Let’s suppose that your problem is not attending Mass while out of town but having an important prescription filled during your trip to treat a chronic medical condition. There will be a pharmacy in the town that could fill the prescription for you. All other circumstances are the same: You don’t have your own transportation and you are traveling with people who do not share your need to go to the pharmacy. What would you do?
I would imagine that, under such circumstances, you would have no problem asking your traveling companions to make a stop at the pharmacy for you, even if it meant dropping you off and coming back later to pick you up once the prescription was filled. You probably would not even consider this to be an imposition upon them, but something that friends do for each other out of basic human decency.
Why, then, do so many Catholics choose to skip Mass rather than “inconvenience” non-Catholic friends and family with a polite request for transportation to Mass? I suspect that the reason is because they do not consider the Mass important enough to do so. Likely, they consider it a “frill” to be worked into their lives if possible, but easily set aside if not. But, like the medical prescription for a bodily ailment, the Mass is a spiritual prescription for the soul. And, since the soul survives bodily death, an even more important necessity to the human person than bodily necessities (important though they are).
If you chose this weekend to treat your friends’ convenience on a pleasure trip as a more important good than fulfilling your obligation to go to meet with your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ at Mass on Sundays and holy days, I encourage you to consider whether or not you should take that to confession. God bless.
