The Church’s Code of Canon Law lists ten holy days of obligation in addition to Sunday (1246.1): Christmas, Epiphany, the Ascension, Corpus Christi, January 1 (see below), the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, St. Joseph, Ss. Peter and Paul, and All Saints.
Readers may be surprised that there are so many, and some may be surprised that Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the Church’s only Fast days, are not among them. However, bishops’ conferences can ask the Holy See to “abrogate” (remove) the obligation to attend Mass on some of these, and most countries have only five or six in practice: Christmas, plus a handful of others with special importance in the country in question.
A matter of recent controversy has been the question of what happens to the obligation, when not formally abrogated, when the feast falls on a Saturday or a Monday, perhaps because it has been transferred from Sunday to the following Monday. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has long taken the view that in these cases, the obligation is or can be lifted, but the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Interpretation of Legislative texts recently clarified that this is not so: the obligation cannot so easily be evaded, and the faithful must attend Mass on both the second Sunday in Advent and the Monday to which the Immaculate Conception has been transferred. Either the American bishops will have to adopt the practice of the bishops of England and Wales, who move the celebration of some days of obligation from Saturday or Monday to the Sunday, or else their flocks will be obliged to attend Mass a few more times a year, including, occasionally, on consecutive days.
The point is that the day that a feast is celebrated should be a day of obligation, if the obligation has not been permanently abrogated. If it is celebrated on a Sunday, you just go on the Sunday; if it is celebrated on a Monday, either because that is the “proper” day or because it has been moved there, then you need to go on the Monday as well.
The easy way out would be for the American bishops to ask for fewer holy days of obligation, but making the practice of the Catholic religion easier over the last half-century or so does not seem to have stopped people giving it up. On the contrary, one problem we have today is that holy days of obligation are now so few that the concept has become unfamiliar to many Catholics. People can be surprised to discover there is such a thing as an obligation to attend Mass on a weekday from time to time. Even quite observant Catholics appear to be ignorant of the obligation to abstain from “servile work” on these days, just as on Sundays. These messages are not being relayed reliably by dioceses, parishes, and Catholic schools and universities, in part because holy days are so rare. Trying to make compliance easy, by making it infrequent, has actually made it harder, because it has obscured what we are supposed to do.
The obligation to attend Mass on certain feast days emphasizes their importance; removing the obligation minimizes their importance. This is not the message the Church should be giving her children. Moving them off their proper dates is also problematic, because it obscures their meaning, which is connected with the dates (and in some cases the day of the week) they occupy.
In England and Wales, the celebration of Corpus Christi, whose proper day is the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, is moved to the following Sunday. This obscures the connection between Corpus Christi and Maundy Thursday. In the USA, the bishops are moving the Immaculate Conception from Sunday, December 8 to Monday, December 9. This is to give the second Sunday in Advent the priority the calendar requires for it, but it obscures the connection with the Nativity of Our Lady, which falls exactly nine months later, on September 8, just as the Annunciation on March 25 is exactly nine months before Christmas Day. The feast of St. Joseph (March 19), kept as a holy day in many countries, is a symbolic seven days before the Annunciation (the twenty-fifth). The Ascension, when celebrated on its proper date of the Thursday after the fifth Sunday of Easter, is exactly forty days after Easter and eight days before Pentecost, creating a solemn novena of prayer for the coming of the Holy Spirit. January 1, variously called the Circumcision, the Holy Name of Jesus, and the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, is also the Octave Day of Christmas. Epiphany concludes the Twelve Days of Christmas.
These are not just convenient dates; they establish a web of symbolic connections across the liturgical year. Furthermore, they are embedded to some degree in secular calendars and often maintained by the Orthodox and among Episcopalians and Lutherans.
The American bishops’ desire to keep Sundays clear of major feasts reflects a century-long fashion to emphasize the Sunday cycle, which led to changes in the ranking of Sundays and other feasts in the various reforms of the twentieth century. These changes protect Sundays from being “occluded” (replaced by) any but the most important feasts, and it does not seem unreasonable to think they have gone far enough. The intrusion of the sanctoral cycle (the cycle of feasts fixed to dates) onto Sundays two or three times a year doesn’t seriously harm the faithful’s appreciation of the Sunday liturgy, especially as it is not the same Sunday every year. At the same time, it has the advantage that Catholics who don’t get to Mass on December 8 in most years, or can manage it only by squeezing in a quick early morning or lunchtime Mass, will get to experience the feast, or to experience it celebrated with greater solemnity.
By contrast, Divine Mercy Sunday, where celebrated, invariably obscures the Second Sunday of Easter, and its appearance in 2000 was an indication that the insistence on having the normal Sunday liturgy on Sundays is less urgent now than it once was: the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. This is also suggested by the proclivity of the English bishops to move feasts not away from Sundays, but onto Sundays.
Another issue in play, however, is the already mentioned point of how demanding the Church should be in asking Catholics to come to Mass. As the restoration of Friday abstinence from meat in England and Wales in 2009 suggests, the pendulum on this has also started to swing the other way.
The Church is not engaged in a negotiation with the laity about how much they will put up with. Few people stop going to Mass because they are being asked to go too often. If it is unreasonably difficult to attend Mass on a Sunday or another day of obligation, there is no sin in not doing so. The question, rather, is how much we as Catholics can imbue our whole week, indeed our whole lives, with a Catholic spirit.
Going to Mass during the week, if we can make it, is a good way of doing this. Still better is doing so in obedience to a command of the Church, which makes it not our will, but another’s, and to attend a really important feast day.