I’ve never really been confident that eating out on Sundays is a good thing to do. I’ve heard, however, from at least two F.S.S.P. priests that it’s all right. I think that the reasoning is supposed to be something like this: (1) people have to eat; (2) a tavern or other eatery does what people would normally do for themselves on Sundays in terms of providing the basic food stuffs; (3) and they can’t do it for themselves on some given occasion for whatever reason. If these are really the ideas behind the claim, I don’t have a problem with them, so much as with the frequency with which this “emergency” dining is needed. “Clara,” I say, “I’m about to die of hunger, please pull over the car - ah, look! there’s a Texas Roadhouse!” Then after the Texas Roadhouse has done good business by us, Franciscus has an emergency hunger attack and we pull off the highway a couple miles down the road for Krispy Kreme. Sundays are feast days after all!

We routinely spend four hours in the car on Sundays, and I’m the last person who would want to part from the Roadhouse, Don Pablo’s, and Krispy Kreme. But even we know that we don’t absolutely need these places; we could, for example, make sandwiches and bring them with us; and in the olden days, when there wasn’t a plethora of national chains to cater to our needs 24-7, this is probably what we would have done. Or, better yet, we would have eaten with one of the families in the parish.

While our Scranton-bound group may be a legitimate case of eating out on Sundays - because we’re social pariahs or unhealthily hungry - yet I just can’t see how the casuistry is supposed to work for Frank and Susie who pop over to the local pancake place on Sunday mornings. If Frank and Susie stayed at home, there wouldn’t be that waitress rushing about, doing her best to earn a good tip, there wouldn’t the Mexican in the back washing the dishes (I’m still in southern California as I write this), there wouldn’t be that other chap bussing tables and cleaning the floors. This is all real work, of course, and if it were necessary to save lives or keep people from starving, there wouldn’t be a quibble in any but the Pharisee’s mind. For instance, at a nursing home or in a hospital, something like a restaurant operation has to go on to get people fed at meal time, and no one questions whether this ought to happen on Sundays, too.

But so much more often - so my intuitions tell me - Sunday dining is about eating nicer food, at some place nicer, taking it easier, having someone else do the work while we kick back. I admit that very few today, besides a traditionalist Catholic or an orthodox Jew, would worry about this. I’m writing this post to express some frustrations - with myself, primarily - because I still do not understand the moral principles or, perhaps, the concrete application of those principles, with respect to the Third Commandment.

The 3rd Commandment is: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”

First of all, if I didn’t know any better, after reading these verses from Exodus, I would have thought that there was something in the very order of the world which requires us to observe the seventh or sabbath day of the week. It might require revelation to know it, yet once we have the Scriptures, we would see that God really meant the Sabbath day to be special; it’s not just any other day, as we might say of the 3rd or 5th days of the week. What, after all, does this mean, that God blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it?

But in the era of the Church, the seventh day is no longer observed. The day of the Resurrection, the eighth day, as it is sometimes figuratively described, became the day both of rest and of worship. I suppose that if I looked, the Catholic Encyclopedia would enlighten me about the historical transition from Saturday to Sunday. I am, however, far from questioning the licitness of the transition! Rather, I’m wondering what kinds of things were carried over from the Jew’s Sabbath to the Catholic’s Sunday.

As far as detailed guidelines go, the text of the commandment itself doesn’t provide much help: we simply learn that we’re not to work and that none of us are to do any work. The main thing, then, it seems, is to figure out what is meant by “work”. Is cooking work? Is flipping a light switch work? Are certain activities always work so that they can never be licitly done on a Sunday?

In this area, my feelings are divided. As I understand it, the traditional division moralists make is between servile labor and cultural labor; the former is the “work” prohibited by the 3rd commandment while the latter, though it looks or might feel at times like work, is not really work, at least with respect to the 3rd commandment. I’m drawn to the idea that certain types of activity are always servile and others are always “cultural” or intellectual. In particular, I like the idea that even though I philosophize, say, six days a week, I can licitly continue to philosophize on the seventh; but if I mow lawns seven days a week, I cannot mow on the seventh. Mowing lawns is just not something one does on Sundays. But then in other cases, say, where I do taxes for other people six days a week and get my jollies and relaxation and rustic pleasure from mowing my lawn on Sundays, I just can’t believe that it’s illicit. If it were illicit, how could that be the case and yet it be all right to take a good long run on Sundays in which my body experiences more stress, burns more calories, and at the end of it all, I’m more exhausted than if I’ve mowed my lawn? (We could multiply examples along similar lines.)

So that’s why I say that I’m divided: I think that activities which otherwise look servile are really servile only when they are subjectively felt as such; but if it’s a “cultural” labor, like philosophizing, I think that they’re all right for Sundays, even if it’s what we’ve been doing the rest of the week, too. (Part of this view is motivated by Romano Amerio’s very interesting discussion in Iota Unum of the new attitudes towards work and leisure which have influenced the thinking on this subject in the 20th century.)

I’ve heard solid priests go all ways on this subject. In Fr. Adam Rigourous’ homily on the 3rd Commandment a few weeks back, he intimated that certain activities were always forbidden on Sundays, e.g. mucking around in the garden; Joe Six Pack has related, on a thread some time ago on this blog, that his F.S.S.P. priest had said a similar thing. In the confessional, however, with Fr. Fischer, F.S.S.P., I heard that gardening would be all right on Sundays if it was something I did to relax. (Don’t worry, I didn’t actually ask about gardening.) Fr. Francis Randolph of the Oratory told Catharina Oxoniensis to abstain on Sundays from whatever labor normally occupied the other days of the week.

I don’t mean the above paragraph as an exhaustive survey of contemporary and competent moral theologians, but only as some support for the thought that this is a somewhat confusing issue. I’ve already mentioned Romano Amerio, and I think that he has put his finger on some ideas which have made the casuistry of the 3rd Commandment an even trickier subject at the present day, i.e. the tendency to eliminate the division between servile and intellectual labor. Amerio singles out John Paul the Fair’s Laborem Exercens in this regard. (I confess that I haven’t read it.) We can probably all agree that, if anything, there has been an historical trend - sometimes trending more rapidly than at other times - from regarding certain types of human activity as inherently servile or “cultural” towards a subjective assessment of what counts as one or the other.

I’ll leave these questions aside for the moment because I want to turn to another aspect of Sundays which I find perplexing. During the same confession in which I heard from Fr. Fischer about gardening (hypothetically), I also asked whether the strictures which apply to Sundays hold for Holy Days of Obligation. This is a question that has long puzzled me! In the first place, I should say that Fr. Fischer told me that the strictures do not hold for Holy Days of Obligation as for Sundays. I had wondered, for instance, if it would behoove one to take the day off from work on, for example, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. If we’re really not supposed to, this doesn’t make sense to me, and to explain why this doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll return to my concerns about the natural order and the 7th day which I had at the beginning of this post.

Apparently, when the Mosaic ceremonial law was abrogated at the rending of the curtain in the Temple, the requirement to observe the 3rd Commandment by resting on the seventh day was among the things abrogated. Why this should be the case was never clear to me instead of, say, the abrogation of other particular ceremonies or rules (the traditions of men, as Christ calls them) which had come to surround the Torah as so many fences (this is, in fact, the Jewish imagery). At any rate, this is what happened, and the new day for 3rd Commandment type observation became Sunday. Fine and dandy. This happened not by a divine decree, though, but by the decision of the Church. (Someone tell me if this doesn’t seem right.) From these premises, it always seemed to me that Sundays are a proper subset of Holy Days of Obligation, not that they’re two different sets with no common elements.

Now the main characteristic of Holy Days of Obligation, it seems to me, is that we have on those days an obligation to hear Mass. If Fr. Fischer was correct, I can work like a slave on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception so long as I heard the 6AM Mass before I marched off to the salt mines. And if this is the case, then I ask: in virtue of what did prohibitions against certain types of work come to be attached to Sundays?

We can reasonably think, I suppose, that the law of nature itself requires that some rest be observed by human beings; certainly we can see how such a law leads to human flourishing, especially if that rest is occupied with wholesome things. But since the seventh day observation was abrogated, why not think that each of us should take his rest as best and whenever he can, provided he takes a day in there somewhere? This is what we do with things like eating: it has to happen and it’s good for us, but we don’t all have to do it at the same time.

On the other hand, we should want to observe in a manner worthy of our Lord the day of his Resurrection - which is why Franciscus and I like to go to Krispy Kreme on Sundays - and maybe it’s necessary to refrain from industrial lawn mowing and commerical dishwashing in order to honor our Lord appropriately. Yet even if this is the case, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s the 3rd Commandment which tells us this, but the Church Herself. Which is a-okay with me! but we commonly handle the matter as though our observation of Sunday as a day of rest follows from the 3rd Commandment. But the 3rd Commandment tells us to rest on the seventh day, not the first (or eighth). Sunday rest is still connected to the 3rd Commandment, but only indirectly, as far as I can see.

Perhaps my questions would in large part be answered if I understood why we were able to jettison the seventh day altogether in favor of Sunday. For example, I can more easily understand the observation of the seventh day plus the eighth day rather than just the eighth day (Sunday) alone.

While I can understand why the Church can oblige us to certain