SATURDAY NIGHT CATHOLICS

The Cathedral at Rheims

I realize that the title of this little piece might be taken in an offensive manner by some but it is not intended so.  Rather, it is our small contribution to the effort of keeping holy the Lord's Day.  Which is Sunday.  Not Saturday.

Obviously, the situation I am referring to is the now common practice of Roman Catholics keeping their Sundays free for relaxing, shopping, sports and fun by getting Holy Mass out of the way on the previous Saturday night...preferably around 4:30, so that it doesn't interrupt the dinner hour.  Everyone knows about this; it is unnecessary to elaborate.  Drive by any Catholic church around 4:30 on a Saturday evening and just count the parked cars.  There will be far more than the ones parked there for the 8 a.m. Sunday Mass the next morning.

My very dear Catholic friends, this is a bad idea.

Who and what brought us to this sorry pass?  It is of course the result of those liberalizations to the Church which came in the late 1960s as a result of that Council.  Rome granted this Saturday evening Mass concession and that action has opened up a number of serious problems in both Church and State.  This writer can still remember a time when most stores were closed on Sundays (indeed up until two years ago most stores in England were still closed on Sundays).  That all went by the boards in the late 60s and early 70s.  In most dioceses today the largest Mass attendance figures, apart from the Big Holy Days, are found on Saturday night.  There are two very grave problems with this.  The first is that it has the effect, unintended or not, of erasing the idea in the Catholic mind of keeping holy the Lord's Day.  The second problem is that it increases another activity that is repugnant to God: doing unnecessary servile work on the day of rest.  If we all flock to Wal-Mart or the malls on Sundays we force people to not keep their Sundays holy by doing servile work for their bosses on that day.  This is in addition to our being tempted to shop and spend on a day that should be devoted to Our Lord, our family and our rest.

When the Church, in a very misguided move, allowed the Saturday night "anticipatory" Mass it opened up the Pandora's Box that we are now faced with: Sunday is just another day in the week to spend money and have fun.  The Church still, amazingly, has not recognized the folly of this move.  Not one in a thousand clerics ever mentions these problems.  [Please write to let us know if and when some brave priest or Bishop has brought this up.  We would welcome such information.]  I am deliberately avoiding the issue of the utter banality and ugliness of most of the Masses people have to attend in order to fulfill their Sunday obligation; that is a story for another day.   The problem is that we are not keeping this clear, unequivocal Commandment demanded by our Creator Himself on Mount Sinai.  I hesitate to say that we are telling God that we will decide how to spend our time on His day.

Not a few Saints have stated that the two sins that offend God the most are taking His name in vain and not keeping holy the Lord's day.  If this opinion is true should it not give us all pause?

This is not the time to get into that red-herring discussion about which day is the "true" sabbath, a discussion that is pointless and leads people away from the central issue.  That question, for those interested, was written about in an interesting article found here.

There are those who will say that the Church has the right to make disciplinary adjustments and exceptions.  And, of course, it does.  What is forgotten, however, is the idea that sometimes those adjustments are problematical or imprudent.  The charism of infallibility does not protect the Church or the Pope with regard to disciplinary changes; they are either good, not so good, or poor.  Examples of disastrous disciplinary changes approved by the Vatican abound but two should settle the argument: altar girls and Communion in the hand.  Those two decisions have wreaked havoc on doctrine, liturgy, the sacred and any sense we ever had of Catholicity.  The great Bishop Athanasius Schneider has written well on the debacle of Communion in the hand, and the idiocy of altar girls has been well and truly exposed by the late Michael Davies.  We needn't cover that ground here.  We know these were tragic mistakes.

And so was the decision to allow an anticipatory Saturday evening Mass.  If we would but look at what this has done to doctrine alone, how it has sown the seed of doubt in Catholic minds, we would see that it is something that we who are trying to cling to the Faith should try never to do.  If nothing else this switching from Sunday to Saturday Mass keeps Catholics off-balance.  We are never certain any more.  Who is right?  Who is wrong?  Of course that is the story of the entire Church today.

Our first goal should be to find a Mass that is beautiful, quiet and reverent.  Not easy, I know.  But our second goal should be to attend that Mass on Our Lord's day.  We might also gently tap on the shoulders of our Catholic family members and friends who use the Saturday exception and encourage them to return to the "old way", which is really the right way.  It is my hope that if we can begin to restore to Sunday the proper reverence that such a day is due we will begin to see the end of several problems plaguing the Catholic Church.