A while ago, I wrote an article titled Are Irreverent Masses Binding On Sundays? and the first paragraph of it reads:
The most common question I receive from my readers is: “Do I have to attend a Novus Ordo Mass on a Sunday when there is no Traditional Latin Mass nearby?” I was going to title this article that very question, but then I realized that question is only sixty years old. Then I thought to title this article: “Is it a mortal sin to skip an irreverent Mass on Sunday if I can’t get to a reverent Mass?” but that was too long. I then realized the entire topic of the Third Commandment was at stake. What does Church history tell us before 1960?
You can read it at the link above, so I’m not going to repeat my answer in this article. But I now believe the devil is again getting traditionalists into a minimalistic way of thinking about Sundays by only focusing on the liturgy wars.
Before getting started, let me be clear what I am not saying: I am not saying the TLM doesn’t matter. In fact, I have not offered the NOM in a decade. Also, I am not saying that Holy Mass is not a huge part of Sundays. Of course, I believe the Holy Mass is far-and-away the most important part of a Sunday for the Catholic. Below, I am simply saying that regardless of which Mass you go to (TLM, NOM or Divine Liturgy) Sundays are still made by God Himself to look very different from the other six days of the week.
And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?”—Luke 6:9. It’s important to notice that Saturday is still the Sabbath while Sunday is now the Lord’s Day. (Re-read that sentence as almost every English speaking Catholic I know still gets this wrong.) The reality of the difference between the two days is much easier for those who speak Romance languages to remember. For example, in Spanish, Saturday is Sábado and Sunday is Domingo, literally, the Day of the Lord.
In any case, what Christ said about Saturday is still applied in the New Covenant to Sundays: Better to save lives on a Sunday than to destroy it. For example, when I was a paramedic, I asked for Sundays off. But if that wasn’t granted, I knew I wasn’t sinning. Why not? Because on a Sunday it’s better to save life than to lose it. That’s literally what we do in EMS: Saving lives. Thus, there are certain jobs exempt from the no-work rule on Sundays. Same with priests hearing confessions.
How about work in the home? As most of you know, the traditional answer for what is allowed on Sundays as far as manual labor around the home is only necessary work. Thus, if Sundays are the day to have over all the extended family, then obviously there is going to be a lot of cooking. And this is totally permitted. I think this is especially pleasing to God to have big family get-togethers on Sundays, especially with how families are barely staying together anymore.
But many people frequently say to me: “Well, I like mowing the lawn on Sundays, so since I like it, it means I can do it, right?” They have heard the affirmative from so many modernist priests who always put the weight of moral theology on subjective conscience instead of objective reality. They think they are going to hear the same answer from me.
But if our psychological pleasure at manual labor at home is the exclusive measure of Keeping the Third Commandment, then that means the only thing I can not do on Sundays is things I don’t like to do! But that is pure relativism. And the Commandments are not based on relativism, so that can’t be the answer.
Although the Catholic Church has never given a direct answer on the limit of what is considered “necessary work on Sunday” the great moralists like St. Alphonsus (whose feast was just a couple days ago) drew the line between venial and mortal sin on unnecessary Sunday work at somewhere between two and three hours. (I know this is going to be very offensive to many modernist Catholics, but try this limit for a few months, and you will see there is tremendous freedom in having such guardrails on the moral life.)
Let’s go back to the example of the big Sunday dinners. All that cooking and cleaning on a Sunday (provided it’s all actually for the Sunday meal) can probably be considered necessary work. But the shopping for that big Sunday meal with the extended family could be done on a Saturday. Thus, the shopping is almost always to be considered unnecessary work on a Sunday.
As you will see later in my article, all of this is for your Sundays to be free, not constrained with moral casuistry. But what initially looks to modernist eyes like moral casuistry in the old-school books of the great saints (like St. Alphonsus) is actually great freedom for the traditionalist. This is true, especially when you start to understand that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.—St. Mark 2:27.
So, for example, I still do all my shopping and laundry on Saturdays. At least, I keep this over 99% of my weekends. What about that 1%? Well, if I am between trips and Sunday is the only day I can possibly do a load of laundry, I don’t think it’s wrong. Again, even St. Alphonsus put the limit to home-based manual labor at about two hours. And I think this applies to humans, not machines. That is, laundry is only fifteen minutes of Sunday work, even as my machines are working for two hours.
Thus, my doing laundry on a Sunday only comprises 15 minutes towards the old-school two-hour limit towards unnecessary manual labor on a Sunday. In fact, I do laundry so infrequently on a Sunday that those occasional 15 minute segments probably would not even count towards that two-hour limit. Why not? Because it would be deemed necessary work if I was truly between two missions where I only had a Sunday to wash my religious habit before flying again on a Monday.
Another thing you can do to be generous to Our Lord Jesus who rose on Sunday for you: If you already pray five decades of the Rosary every day, Sundays could be days of fifteen decades.
Another example: Request from your employer that you not work on Sundays. Many will be surprisingly generous, especially if you’re willing to (for example) work secular holidays in return.
Another example: Treat First Class Feasts (like the Assumption) as Sundays. Do your best to get all your shopping and manual labor done on the Vigil of such feasts. In fact, try to fast on such Vigils so you can actually feast (yes, gastronomically feast) on the actual Feast Day.
Another example: I will not purchase things on Amazon on a Sunday. In addition to that, the settings on my Amazon account prohibit Sunday deliveries. (I am not writing this to brag, but just to show you that I do try to practice such things before preaching them online.)
At this point, some of you might be saying “Wow, Fr. David treats his Sundays just like orthodox Jews treat their Saturdays.” But as I keep saying on my podcasts, the New Testament has a higher moral bar than the Old Testament on every single aspect of the moral life. So, that argument doesn’t work against me.
If the Sabbath was the Old Covenant day of rest, then Sunday includes both that and Sunday is the day of the re-creation. Additionally, Sunday is the day of the re-creation because Christ raised Himself by His own power on a Sunday. Clearly, this is the preview of our own bodily resurrection. Thus, the human body matters a lot in Christianity and on Sundays. This means Sunday is a good day for re-creation for the Christian. Or, spelled another way, recreation. Thus, it’s very good to get exercise on Sundays as a family or as an individual.
However, families need to be careful that children’s sports does not become an idol on Sundays. If adult or children’s sports determine the schedule for a Catholic family and/or take precedent over Holy Mass repeatedly, then such a family is approaching idolatry. I’m not saying they are simply poor at scheduling. I’m saying they are committing grave sins against both the First Commandment and Third Commandment. So, yes, please recreate on Sundays, but let it be subject to the laws of God.
Because the Church has apparently never officially set numbers quite as direct as say, St. Alphonsus above, in regards to keeping Sundays sacrosanct, the main question you need to ask yourself and/or your family is this: How is Sunday lived differently from the rest of my week? If your only answer is “Mass” then you’re obviously failing at the Third Commandment.
We live in a time of such confusion within the Catholic clergy that if you were to walk across a medium-sized or large American city and stop at ten mainstream parishes to ask about the Third Commandment, you would get ten different answers. Or perhaps just one squishy and amorphous answer about how “God loves you no matter what you do on a Sunday.” But that answer is Protestant (at best) for the first thing Jesus Christ Himself said to the young man who asked Him how to be saved was: If you would enter life, keep the commandments.—St. Matthew 19:17.
Thus, we have to get Sundays and the Third Commandment down-pat if we are to be saved. But because there are so few parameters in canon law and so many different answers among clergy today, my encouragement again to you in this article is to really ask yourself as a family: How do we as a family keep Sundays different from, say, Tuesdays or Wednesdays? If you can’t come up with anything except Mass, you most certainly are failing.
But I also want you to approach Sundays (and this article) with love instead of fear. There are plenty of fear-based quotes from the saints I have used in the past to show the importance of the Third Commandment of Keeping Holy the Lord’s Day. For example, St. John Vianney (whose feast is also this month of August) spoke of the Catholics in Southeastern France pushing their work-carts on a Sunday and exclaimed: “I see them pushing their carts, and I see them pushing them into hell.” How much more for our current shopping center carts that need not be pushed into a Walmart for unnecessary shopping on a Sunday!
But let’s go back to love instead of fear. Remember that Christ said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.—St. Mark 2:27. This means God actually wants you free on Sundays to pray, play, relax, nap, recreate, eat with family, play music and totally recharge on Sundays.
In fact, secular psychological studies have even shown that people who take a day off every week work harder the other six days of the week. Wow, it’s almost like God programmed the Commandments and human nature to both honor Him to get to heaven while thriving here on earth without any contradiction between the two!
As to the question of going to restaurants on a Sunday, I do still go to them on Sundays… but I have heard some very compelling arguments against it!
Finally, all of this comes down to trust in order to Keep Holy the Lord’s Day. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, for every family is different. I don’t know what you’re called to change in your lives, especially since canon law is not very specific about Sundays. But I do know that 99% of you can stop shopping on Sundays. And that’s a really good place to start to make a Sunday look different from a Tuesday. If you go further than that, then just use common-sense and generosity to guide you.
Oh, and keep in mind that sanctifying all of your Sundays is how you get the devil caught in his own anti-TLM trap, especially if your local one gets suppressed.