My goodness.
You’d think some folks were still living under the old law. As I said earlier, this is probably a very meaningful time for your father.
Love him as God loves him. I believe that pushing this issue too far will be a blemish on this wonderful time between you. That’s selfishness.
Ask him. If he doesn’t want to, say “Dad, I won’t always acquiesce in this case, but today I am because I love you.”
It will be its own Mass…A sacrifice for God.
Her dad is Catholic. His long-standing failure to practice his faith and his loss of appreciation of Sunday as a day of singular significance can hardly be a matter of small concern to her. If she can convince him that it would be special to her if they would go to Mass together, that day of all days when Catholics ought to want to go to Mass together, all the better. While they may be given a dispensation for some outing that is not possible except by missing a Sunday Mass or whose purpose would be defeated by the effort required to get to a Mass, so be that, too, but it would not be a “sacrifice” on par with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It would be a very unfortunate loss and a high price to pay for both of them. The difference between the OP and her father is that she appreciates that and he doesn’t
*Living the Sunday obligation
- Conscious of this new vital principle which the Eucharist imparts to the Christian, the Synod Fathers reaffirmed the importance of the Sunday obligation for all the faithful, viewing it as a wellspring of authentic freedom enabling them to live each day in accordance with what they celebrated on “the Lord’s Day.” The life of faith is endangered when we lose the desire to share in the celebration of the Eucharist and its commemoration of the paschal victory. Participating in the Sunday liturgical assembly with all our brothers and sisters, with whom we form one body in Jesus Christ, is demanded by our Christian conscience and at the same time it forms that conscience. To lose a sense of Sunday as the Lord’s Day, a day to be sanctified, is symptomatic of the loss of an authentic sense of Christian freedom, the freedom of the children of God. (206) Here some observations made by my venerable predecessor John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Dies Domini (207) continue to have great value. Speaking of the various dimensions of the Christian celebration of Sunday, he said that it is Dies Domini with regard to the work of creation, Dies Christi as the day of the new creation and the Risen Lord’s gift of the Holy Spirit, Dies Ecclesiae as the day on which the Christian community gathers for the celebration, and Dies hominis as the day of joy, rest and fraternal charity.
Sunday thus appears as the primordial holy day, when all believers, wherever they are found, can become heralds and guardians of the true meaning of time. It gives rise to the Christian meaning of life and a new way of experiencing time, relationships, work, life and death. On the Lord’s Day, then, it is fitting that Church groups should organize, around Sunday Mass, the activities of the Christian community: social gatherings, programs for the faith formation of children, young people and adults, pilgrimages, charitable works, and different moments of prayer. For the sake of these important values – while recognizing that Saturday evening, beginning with First Vespers, is already a part of Sunday and a time when the Sunday obligation can be fulfilled – we need to remember that it is Sunday itself that is meant to be kept holy, lest it end up as a day “empty of God.” (208)* From the Apostolic Exhortation
Sacramentum Caritatis, “
On the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church’s Life and Mission,” Pope Benedict XVI, 2007
