Parents´ actions and childrens conscience

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kima
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It’s sad.

I just want to say a few words about organized sports.

My daughters were athletes in a sport that had required practices on Saturdays from 5:30 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. and on Sundays from 5:30 a.m. until 1:00 p.m.

We were not Catholic at the time. We didn’t worry about missing Protestant worship services, since there is no “obligation” to attend, and there were plenty of other opportunities during the week to worship, pray, study the Bible, and be with other Christians in our Protestant church.

But Catholics, as far as I can see, don’t have that option. However, I have a hard time understanding why they would have to miss Mass, even with the kind of schedule that I listed above.

Saturday vigil Masses are available, and at least one parish in our city (ours) has a Sunday evening Mass. Many college towns/cities have late Sunday Masses (my daughter used to attend Mass with her friends at her Catholic college–yes, we sent her to a Catholic University even though she was not Catholic!) at 10:00 p.m.–and it was a packed Mass! The public was also invited to attend this Mass, and many did.

The locations where my daughters did their sport had Catholic churches galore. Many of their teammates were Catholic and the families managed to get them to Mass.

Even during competitions, the Catholic families found ways to get to Mass.

So…why do Catholic kids who are doing sports have to miss Mass so often? I can see once or twice a year, if the Big Game or Big Tournament is scheduled for the ENTIRE weekend from Friday evening straight through till Sunday late night (although I would think that most coaches/teams would allow for religious absences for a few hours).

But for typical children’s and teen sports? I don’t get it.
 
It depends on the location the kids are in, the time of their sporting event and also whether the parents are motivated enough to plan their day around getting everybody to Mass and to the sporting event. I will say that in some locations the Masses are pretty few and far between. There may be one or two morning Masses and that’s it. Saturday vigil is not universal, or the closest one may be 15-20 miles away and that’s not a practical drive. Also, before the Masstimes app was invented it was hard to gather info about available churches and Masses in many areas.

Anyway, that’s not the point of the article. An occasional miss because you’re traveling or you had a sporting event is generally an occasional situation. It does not result in kids missing Mass for weeks at a time. The priest’s point is that the parents are not taking the kids to Mass during ordinary non-travel non-sporting-event Sundays, and are not going to Mass themselves.
 
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