she mastered were, “Enjoy! Enjoy!”

I like to think that that’s what the God who creates and redeems and makes plans for His family, who works for our well being day and night, had in mind when He gave us the Lord’s day each week. It’s not supposed to be a time of Puritan oppression and terror, nor a time for doing everything we didn’t have time for on the other six days, nor a time for simply taking it easy. It’s a time for re-associating ourselves with our family in the Lord, of remembering who we are and what a wonderful future lies in store for us. As Sunday rolls around each week, God says to us, “Enjoy! Enjoy!”

For reflection and discussion...

1. How do you spend your Sundays? How do you celebrate the “Sabbath Rest”? What might you do differently on Sundays that would help you to “remember the Lord’s day”?
2. Do you think of Sunday as the end of your weekend or as the beginning of your week, and why? What difference would a shift in your present perspective make?
3. In your group or by yourself, read the story of the Emmaus journey from Luke’s gospel (Luke 24:13-35) What does the story say to you about the meaning of Sunday for a disciple?

It’s probably impossible to determine how many people take seriously the church’s invitation to rest and reflection on Sunday. But, in our local church at least, we do know how many people come to Mass. Every year in October we count our Mass attendance throughout the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Over the past five years we have had slightly more than 42% of our Catholic population at Mass on Sunday.

This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that this makes us one of the top-ranking big-city dioceses in the country in Mass attendance. The bad news is that it tells us that more than half of our Catholics do not attend Mass on Sunday. As I have reflected on this sad reality, several possible explanations have occurred to me.

For one thing, fulfilling the Sunday Mass obligation is harder than it used to be. The social expectation that all decent people are going to go to church on Sunday has eroded, and the other demands on our time and on our attention are greater than they used to be,. The Holy Father mentions this often in Dies Domini (cf. nos. 4, 30, 48, 52, 64, 82 f). One of our pastors told me recently that his parishioners are generous with their money, but that it’s hard to get them to church on Sunday and to volunteer for other activities because, as he put it, they are “time broke.”

This is another way of saying that people’s priorities do not give a high place to Sunday Mass. Too many other things are more important. Getting to Mass ranks after sleeping in, getting away for the weekend, shopping and cleaning, fulfilling social obligations, and taking advantage of recreational opportunities. Some of our priests contend that we would see a significant increase in Mass attendance if no amateur athletic events were scheduled before 2 PM on Sundays!

Sometimes people stay away from Mass because of inappropriate expectations or bad experiences. They say they “don’t get anything out of it.” The reason why the church calls us to Mass on Sunday is not to provide entertainment or short term satisfaction, but to keep us properly oriented toward the Lord — to keep the meaning of our lives in the forefront of our consciousness.

It’s true that parishes ought to offer Sunday liturgies that are satisfying and uplifting. But that’s not to say that attending Mass should be effortless or without cost on the part of those who attend. Maintaining a proper diet and engaging in necessary exercise isn’t always easy, either, but if we don’t attend to such things we soon find ourselves in trouble. One could also say that fruitful participation in the Sunday celebration takes practice, just as playing a musical instrument or being a good golfer takes practice.

The basic problem is that we are all affected by original sin and still feel its results. We naturally tend toward selfishness, superficiality and skewed values. We don’t always see things as they really are. We don’t always appreciate the blessings that the Lord offers us. We’re not always willing to put out the effort that’s required to assimilate His gifts.

So what can we do to improve the level of Sunday observance?

There are some who want their bishop to raise Cain about things like this. They want me to stress the obligatory nature of the church’s directives about Sunday and threaten damnation for those who do not comply with the church’s law. In response to those persons, I hereby affirm that there is a serious obligation for every Catholic to attend Mass every Sunday (unless there is some grave impediment) and to spend Sunday in a way that is in accord with the religious nature of the day.

(In passing, I wish to observe that the people who want me to say more about sin and punishment always seem to want me to talk about things that other people are doing or not doing. It has been said that one of the more satisfying, though less salubrious, joys of religion is hearing sermons about our neighbor’s sins.)

I certainly don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the Sunday obligation, but I think the message is more likely to be heard if it is couched in more positive terms. Encouragement is generally more effective than threat.

What would happen, I wonder, if every regular Sunday Mass-goer could find a way to express to others the joy and satisfaction that comes from the habit of going to church on Sunday? I don’t think this involves giving sermons to our friends and neighbors. Maybe it involves simply letting others know how grateful we are for our faith, how important it is for us to nourish that faith through participation in the weekly Eucharist with the community of the church. We don’t have to ask people to believe that we enjoy the poor homilies or bad music that we sometimes experience, but we don’t go to church for a perfor mance. We go to church to acknowledge that we have been gifted, and that acknowledgment brings a profound sense of worth and security and conditions us to receive new and deeper gifts from the Lord.

For that matter, what would happen if every Sunday Mass-goer would invite someone else to go along, offering a ride to and from church? I suspect that some Catholics don’t go to Mass just because it’s too much trouble, and reducing the trouble might induce such people to return to their observance of the Lord’s day.

Often parents are saddened to learn that their adult children no longer go to Mass on Sunday. They wonder whether they have failed as parents. I don’t think blame should be allotted easily in matters like this. I know good Catholic parents whose adult children are unchurched, and I know other parents, apparently just as good, whose children wouldn’t dream of missing Mass. I’m not sure anybody can explain the difference, but I am sure that parents have to be sincere and practical and open and happy about their Catholic faith if there is to be any chance of handing that faith on to their children. The rest they leave to the Lord.

Sometimes, of course, there are surprises. A lay friend was telling me recently that his grown son told him that when he was growing up nobody ever told him that there was an obligation to go to Sunday Mass. “You and mother always went and took us along, but we thought you went just because you liked to go to church on Sunday. You never told us that we had to go, and that’s why I don’t go any more.”

Maybe the secret of Sunday observance lies in our choice of verbs. Do we have to go to Mass and have to spend time in prayer and reflection and sociability, or do we get to go to Mass with the assembled community and get to spend time on more important things than we spend time on during the rest of the week? Is it an obligation or a celebration, a duty or a gift?

In Dies Domini the Holy Father says that God gives us Sunday as a day of joy (no. 57). “His day” is an ever-new gift of His love (no. 7).

As I have grown older, it has become increasingly clear to me that one of the most basic Christian virtues is gratitude. Gratitude involves an ongoing appreciation of and response to God’s generosity, an awareness of how much God has done for us, of how many wonderful gifts He has given us. It includes the realization that God has shared with us His own life, that we are important to Him, that our lives have unending significance. Gratitude presupposes awareness of well-being and fulfillment. Grateful people are joyful people, and that’s what God wants us to be.

This doesn’t mean that there are no sorrows or disappointments or tensions in the lives of believers. It doesn’t mean that their response to God’s gifts is effortless. What it means is that the pain and effort of Christian life fall into a wider context, and that context is the ongoing goodness and generosity of the Lord. There are sad and difficult episodes in the drama of every Christian life, but the main theme of the drama is blessing and gratitude.

Sunday is a gift and an invitation. It’s a gift that gives us the opportunity to be grateful together: together with the community of faith, together with the risen Jesus. It’s an invitation to remember who and what we are, an invitation to joy.

How different our lives would be without it!

For reflection and discussion...

1. In our country most people trade their time for money. Consequently, today many people in the United States have more money than time. What do you think is the real meaning of the “time poverty” referred to in this section?
2. Granted that the purpose of Mass is not to entertain, are there nonetheless some legitimate and appropriate expectations for Sunday Liturgy? What are your expectations of Sunday Mass?
3. Do you think of Sunday observance as an obligation, a privilege, a discipline, an invitation, all of the above or none of the above? How do you think of Sunday Eucharist?