holy day of obligation?

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Kathrin

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Does anybody know if December 26, the sencond Christmas Day, is a Holy day of Obligation in Switzerland?
It IS a national holiday.

I am asking because I am working from 10 to 5 at a group home and it is evry difficult to find a mass I can go to. I found one at 7pm that is not too far away, but that’s in Italian - would that be ok, eve though I won’t understand most of it?
Or should I ask my boss if I could come later that day? I am a bit weary about that since I just started working there.

I am also working Christmas day, but there it’s easier to find a mass in the evening. And midnight mass would also count for Christmas, right?

Kathrin
 
Best way to confirm, call your Parish or check your Diocese web site 👍

Yes, Midnight Mass will meet your Christmas obligation.
 
I found another mass at 7pm in some other remote town or something that is in German (which I speak) 🙂 It is kind of far too but if it does turn out to be a holy day of obligation I think I can make it 🙂
 
Kathrin said:
Even if it actually is before midnight, right?
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The Masses of Christmas Eve meet the Christmas obligation.

Midnight Mass is mass that begins at Midnight - another time it is a Christmas Eve Mass (still meets the obilgation).
 
Can. 1248 §1. A person who assists at a Mass celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite either on the feast day itself or in the evening of the preceding day satisfies the obligation of participating in the Mass.
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The Diocese of Lausanne, Geneva, and Freiburg does not list this feast on its calendar. Due to the heterogeneous composition of Switzerland, it may be that each diocese sets its own holy days, based in part on local linguistic and cultural heritage. So it would still be a good idea to check with your pastor or your diocese.

More: The Diocese of Lugano provides a detailed calendar, but it appears to be a comprehensive liturgical guide of dates, readings, liturgical colors, etc, without (so far as I could find) mentioning days of obligation. Elsewhere on its site, the diocese listed the mass schedule for Christmas Eve and Christmas, but did not list any masses for Dec. 26. Presumably if it were a holy day, some mention would have been made of available masses.

A relatively active parish in the Diocese of Sion/Sitten lists a number of events on its calendar, including the Gospel readings for Sundays, Immaculate Conception, and Christmas, as well as the time of the midnight mass on Christmas Eve (1800!), but no events are scheduled for Dec. 26.

By the way, if an obligation does exist for the 26th, it can be fulfilled by a mass in any language, as you can see from Canon 1248 above.
 
Thank you for the very detailed information!!
It is not the first time that I am trying to find out what exactly the Holy Days are in Switzerland. Wikipedia lists them for Germany. And yes, it may also differ a lot from canton to canton.
In some cantons Holy Days like the Feast of the Immaculate Conception are even national holidays, but only in those that are mostly Catholic. I live in Baselland which is not one of the very Catholic cantons, so e.g. Immaculate Conception and All Saints Day aren’t holidays. Asencsion for example is though, I think that is Swiss-wide. As is Easter Monday and Pentecost Monday AND the second Christmas Day “Stephanstag”. But the fact that they are national holidays doesn’t necessarily mean they are Holy days of Obligation. See, it gets complicated…

And usually when I wasn’t sure I would just go, I mean I go to daily mass on most days too. But with me working and not all that many masses offered on the 26th it might get a bit hard, the one at 7 I think would involve at least a 45 minute trip, and then it’s the same concern that I sometimes have about going to daily mass: I need some rest too, especially when I’ve been working!
But if it is a day of obligation, of course I would WANT to make the effort anyway! 🙂

By the way, if any mass on the evening before a Holy day fulfills the obligation, would it also be possible to go to a Christmas Eve mass on the 24th and then to a Christmas mass on the evening of the 25th, for the 26th? Or is that different, because they are TWO holy days one after the other?

(If this question has gotten too complicated, don’t worry about it, I guess I could ask all this at the diocese too.)

Kathrin
 
Kathrin said:
By the way, if any mass on the evening before a Holy day fulfills the obligation, would it also be possible to go to a Christmas Eve mass on the 24th and then to a Christmas mass on the evening of the 25th, for the 26th?

Kathrin
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Yes
 
Ok. Now. I talked to my priest today.

I have often thought that in general, here in Switzerland, the Chruch is less “strict” than in the US.
I don’t even know the German term for Holy Day of Obligation. I asked him if the 26th was one of those days when we have HAVE to go to church. He told me something to the point of to not let others tell me what I have to do but to listen to my conscience. (He knows how scrupulous I am so he knows there is a problem there. That might also be a reason why he wants to draw me to a less rigid perspective.)

Anyway. He said that if I am working on a holy day and doing God’s work (like tending to disabled people) and can’t come to church then, that does NOT mean that I will have to go I don’t know where far away to find another mass sometime in the evening. That’s not the way it is meant.
It is more important that I do God’s work where I am.

I may still go to mass on Christmas Eve AND on Christmas Day in the evening, but not go to that far away one on the 26th.

Oh, and I also could do confession :).

Kathrin
 
Glad to hear you consulted with the priest and got this worked out
Kathrin said:
I don’t even know the German term for Holy Day of Obligation.
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One way that I’ve found useful to figure out certain terms in foreign languages is to look up the topic on Wikipedia, then see if there is a corresponding article in the other language. For instance, when I look at the entry for Holy Day of Obligation, I find the link to the same topic in Deutsch on the lower left. That article is Gebotener Feiertag. This has its limits; sometimes you’ll have to play around with the form of the words (adjective endings, plurals, etc). And you may have noticed there was no corresponding article at the moment in for instance French and Spanish. But it’s a good quick-and-dirty solution in a lot of cases.

My other main resource for foreign languages is the Google Language Tools page, linked just to the right of the search box on the main Google page. Frohe Weihnachten!
 
So even after the strictest perspective, if my priest tells me it’s ok to not go to a far away service in another town after work, then it IS ok, right?

Anyway, I went to midnight mass last night 🙂 and I will probably go to a Christmas Mass tonight after work (not so far away and not as late as the one on the 26th), so I would say I will have fulfilled my obligation?

Kathrin
 
Kathrin said:
So even after the strictest perspective, if my priest tells me it’s ok to not go to a far away service in another town after work, then it IS ok, right?

Anyway, I went to midnight mass last night 🙂 and I will probably go to a Christmas Mass tonight after work (not so far away and not as late as the one on the 26th), so I would say I will have fulfilled my obligation?

Kathrin
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Your pastor has the right to indult you for non-attendance or even attendance of a non-catholic service. He can (and should) impose some other requirement, for example, reading the readings of the day while camping, or saying the rosary, or some other prayer-based requirement.
 
Well, I went to a Christmas Eve mass last night (beautiful!) and then went to mass today after work, I was a LITTLE late but made it during the Gloria… realized then that this one was indeed in Italian (must have mixed them up…) so I didn’t understand much at all. I reread the scripture readings for today though now online, so I hope I am ok… so maybe I really won’t go to that faraway mass tomorrow but maybe come home after work and spend some time with my parents…
 
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