I think anyone who is sick and attends mass is being selfish. You are potentially spreading your illness to others and making them sick. If you are sick, STAY HOME. Have some concern for others, not just yourself.
See, if you are sick, you can easily spread your illness. You, for example, blow your nose before you get out of your car (hands are now dirty with the virus/bacteria). You must open the door to the church, thus the door handles now have your viruses/bacteria. Anything you touch is dirty. How many times do you touch your nose, eyes, etc. while in church? Then you touch something else. You are spreading your illness.
I’d like to illustrate my feelings about this through a fiction story. It’s the best way I know of to explain myself.
Once upon a time, there was a man who was dirt poor and had nowhere to eat except at a soup kitchen. Lots of other people around him also were dirt poor and had nowhere else to eat, so each day when he went to eat, hundreds of people were at the soup kitchen were he collected his meal. He worked in a factory nearby with electrical wiring, and any slip-up could give him an electric shock.
One day, he caught a cold. He went to the soup kitchen anyway, for he had nowhere else to eat. He carefully washed his hands before entering the building, but when he went in to get his food, someone heard he had a cold. The person went up to him and said, “You must not eat here. Go and stay at your home for the next one or two weeks until your cold is completely gone.”
“It’s just a little cold!” the man replied, “You may be right that I may sneeze, and maybe I will get one or two people sick. But I have nowhere else to eat! You expect me to fast from all three meals, every day between now and whenever the cold lifts?”
“Yes. I know you’ll be extremely hungry, that you’ll have hunger pangs, but I don’t want you near us as long as there’s any chance I, or someone else here, might catch this cold from you.”
“But listen!” the man protested. “It’s not only the physical hunger of fasting for one or two weeks that I’m complaining about. I have a job in a factory, and if hunger makes me shaky and weak, and I slip up, a shock from the electrical wiring could give me great pain. Also, if I fumble the wiring, the result could shock others as well.”
“Listen,” the person said. “We don’t want to have any risks of anyone here catching your cold. Just do the best you can with the factory work and hold out as best you can while you fast for a week or two. You can’t be so selfish.”
The Eucharist is my food. I live on God. I don’t think you would do what I present happening in this story, asking me to withdraw from all earthly meals as long as I have a cold, if there was only one place I could eat, and there were people there who might catch the cold from me. How much less, then, should you ask me to abstain from Heavenly Food, on which our souls live? How much more do our souls need Heavenly Food than our bodies need physical food? Moses giving Israel manna in the desert when their stomachs were hungry was only a
symbol of Christ providing the Food that satisfies our souls.
Also, I do this “factory work,” the work of sanctification, and if I make a false move because of weakness, as a result of having not eaten my spiritual food, that false move is sin. Which is far worse than an electrical shock to the body. I don’t think you would urge me to not eat the Eucharist if the consequence of my abstaining was electric shocks to my body, but sin is much worse than that, for it pierces the soul. Also, if I sin because of lacking the daily grace that comes from the Eucharist, I might cause others to sin in reaction to me, which spreads the evil beyond myself.
I don’t think you are the person in this story. I don’t think you’ve fully thought through everything about the Eucharist though, and neither have I, of course. But I’m just trying to clarify some about the vital importance of participating regularly in the Eucharistic Celebration, and how that’s so much more important than the body.
I appreciate very much your concern for people’s health. I try to protect their health too; I didn’t shake people’s hands yesterday at Mass, during the time of peace, and today I only did because I felt they were safe from germs, as I washed my hands in the parish bathroom before entering the church building. Also, if I was sick with something really severe, I wouldn’t risk their health. I would abstain. But I feel very strongly the need to put the spiritual life as #1 priority, for myself and others.
and my family is telling me that I shouldn’t go to Mass today. Also I guess it can be contagious… I’m wondering, would it be a sin if I missed Mass? If it was all up to me, and if the disease wasn’t contagious, I’d go… but my family really doesn’t want me to (ie: I might not get a ride, and I can’t drive yet), and also we’re getting the car repaired and I don’t know when it will be fixed
.
it’s going to be a long week… lol… I’m still sick and the car still doesn’t work