The title of this essay comes from a 2021 Christmas movie, the kind that run in places like the Hallmark Channel. But I think it better fits the American bishops’ approach to holy days of obligation.
Regular readers know that I have criticized detachment of holy days from their historical context (e.g., Ascension Thursday becoming Ascension-next-Sunday) or the “pastoral” don’t-make-people-go-too-much-to-church-so-Saturday-and-Monday-holy days-sometimes-don’t-count rule (especially ludicrous when it comes to January 1, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God).
Well, the latest installment of episcopal follies just exploded over this year’s status of Immaculate Conception. According to universal church calendar rules, when December 8 falls on a Sunday, Immaculate Conception is automatically transferred to Monday, December 9 because Advent Sundays outrank feasts but solemnities have to be observed. The U.S. bishops basically said, “OK, but the transfer of the feast means the obligation to attend Mass is abrogated.”
That approach would tally nicely with their “Saturdays-or-Mondays-time-out” rule, except that I remember reading somewhere that there should be at least two holy days on a national liturgical calendar: Christmas and a Marian feast. Since Immaculate Conception is also our national patronal feast, December 8 was never subject to the “Saturday-or-Monday-get-out-of-church-free” rule.
The “pastoral” types in our episcopal class tried to wedge an exception in this year by saying the transferal of the feast did not also transfer the obligation. That’s been the bishops’ tack for years, last applied in 2019 and not recurring until 2030. This year, though, Bishop Thomas Paprocki decided to ask the Vatican whether that interpretation was right and was told, “no.”
With roughly a month out, bishops are scrambling, producing the ecclesiastical mishmash at which the USCCB excels. December 9 is now no longer a holy day this year in the Archdiocese of Chicago, by decree of Blase Cupich, for the “spiritual good” of Windy City Catholics; but it is presumably a holy day in the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois (since its bishop asked the question). I guess it’s a far greater hardship for Chicago Catholics, with churches in close urban proximity to each other, to get themselves to Mass than, say, Catholics in more central, rural Illinois where Springfield lies.
Frankly, this makes about as much sense as ecclesiastical provinces deciding on the day of Ascension: when Newark observed it on Thursday but Wilmington on Sunday, I wondered what one should do if he was on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, since America has some bishops with affectations of celebrating Mass “on borders.”
This whole incoherence has roots in two major factors. Some liturgists who make mountains out of molehills were upset about when evening anticipated Masses are celebrated or which Evening Prayer I should be said when a solemnity and a Sunday abut. Honestly, that “problem” was a non-problem because the liturgical calendar establishes precedence. The answer was never in doubt.
But it also served as a convenient excuse to cover up a debate among the bishops back in the 1980s between those who thought today’s Catholics should continue accommodating modernity and secularization versus those who had enough of the sellout to a contemporary world closed off to the sacred. As I understand it, there were bishops who wanted to eliminate Ascension, Assumption, All Saints, and Mary, Mother of God entirely, while others wanted things left alone. The former also contended too many Catholics didn’t attend Mass on those days so, like new Lambs of God, they would “take away the sins of the world” by removing the Mass obligation. As “comity” is a far more important “value” to the episcopal class, the current Saturday-Monday-take-the-day-off rule was cobbled together, and we have hobbled along with it for 32 years.
Rome probably went along with this system because in many places in Europe where Catholicism was also part of the national culture holy days are also civil holidays, so there is a certain European mentality that deems it a hardship to go to church if you don’t otherwise get the day off, something that was never the case in the United States.
