September 04, 2024 – Pastor’s Note

Canon 1245

Did you know that your Pastor can provide a dispensation from your Sunday Mass obligation? I have had a few parishioners ask me for this since I became Pastor, so I might as well give you a full catechesis on this.

First, some foundational principles:

1. Keeping holy the sabbath day is a commandment of God, and doing so through Mass attendance is an ancient requirement of the Church on all Catholics. So willfully missing Mass on Sunday, when it is possible to attend, is a grave sin. To say it another way, choosing anything over Sunday Mass is a form of idolatry – the choice of a lesser good over God.
2. The Church cannot require the impossible. So, as once happened to me, if one is on a plane or a boat for the duration the availability of Sunday Mass, one’s obligation to attend Mass no longer exists because of impossibility. But the obligation to keep holy the sabbath day still exists, so one would need to find a way to do so, likely through additional prayer.
3. There is also the question of reasonability. If one were in the Yukon and it was a 4-hour trip to the nearest church, that would not be reasonable, so the same conditions for impossibility apply. It is hard to define reasonability in this age of cars and freeways, but my rule of thumb is anything less than a 45-minute one-way drive is reasonable.

Now, what about that dispensation?

Canon 1245: “Without prejudice to the right of diocesan Bishops as in can. 87, a parish priest, in individual cases, for a just reason and in accordance with the prescriptions of the diocesan Bishop, can give a dispensation from the obligation of observing a holyday or day of penance, or commute the obligation into some other pious works.”

Some words to be aware of:

• “parish priest” – in canon law, this specifically means the pastor, not any priest assigned to a parish.

• “just cause” – the justice of the cause would be evaluated by the pastor, but this means there has to be a good and proportionate reason.

• “individual cases” – the dispensation must be given to specific individuals for specific days.

Now, if you are thinking about asking for such a dispensation, I would ask that your request be accompanied by the following:

1. A description of what it would take for you to get to Mass, which will allow me to evaluate the justice of the cause. “We are traveling and cannot get to Mass” is not helpful. “We are camping in the woods through Monday morning, the nearest church has Mass at 12:00 pm on Sunday, and it would take us 90-minutes to get there” is very helpful.
2. A list of all the people who need the dispensation.
3. A suggestion for how I might “commute the obligation into some other pious work.” For example, “I will spend an hour in prayer, including reading the Sunday readings” or “I will attend daily Mass on the Tuesday that I return.”

Finally, some people might wonder why they should bother asking their Pastor for such a dispensation: “My Mass attendance is between me and God!” True, we will all need to answer individually to our Creator for our actions on this Earth. Buuuuuuut…

• Human beings are broken, and it is super easy for us to rationalize bad behavior, so it is spiritually healthy, when we are tempted to deviate from a spiritual norm, to consult a third party. The Pastor is a third-party responsible for the spiritual life of his parishioners. As such requesting a dispensation is a way to check to make sure one’s cause is just.

• The thing that is difficult about an obligation is that it is imposed externally. As Americans, we fight against anyone other than ourselves telling us what to do. But in the Christian life, obligations make us holy, precisely because they force us to bend our will to a higher cause or a greater good. If an individual could subjectively decide to break an external obligation, that obligation loses its power to bend one’s will and make one holy. But if an external obligation can only be dispensed externally (like, through the parish priest), the obligation retains its sanctifying power.

Coptic Orthodox Celebration

There is a local congregation of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Bellingham whose normal rented building was not available on their Feast of the Assumption (August 22). They reached out to us, and we were able to host them at St. Joseph’s in Ferndale. Thank you to the Ferndale staff for being so accommodating! (We also had two Catholic parishioners attend who were raised in Egypt and wanted to support this community.)