Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
With the help of St. Rose, today's Franciscan Saint, and of course, Our Blessed Lady, I'd like to share a brief reflection to you, with you today and I'm going to go on with theology for a little while at the beginning and then I'll make a practical point at the end.
And if it seems long, you can try to tell yourself that it's actually interesting and you'll need it one day, and maybe that will help to make it not seem so long.
So by divine law, this is the reflection now, by divine law, all human beings must sanctify certain days by worshiping God and abstaining from certain types of work.
It's the third commandment.
Our human nature itself makes us feel this law, and in fact, most people on certain days of the year take a day off from work.
So like Labor Day, most people take that day off, and certain other days of the year, they do that as well.
It's written in our nature.
But depending on where you make your observation, it would seem that for a growing number of people, a Sunday is not necessarily one of those days.
Sunday is not necessarily a day of rest.
And I think it's fair to say that it's true for a growing number of people, even those who are nominally Christian.
We see the same stores open on Sundays like any other day of the week.
We see the same activities going on.
So, you know, you see people working on their roofs and doing landscaping work and cutting down their trees, continuing their farm work.
Construction vehicles go by, and people, construction workers, are on their way to and from their job sites, etc.
So this type of activity goes on on Sundays.
And again, I think it's not exaggerated to say that most people, even nominal Christians, are not sanctifying the Lord's Day, but spend it, for the most part, like any other day.
That's the starting point.
So that's where we begin.
Now, the Third Commandment, specifically the sanctification of the Lord's Day, is actually not a continuation of the Old Testament law on the Sabbath.
Determining which days are to be sanctified and which kind of work needs to be avoided belongs to the Church for this reason.
The Old Testament laws on the Sabbath no longer apply today under the new dispensation, under the new covenant.
We don't observe the laws regarding the Sabbath from the Old Testament.
In fact, we celebrate the Lord's Day on a completely different day of the week, Sunday, not Saturday, and also in a slightly different way.
Canon 1247 of the current law of the Church says, On Sundays, the faithful are to abstain from those works and affairs which hinder the worship to be rendered to God, the joy proper to the Lord's Day, or the suitable relaxation of mind and body.
That's the current law of the Church.
And it might seem like it's not very specific, but legislation, the Church legislation, has never actually been much more specific than this, except for the difference that, if you remember old canon law or if you remember the Baltimore Catechism, the Church used to use a term, an expression called servile labor.
So that specifically was prohibited on Sundays, servile labor.
But even that concept, servile labor, was not, at least not at the level of Church magisterium.
It was not ever specified.
I'll quote one group of theologians.
They wrote an excellent manual of theology, Regatillo and Zalba, Spaniards, very good theologians.
So just briefly, they say, The concept of servile labor has never been determined by the Church with an authoritative definition.
It must be deduced from particular decrees of the Church, local customs, and the common opinion of theologians.
So previously, until somewhat recent history, until about 60 years ago, when moral theologians, this is going to, I'm going to attempt to be humorous here.
You might not find this humorous, so don't worry.
But until about 60 years ago, when theologians, moral theologians, stopped dedicating themselves to any worthwhile questions, until about that time, servile labor in manuals of moral theology was very well categorized in great detail.
The Church never defined what it was.
It left that to theologians, and theologians, in great detail, categorized the different types of human activities into servile labor and non-servile labor.
And theologians, just to oversimplify this, theologians put emphasis on the fact that servile labor was the kind of work that used to be done by slaves.
So oversimplifying, it was manual labor, the kind that made you feel you had a master, a slave driver, the kind of labor you had to do, not necessarily against your will, but regardless of your will.
You just had to do it, because we live in a valley of tears, whether you like it or not, because you don't have the power to decide when you have leisure and when you don't.
So that was servile labor.
It's not in your power to stop doing this work.
It's not in your power to dedicate yourself to leisure at will.
Now, there are certain reminders of contemporary magisterium that corroborate that this is still exactly the kind of work, which we should abstain from on Sundays, and I'm getting close to my practical point.
So far, it looks like you're listening, so I thank you, and I'm getting closer to the point.
St. John Paul II, in his document on sanctifying the Lord's Day, Dies Domini in 1988, says that it should not be forgotten that even in our own day, work is very oppressive for many people, because of miserable working conditions or long hours, or because of the persistence of too many cases of injustice and exploitation of man by man, even in wealthy societies, work can be oppressive.
And he says that historically, the reason the church has emphasized so much Sunday rest is precisely to protect those categories of people that were oppressed by their work, that couldn't just free themselves from their work.
So the church has emphasized even a social protection of Sunday rest, a legal protection of Sunday rest, to give that rest to those who didn't have it in their power to give it to themselves.
In fact, we can connect this to today's gospel.
Our Lord says, he has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight for the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.
So even though the term servile is no longer used in the code, or in theology, this doesn't mean that servile labor is no longer prohibited.
The change in language is, in fact, a very subtle change, if you read, whether it's moral law today, which is again, exists, but it's not as robust as it used to be, or commentaries on the code.
The change is merely, or mostly, a linguistic, etymological change.
Work is not called servile because no work is ever servile in this theological framework, because it receives its dignity from the person who does it.
So no matter how menial the work might be, no matter how undignified it might seem, if a human person does it, it is dignified.
So the work done by Jesus, the carpenter, is not any less dignified than the work done by whoever the greatest lawyer in his time was.
Equally dignified is the work because equal is the dignity of the person that performed that work.
But okay, that doesn't have much to do with moral theology.
The practical point is, servile labor, whatever name you give it, is still prohibited.
The kind of oppressive work that makes you feel you have a master, a slave driver, the kind of work you have to do regardless of your will, whether you like it or not, is still prohibited on Sundays, I would say, because certain work still gets in the way of divine worship on Sunday rest, and still make us feel like we have a master, slave driver, and still fits the category.
And for the most part, again, this kind of work overlaps with what classical moral theologians categorize as servile labor.
Therefore, again, I would say that the church has not permitted servile labor on Sunday.
If anything, it has perhaps even extended this category.
So if you recall, the canon says that what are we to abstain from?
Anything that is against the suitable relaxation of mind and body.
So an example, and here I use this cautiously because it is really for moral theology to get back to doing what it's supposed to be, get back to studying worthwhile questions in a systematic way.
But I would say that perhaps, whereas before, just to use an example, moral theologians would consider the work of a lawyer to be non-servile.
So even though to hold court cases or to go to trial on a Sunday was prohibited, preparing for legal cases was not prohibited on a Sunday, just because of what it meant to be a lawyer 200 or 300 or 500 years ago.
It was, let's just say for oversimplification's sake, that it was a more leisurely type of work.
Whereas today, I would say that being a lawyer for a large firm and having to work on cases, even on Sunday when you really don't want to, can be a type of servitude.
And you might be wishing, I wish I was out in my garden digging and planting flowers or doing something else that would be considered by moral theologians servile labor.
But again, the church has not clearly defined this.
I just leave it for your consideration.
The practical conclusion is that if a person feels like he needs a rest after Sunday, unless it's out of necessity, piety or charity, perhaps he's doing servile labor.
Again, whether it's doing law or sports or working in a factory, if you feel like you need a rest after your Sunday, perhaps you're doing servile labor.
Because unless it's being done out of necessity, our Lord says if your ox falls into a pit on Sunday, get him out.
Piety, if it's necessary for divine worship, do it.
Or charity for the common good, police and firefighters and doctors' work.
If it's needless work, that which in old books is called servile, it should not be done on Sunday.
So if you can avoid your day job on Sunday, whatever it might be, avoid it on Sunday.
It's still prohibited.
If you can plan your week and if you can plan to mow your lawn on a day different than Sunday, mow it on a day different than Sunday.
You have to set that day apart for the Lord somehow.
The same would go with laundry or housecleaning, whether it be vacuuming or dusting or moving furniture, shopping, landscaping, chopping wood, home improvement projects, farming and the like.
These, I would say, still very much fall into what is prohibited by the current church legislation, what is prohibited and what is incompatible with the sanctity of the day of the Lord, which has to be in some way, in this particular way, a day visibly belonging to God.
Our Lady of La Salette says, these are the two things which make the arm of my son so heavy.
Blasphemy of God's holy name and work on Sundays.
And if we don't rest on Sunday, we forget what we are working for and who we are working for, and that's a terrible suffering for human beings.
Just even when it comes to the psychology of work and labor, people who own factories study this.
If workers don't know what they are working for and who they are working for, they are less productive.
Natural law, human psychology, written in our hearts.
If we don't know what we are working for, if we don't take a break to think about that, what am I working for Monday through Saturday?
Why am I working?
And if we don't take a break to think about who we are working for, tomorrow is Monday, why am I going back to work?
Then the work becomes truly a servitude, an unbearable servitude.
And it's this that our Lord has come to set us free from.
God has sent him to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.
Okay, I hope that was really interesting.
I hope that it'd be useful to you somehow.
And I hope it'll help you to sacrifice the Lord's day in your life as well.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.