On holy days of obligation not being so obligatory anymore

From The Divine Life:

Today has been officially declared “Catholic Blogger Complaint Thursday.” As we all know, today used to be known as Ascension Thursday, but that has been moved to Sunday to allow Catholic bloggers a day to complain about the state of the Church. So we can now distinguish today from every other day, which are considered unofficial Catholic Blogger Complaint Days.

In the Catholic blogosphere, no one seems to like the fact that the celebration of the Ascension has been moved from its traditional date 40 days after Easter (when, you know, it actually happened) to the following Sunday. And to be honest, I don’t like it either. I realize that the intentions behind the move are quite sincere and well-meaning: people were afraid that celebrating the Ascension on a business work day would cause too many people to miss Mass on this important day, and so moving it to Sunday would allow more Catholics to actually celebrate it. But I think this was short-sighted and in the end actually causes more people to miss celebrating the Ascension because they are not going to Mass on either Thursday or Sunday. What do I mean by that?

Making a day like Ascension Thursday a holy day of obligation sets apart Catholics from the rest of the culture. While I do believe that Catholics are to be immersed in society in many ways, we also need to have a strong Catholic identity so that we don’t drown in the prevalent culture. There has always been a thin line balancing our need to be part of the culture yet separate from it.

Read the rest here. HT Knights of Divine Mercy blog. Photo: From Father Z's blog.