is THUS REALLY OUR SUNDAY BEST?

By
CONSTANCE HOLT Former Editor of a popular weekly and a monthly magazine for women OWADAYS so much is
thrown all at once into the
talk "tub" that some time should be allowed for the clearing of steam and the removal of irrelevant foam. That homely metaphor suggests Monday morning, and this article is about Sunday.
What, again? Hasn't the Bill already been introduced and rejected? Haven't we heard everything that can be said about it?
Yes, the debate is long over— but Sunday itself, a symbolical high-light of the week, can never be more important just for being in the news.
Last month the law and its anomalies related to openings and closings, changing customs, varying views of the same objectives in preserving Sunday observance. All were well discussed from the interests of religion, wade, society —even Culture. In some quarters hopeful flickers of two-way understanding emerged. We were reminded that people on opposite "sides," while singing a different tune, can share a deeper harmony.
But on both sides more significant warnings remain.
Reason for joy
'WE have enjoyed three or 7° four Sundays since the Bill was thrown out.
Enjoyed them?
Christian joy, that normal byproduct of our faith so insisted on by the New Testament, a sense of happy worth-whileness about life, can be captured and crystallised in our feeling towards the Sundaybest day of our week. . . Yes, feeling—that dangerous thing. For association and atmosphere do grow round a day, out of the way it is spent . . . and behind them is the reason for that way.
Basic Catholic teaching on Sunday is changeless, while application varies from age to age and in different places.
Worship—Rest and Play . . a happy plan for a day set aside to commemorate a joyful occasion, fulfilling and finally supplanting the wise old Jewish Sabbath.
How does the plan govern Sundays for Catholics in Britain now?
`No sin' pleasure
THIS is not a Gallup PoIl nor a national survey but a personal view based on impressions of the ordinary people we know and are.
These impressions have been formed from unusually good opportunities to meet varying types of Catholics in many settings, some in the U.S.A. and Australia.
It seems likely that among regular churchgoers it will be found
that fewer Catholics in proportion have a personal feeling, a sense of joy about Sunday, beyond and after their regular -Mass-hearing."
The note that has stuck fast and
firmly is that it is "no sin" to go apleasuring afterwards.
Worship on a festive day surely suggests something more than an anxious, hustled rush to church and back, followed by ardent dedication of the next few hours to
the pursuit of health and pleasure. Something more than the avoidance of the "forbidden" things— surely?,
Some Catholics among the middle-aged report tender recol lections of Sundays long ago, in spite of restrictions, which they remark were usually suffered more acutely by Protestant friends.
Sunday clothes, of course, figure prominently in the memories.
These helped though to give one a
starched outlook, says a priest of particularly balanced and "mod
em" outlook. (It seems quite possible that the stress on the "gloom" associated with restrictive clothes is largely male, for, on the whole, girls enjoy wearing their best: boys do not.) Nice meals, fathers at home, favourite aunts to tea all blend into the homely memories of the Rest Day.lut it "felt holy."
"Sunday was made to feel so different," says the same priest.
"On the whole it was a happy day." This idea is shared by some ex-convent boarders.
From others (and today too): "Just dull. Mass at the same time as usual, and nothing happening after 3 o'clock Benediction except homework or reading."
'Different' day
OR very many Sunday today is just comfortably associated with no going to work . . . and, yes, of course, of not missing Mass. That is the flavour—the not failing to hear Mass, the not forgetting to put in the weekly effort. Can a good tradition and atmosphere round Sunday grow out of this negati,?e idea of avoiding sin? Is Sunday any longer made to feel "so different"? Is it any wonder that festivity on the Rest Day takes the form only of secular pleasure associations? Is it left very largely to nonCatholic worshippers in England to associate the joy of Sundays with worship which is articulate, shared, communal?
It is easy to get labelled as sentimental, as advocating a Nonconformist "heartiness" in church matters. But the real needs of Catholics today would more quickly be met—and the hopes of many saintly leaders, including the H o 1 y Father himself — more quickly fulfilled, if Catholic eyes were opened to the fact that "outeiders" are not wrong in everything and all the time. The defensive minority point of view still often dominates English Catholic thinking. It quickly justifies clinging to a habit, even a negative one, just because the "separated" do otherwise.
Early rising
THE brief time spent passively in church by thousands of practising Catholics does nothing to underline the character of Sunday, nothing to rekindle the spirit of joy which first consecrated it.
Catholics are often commended for their effort to get to Mass under unusual conditions. One hears of the excellent young people on a hiking holiday who will "get" an early Mass so as to tuck their Sunday duty safely into their rucksacks before the day's fun begins. But young people have a way of spending more time on the things they really enjoy. One admires the energy of the girl who got to a 5 a.m. Mass because she wanted to join a cycling club at 6 a.m. But . . . is this realty the Sunday "idea"?
The Liturgy cannot be left out of the picture of our Sunday as it is now and as it may become. Where it has been lost—or rather drifted quite away—from people's possession, the Christian year loses for the vast majority of the faithful its character, colour, variety. Where it is renewed, the "joy" spirit and all its accompanying initiative begins to show. It governs the character of the day "outside" church.
For how many of the packed congregations who "hear" Mass before proceeding to enjoy Sunday this spirit is locked away, unknown? If we all saw the need, we could restore to Sunday a character which would be printed into the hearts and minds of every practising Catholic, in whose name the altar boy replies ". . . the God who gives joy to my youth."
Our own Sunday
THis is not a plea for Sundays to be spent largely in church. Heaven forbid that we should have a situation where we needed "churchwardens" with beadles to prod us into wakefulness as did Protestants at early 19th century
services when wordy "Old Testament Prophets" of that time occupied the pulpits.
But we who have the Faith need, especially today, to revive our own spirits in church, and then go out and refresh the world afterwards.
Is that, on the whole, the effect of our Sundays nowadays?
Probably there is today less violent desecration of Sunday than in many periods past—in, say, Hogarthian days, when cheap gin and riotous Sunday morning activities kept the masses from the Established Church services. The Catholic minority then was still leading their "catacomb" life, and to a large extent still paying in very real ways for their loyalty to the Faith.
Now, moving freely in the mainstream of national life a potential force in public opinion, a body which fills its churches, we are producing a Sunday idea of our own. Is it a good enough one?
This set of reflections sprang from a hunch that it is not. To hear from people who think this view is wrong would be a cheering occasion.
The ideal—but
RECENTLY mitECENTLY in this paper we read: "Catholics arc all agreed that
Sunday must be kept a day of prayer and rest."
May I suggest that this is the ideal—but not the situation?
Readers are invited to comment on Constance Flolt's view of a Christian Sunday. Letters should be brief.