I am a bit hesitant to answer your question in this forum because what you present is open to several interpretations, which bear on the answer I would give. As presented, you have left the situation, frankly, too speculative.
Let me explain. A weekend trip could mean that you are going out after work on Friday and returning after supper on Sunday. If that were the case, I would counsel you to investigate the possibility of attending Mass on Saturday evening or Sunday evening as you returned home. An absence is less noticeable over such a period.
Conversely, if this “weekend trip” involves getting to a remote destination late on Saturday (and there is no possibility of finding an anticipated Mass en route) and the return is on Sunday afternoon (again with no possibility of coordinating with an available evening Mass) and such that you are actually at the lodge for 24 hours or even less…while the main focus of your hosts’ hospitality is the hunt, which you would not be able to participate at in order to get to the one available Mass a significant distance away…all that would directly impact my evaluation.
If this is such a rural area that there is no anticipated Mass (which happens) and no Sunday evening Mass where you are (which happens) those facts matter.
As it is, you leave me a scenario in which I am left to assume you have access to one and only one Mass and that one is critically situated at a point so as to make you miss the hunt that, I have to assume, is really the main purpose of a trip to a hunting lodge.
If it is, however, that your custom is to attend Mass on Sunday morning but you could reasonably adjust your routine in this trip to attend Mass on Saturday evening or Sunday evening, either coming or going, then that would be a reasonable accommodation for you to make in having this weekend getaway and so the obligation should abide.
The mere fact of being in transit does not excuse from the obligation; it is the relative burden that the obligation imposes that eventually reaches the point of being excused – and that is actually a significant variable.
You say that the church is thirty miles away but that does not tell me whether you can get there in a half-hour or less (should you have access to the autobahn – although I assume you are American!) or, as would be the case where I am from, thirty miles can easily take an hour or more to travel. If this latter is the case, we are talking about three hours away to fulfill the obligation, and I would certainly lean toward saying you had reached the threshold of being excused, given the various concomitant circumstances you present.
As an aside, I had a friend who was going to a cabin on an island with friends for the weekend. Mass was only available once on Sunday morning at the nearest church…but it meant using a boat to get to his car and since it was not his boat and he did not know how to operate it, it would mean the hosts would have to both take him to shore and then coordinate to return to pick him up and this in the absence of mobile phone reception and the logistics became such that he was certainly excused from the obligation given all the particular circumstances.
In other words: If the burden to attend Mass is also such that a reasonable host would conclude “this is so disruptive to us and our hospitality; why did we bother inviting you to an occasion a significant portion of which, and actually the main event of, you had to miss?”…then I would also certainly say you were excused from the obligation. But there are other reasonable scenarios I could construe from what you relate that I would not be able to make that finding.
In any event, there are two relatively quick ways that I can conclude this.
- The criteria for a serious sin is: the matter is serious, you have to know it is serious, and you have to fully and freely consent. In this circumstance, you state that you lacked sufficient knowledge of how the obligation bound you in the light of the circumstances to arrive at a decision and you ask advice; you think you were excused from the obligation. Since you assert you did not know how the law applied here, moral theology would cause me to say that in this instance you could not incur the penalty of moral guilt regardless of whether or not these circumstances, which I can’t really and accurately determine, excused you from the obligation. You can certainly mention it in your next confession but I do not make the determination based on what you have said that you would have to make that confession before you approach Communion, given that what you assert involves honestly lacking sufficient knowledge to decide.
- Going forward, rather than wonder whether or not this particular array of circumstances is at the threshold to excuse you from the obligation and seeking advice in such a forum, I would earnestly counsel you to simply ask your pastor (or a vicar general of your diocese, should you have the good fortune to know him) to either dispense you from the obligation or at least to commute it to something else for these occasions. (Canon 1245) Provided I had a few more details, which I surmise is what is actually the case here, I would grant the dispensation.
