Keeping the Lord's Day Holy

Bulletin Column – May 26, 2019

            Welcome to summer! Memorial Day weekend often heralds the unofficial beginning of the summer season. As we start this much-anticipated season of recreation and fun, I read a very interesting short document this past week that kept it all in perspective for me.

            The Archbishop of Detroit, Archbishop Vigneron, recently released a Pastoral Letter called “The Day of the Lord” as part of what they call a “missionary conversion” of their diocese. He – like many other zealous bishops across the country, including our own – is taking the call to become missionary apostles in a post-Christian America, and is leading his own diocese through a process of renewal and rededication to the truths of our Catholic Faith (much like we did with our synod process back in 2014-2015).

            In this particular document, the Archbishop talks about the importance of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) as a day of rest, worship, and true connection to God and our loved ones. He is making a call to reclaim Sunday as the day that is set apart from all others, on which we should not work or engage in pursuits that do not lead to greater holiness and wholeness.

            To that end, in this pastoral letter, the Archbishop officially declared that there will be no sports in any diocesan school (high school or elementary school) on Sundays. Wow! What a radical change! Even when I was chaplain at TCHS, our field would be used by our teams on Sundays to practice or to host games. But this Archbishop is declaring that there will be no practices, games, or any other sporting-related events for any school team on Sundays in his diocese.

            What a mandate! And it flies in the face of our modern culture. It is an amazing fact that on Sunday mornings, more Americans can be found at sports fields than in churches – prompting us to ask, what do we really worship? This pastoral initiative by the Detroit Archdiocese seeks to replace kids’ sports with the Lord Jesus as the true God that we worship.

            This declaration should cause us to pause. Do we, at times, put sports or vacations above God when Sunday rolls around? When I was doing the Confirmation interviews for our students here at St. John’s, I would ask every single one, “Do you go to Mass every Sunday?” Many of them said, “Well, I get to as many as I can, but I have dance…I have lacrosse…my family was on vacation so we missed it…”

            As we celebrate the unofficial start of summer, let us redouble our commitment to make sure that we worship God fifty-two weeks out of the year. If you need help finding a Mass because of vacations or your kids’ sports tournaments, check out www.masstimes.org – this fantastic website has the schedules of every Mass in every town and city throughout the world – so there’s no excuse to miss Mass! Our vacations should not be a vacation from God!