Spending Sunday in Mass - Even when you’re at the Cabin

If you didn’t know any better, you might be tempted to think it was a Catholic rapture: parishioners vanishing from Mass en masse. Each year it begins around May and its effects are evident come June. As the temperature outside increases, the number of congregants on succeeding Sundays steadily dwindles.  However, what’s actually happening is more of an exodus. As fall approaches you begin to see faces you haven’t seen in months.  By October the diaspora is almost over.  The weather is cooler and most parishioners having ceased their weekend forays to their cottages and cabins.

I used to think this exodus was a local phenomenon.  The city in which I work and go to mass, St. John’s, Newfoundland, has a population of little over 100,000 people. The greater St. John’s area, including surrounding communities, brings the population closer to 200,000.  That’s not a huge population, but it’s definitely urban. When you consider that the entire province has a population of only around 500,000 people and a land area that would rank fourth in size behind Alaska, Texas and California if it were on of the American states, you should not be surprised to know that Newfoundland is a cabin-lovers haven.  Land is affordable and almost everybody has some kind of get-away. Whether it is a “gravel-pit camper” or a decked-out cottage, most people have a home away from home.

Almost everybody, but not me. Removed from cabin-culture, it can be excused that I had always assumed that the St. John’s exodus was accompanied by an equal and corresponding surge in attendance in rural parishes. However, my naivety disappeared a few months ago. One of my friends was planning to visit her parents’ cabin over the weekend and explained to me that she wanted to go to an early Saturday evening Mass, as she wouldn’t be able to get to mass while she was there. “Well, where’s your mother going to go to Mass?” I asked. “Oh,” she replied, “my mother doesn’t go to Mass when she’s at the cabin”

Then only a few weeks ago I came to realize that this summer absence from Mass reached beyond Newfoundland. In the airport in St. Paul-Minneapolis, I picked up a t-shirt for my roommate: “The Ten Commandments, Minnesota style”. On the back, “Keep the Sabbath holy” was converted to “Go to church – even when yer up nort.”

This problem is apparently so wide-spread that even Pope Benedict had something to say about it during his most recent general audience at St. Peter’s Square. The pope remarked:

“While at work, with its frenetic rhythms, and during vacation, we have to reserve moments for God. [We have to] open our lives up to him, directing a thought to him, a reflection, a brief prayer.

“And above all, we mustn’t forget that Sunday is the day of Our Lord, the day of the liturgy, [the day] to perceive in the beauty of our churches, in the sacred music and in the Word of God, the same beauty of our God, allowing him to enter into our being.”

“Only in this way,” the Pontiff concluded, “is our life made great; it is truly made a life.”

The faithful must remember that Sunday is a holy day of obligation. Mass attendance is not optional:

Canon 1247

On Sundays and other holy days of obligation the faithful are bound to participate in the Mass; they are also to abstain from those labors and business concerns which impede the worship to be rendered to God, the joy which is proper to the Lord’s Day, or the proper relaxation of mind and body.

As you and your family prepare for your summer vacations, please don’t forget to heed the pope’s words. Rest in the Eucharist and your vacation time will be both more replenishing and rejuvenating.

Source:

Pope Bendict, “General Audience” (St. Peter’s Square: June 3, 2009) <available online: http://www.zenit.org/article-26080?l=english>.