Nobody “changed” the Sabbath, and the Sabbath isn’t on Sunday. The Sabbath was and remains the seventh day, Saturday. What happened is that the Church Jesus founded to teach in his name, the Catholic Church, determined that it is no longer necessary for Christians to observe “the Sabbath” because the Sabbath is a Jewish holiday that is not binding on Christians. Instead, Christians observe
the Lord’s Day on Sunday, in honor of the first day of the week when Jesus rose from the dead and the Holy Spirit descended on the Church. Because the moral requirement of the third commandment (the Sabbath commandment) that humans set aside sufficient time to worship God and rest from labor remains valid, the Church transferred the moral obligation for communal worship and rest to Sunday.
There is a lot of confusion among many Christians, including some Catholics, about the distinction between the Sabbath and Sunday. What happened is that Christians (mainly the early Protestants) started describing Sunday as “the Sabbath,” intending it as a shorthand description of the parallel function to the Sabbath that the Lord’s Day serves for Christians under the New Covenant. The important distinctions were soon lost and some later Protestants, formed by the faulty theory of
sola scriptura, started wondering why Christians “changed” the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Seventh-Day Adventists were among those who decided that the change was unwarranted by Scripture and was instead a “novelty” introduced by a “paganized” Catholic Church, the authority of which they rejected.
At this point, I believe it would be better for Catholics to entirely drop the word
Sabbath from their vocabulary when discussing the Church’s practice of communal worship and rest on Sunday. When the word is used, it should be used exclusively to refer to the original Jewish holiday observed on the seventh day, Saturday.
Recommended Reading:
Seventh-Day Adventism
Sabbath or Sunday?
From Sabbath to Sunday by James P. Guzek
