Welcome to today’s episode of “As the Holydays Turn.” When last we tuned in, the Catholic bishops of the United States were in a quandary. In 2024, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 fell on a Sunday. According to the norms of the liturgical calendar, when a Solemnity falls on an Advent Sunday, the Advent Sunday takes precedence; the preempted observance moves to the next day. Springfield-in-Illinois Bishop Thomas Paprocki asked Rome what moved: the holyday, the obligation, or both? Rome said both. This precipitated great consternation among America’s prelates. Some clung to Rome’s interpretation. Others decided the change was too late and the expectation so drastic that they dispensed Catholics in their dioceses from attending Mass. In rural Springfield, Catholics made their way to church, while in urban Chicago they were dispensed from the “burden” of finding a church within perhaps a couple of blocks.

In today’s episode, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments on January 23 published its own about-face. No, said the Dicastery, what transfers is the holy day, not the obligation. Summary of the “Note”: When two observances collide on the liturgical calendar, the table of precedence determines which one is observed. The outranked observance then moves to the next day. So, the question the Dicastery had to decide is: when a holy day of obligation (a “feast of precept”) is transferred, does the obligation (the “precept”) transfer along with the “feast”?

The Dicastery says that the Code of Canon Law does not address the question. The Code provides that when a holy day of obligation is transferred permanently to another date (e.g., the American bishops’ mishmash over Ascension ThurSunday) then the Holy See must approve that permanent change. But, according to the Dicastery, the Code does not envision the occasional transfer of a holyday caused by a clash of precedence in the liturgical calendar. On such occasions, the Dicastery says, the obligation does not transfer. It therefore concludes that absent explicit indication to the contrary in the Code of Canon Law, the occasional transfer of a holy day to an adjacent date does not transfer the obligation along with it.

It should be pointed out that the question Bishop Paprocki raised is distinct from the “Saturday-or-Monday-Get-Out-of-Church-Free” rule contained in the 1991 Complementary Norm (here) adopted by the USCCB and approved by Rome. That change stipulated that if January 1 (Mary, Mother of God), August 15 (Assumption), or November 1 (All Saints) fell on a Saturday or Monday, the obligation to attend Mass on that holy day ceased.

That situation differs from the December 8 kerfuffle last year, for two reasons. First, the bishops’ “Complementary Norm” never applied to December 8 which is, after all, the patronal feast of the United States. Second, the bishops’ rule applies to certain Saturday or Monday holy days, intended to prevent an ecclesiastical doubleheader. That Norm is even more confused because if January 1, August 15, or November 1 falls on a Sunday, that holyday is observed. January 1 would have no liturgical competition to outrank it if it fell on a Sunday. August 15 and November 1 would outrank a Sunday in Ordinary Time. Immaculate Conception is different because it will always fall in Advent and Sundays in Advent (and Lent and of Easter) always outrank other observances.

No, the bishops’ Norm simply dispenses Catholics from going to church on two consecutive days. But here’s an example of that incoherence: if Christmas (December 25) and Mary, Mother of God (January 1) fall on Mondays, Christmas will be a holyday and Catholics will attend two Masses (Sunday + Christmas) while Mary, Mother of God on the following Monday will not be a holy day. Catholics would have no “obligation” to attend Mass, even though January 1 is also a civil holiday (and thus, work-free) in the United States.

Some might say that all this is a dirty little coverup for what some bishops wanted to do in the 1980s: abolish most holy days on the basis that they were poorly attended anyway. Some say that our complicated rules of observance are the artifact of attempts to cobble compromises and maintain the illusion of episcopal collegiality among the bishops. But if we do not catechize well and people primarily think of the holy days as simply obligations, then the habit of going to church declines. Can the average Catholic explain coherently why the Assumption is an important feast?

Now, let’s take a step back and see the forest for the trees.

Vatican II wanted to encourage “active participation” in the Mass. A proper Catholic attitude sees the “obligation” to worship not as a yoke (not “I’ve got to go to church, so how much of Mass can I miss before I fail in my obligation?”). A proper Catholic attitude sees one as having an “obligation” to worship not as some externally imposed law but as a duty that I, as a creature, owe God as my Creator in justice. (That’s what we mean when we respond to “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” with “It is right and just”). A proper Catholic attitude sees that duty not as an extrinsic imposition but as a privilege, a joyful opportunity by which God who loves me wants me to be in touch with Him. After all, being with someone one loves is not a burden and, even when we might not want to but they do, we recognize that “ought” not as something just required by a law but by love.

So, if we began from the starting point of good theology, we’d begin by understanding the rationale of why we worship God (including at fixed times and seasons, like Sundays and holy days of obligation). We might then conclude that the opportunity to celebrate a particular feast should also carry with it the expectation of participation in the central act of our worship, the Eucharist. We might also then conclude that dispensing the participation in Eucharistic worship on Saturdays and Mondays because it would “make us go to Mass twice in two days” is a callow excuse. But the canonical standard for making such dispensations has, especially in our times, grown ever lighter.

This document doesn’t start from good theology. It starts from canon law. Does the law envision this set of circumstances? Can we interpret the law’s application in a restrictive way, i.e., as applying the requirement for Roman permission only to permanent changes in the liturgical calendar, and thus leave a lacuna to say that the local bishop(s) can address occasional situations ad hoc, defaulting to the position that transfer of feast does not entail transfer of precept? In other words, the liturgical question is seen primarily through a legal lens. That seems paradoxical for a pontificate that is always talking about the dangers of “legalism,” not “sitting in the chair of Moses,” and of the need for theology, especially “pastoral” theology. For a pontificate nominally committed to “pastoral theology,” its legal approach would have made many earlier pontificates proud—except insofar as this pontificate seems always to want to minimize what the law (and theology) require. And it will certainly resound with American bishops, most of whose higher ecclesiastical education has not been in theology (much less philosophy). Most hold canon law degrees. If an American bishop is going to send a man for advanced studies, it is most likely to be in canon law to work in tribunal and chancery. Somebody’s got to put asunder what God has joined!

We wouldn’t even ask how well the problem was seen from an administrative lens. One Vatican office ruled a month before Immaculate Conception that what many bishops in the United States thought would not be a holy day of obligation in fact was, causing those bishops to scramble. Then, one month after Immaculate Conception, another Vatican office decided the first was wrong. Is it too much to expect them to stroll across Piazza S. Pietro and coordinate in advance? Or is amateur hour management to be the hallmark of a pontificate coming on a dozen years in office, even though this Pope was elected to make the Curia get its act together?

In the end, however, I ask that we step back and look at the forest for the trees. Between the “occasional” waiver Rome will allow on Immaculate Conception plus the Saturday/Monday waiver the U.S. bishops impose plus the shift of the Ascension throughout most of America to a Sunday, the only holy day (of the six the Council of Baltimore established for the United States) that is still always a holy day on one uniform date is Christmas. In other words, five of the six holy days in theory observed in the United States can be dispensed for varying reasons. That is startling for two reasons: first, it was not that long ago that all six holy days were always holy days, and second, it means the real “feasts of precept,” i.e., when you are bound under pain of mortal sin to attend Mass, are minimally 52 Sundays plus Christmas. That minimalization is like the deflation of another distinct Catholic practice – abstinence – from Fridays throughout the year to just seven days (Ash Wednesday, Lenten Fridays, Good Friday).

Consider the “problem” of Immaculate Conception colliding with the Second Sunday of Advent. That’s probably a once-in-twenty-years occurrence. So what’s your Catholic default position: It’s an exception so we dispense with Mass, or it’s an accommodation we make so rarely we just observe December 9 with Mass?

Look at the forest for the trees. Canonical legerdemain and “pastoral” theology have progressively minimized the expectation for Catholics to participate in what Vatican II calls “the source and summit of the Christian life,” i.e., the Mass. Less than five years ago, we underwent the unprecedented event of the bishops of the world telling Catholics they did not need to attend Mass by shutting down public Mass for months on end, the only “field hospital” known to evacuate the grounds in the midst of battle. (Is it perhaps telling that Arthur Roche, the Prefect of the Dicastery that issued this Note on Immaculate Conception, is a British bishop and that the English and Welsh Bishops’ Conference was one of the most subservient to government lockdown?) It is commonplace in the United States to hear bishops engaged in the Orwellian blather of how they are “renewing,” “reforming,” and “evangelizing” their “local churches” by closing parishes, abandoning neighborhoods, and making churches physically distant from one another, making it tougher for people to get to church. Like it or not, the cumulative message — the forest that appears amidst all the discrete trees — is that the expectation of participation in Mass is easily waivable. Anything that makes going “burdensome” is potential grist for the canonical alchemists to turn into a dispensation. Pardon, then, if it doesn’t really seem that Mass is “the source and summit of the Christian life” we say it is.