Fr Z has picked up a piece from the Catholic Herald by Michael Jennings on Why the Church should make life harder for Catholics.
You will get the drift from what he says about Holydays of Obligation:
More mollycoddling is in evidence with the recent transferring of various feast days to Sunday. This has saved Catholics a trip to church or otherwise having another thing to own up to in Confession – that’s if they happen to be part of the majority who don’t do Holy Days of Obligation.
Certainly, we had less than half of Sunday's congregation at Mass today, despite a fulsome reminder on Sunday that our commitment to the Assumption should be just as it is for a Sunday. Mind you, it's hard to expect Catholics to turn up today when so many other Days of Obligation are transferred to the nearest Sunday. Common sense tells people that they can't be that important if we can chop and change them around with so much ease.
Anyway, we had a lovely celebration of Our Lady's Assumption into Heaven with a simple OF Mass this morning with a little singing and Missa Cantata this evening.
There is a good piece by my friend Fr Leon Periera, O.P. over at Linen on the Hedgerow. Thank you for this morning's homily, Father Leon!
Hail Queen of Heaven
3 comments:
Father, spare a thought for those who work and are faced with Sunday: there were no lunchtime Masses where I am, but I managed to arrange to slip out for the mid-morning Mass only to find four hymns, and a longer-than-on-Sunday-because-you-all-really-want-to-be-here sermon. This meant I had to leave just after Communion as the extra twenty minutes would have made me late for a meeting I couldn't miss.
Let's by all means have Holy Days on the appropriate days, but let's not try to pretend that we live in a Catholic country in which they are all holidays.
I was very lucky and managed to get to St Peter's in Hyndland (Glasgow) for an 1800 hours service. Having only moved to Glasgow at the weekend I did find it somewhat problematical to find a conveniently located church with Mass at a convenient time (and that was with the power of Google). Schools have started here in Scotland and I think that for a work day the 1800 hours timing worked well, but I wonder if the advertising of the services could have been done better accepting that people have different routines on a workday from a weekend.
I'm not sure I'm totally convinced that the reason for the transfers of Holydays was to mollycoddle the laity. To my mind the decision was twofold: to ease the burden on a diminishing number of priests and to downgrade some specifically Catholic memorials.
In the olden days when there were two or more priests per parish Holyday Masses were celebrated very early in the morning before work, at lunchtime and in the evening and all had the chance to attend. This is a lot to expect of one priest with myriad other duties to fulfil.
As regards homilies/sermons on Holydays of yore, it was the one time we (and the celebrant) got a break. It seems to be one of the those improvements of V2.
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