Four Holy Habits | Reclaiming Sunday

Bishop Donald Hying opens a four-part series on the Four Holy Habits – the simple spiritual practices he has invited every Catholic in the Diocese of Madison to embrace since launching the Go Make Disciples initiative. He begins with the first and most important: keeping holy the Sabbath. Bishop Hying reflects on why each Sunday is a "mini Easter," why the Eucharist stands at the very center of Catholic life, and what it would mean to reclaim Sunday not only as a day for Mass but as a true day of rest, worship, and time with those we love.

Show Notes
In this episode, Bishop Hying references Dies Domini ("The Lord's Day"), St. John Paul II's 1998 apostolic letter on keeping the Lord's Day holy. Read the full text at the Vatican website: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_05071998_dies-domini.html

Transcript

Bishop Donald J. Hying 0:00

Welcome to Things Visible and Invisible, a podcast that discusses life, faith, current events, culture, history, and more, all in relation to Jesus Christ and his church. I'm Bishop Don Hying, and we will be talking about the four holy habits. Those are spiritual practices that everyone here in the Diocese of Madison have been invited to embrace as we seek a deeper relationship with the Lord. Back in 2020, here in the Diocese of Madison, after prayer and discernment and consultation, I launched Go Make Disciples, which is our evangelizing initiative, really putting at top priority the proclamation of the gospel and the formation of disciples. We know in reading the scriptures that it's in the Great Commission that the Lord Jesus gives the mandate to the church, sending forth the apostles to proclaim the wonder of his resurrection as the new meaning of history and the cornerstone of our salvation. And we know the effectiveness, the fruitfulness of that proclamation. Historians would tell us that within 300 years, something like 60% of the citizens of the Roman Empire had converted to Christianity. Ponder the wonder of that, given the lack of communication, lack of transportation, all the things that we have to facilitate a message, to communicate a meaning that people didn't have 2,000 years ago. So the apostles went forth and made disciples, proclaiming the gospel with absolute conviction and in the fire of the Holy Spirit, beginning on the day of Pentecost. So our Go Make Disciples initiative is simply living out that fundamental mission of the church and giving it top priority. Here in our diocese in Madison, we've seen an increase in mass attendance. We've seen an increase in baptisms and marriages. And in many dioceses as well, we've seen a marked increase in the numbers of people coming to the church and joining the church in the Easter sacraments. God, of course, can do anything he pleases, so I would never claim that our efforts are the sole or even primary reason for such growth. But I'd like to think that God always is using us as agents, as points of mediation, as instruments to bring about his will and his salvation. So all that is a lead up to say that from the beginning of our Go Make Disciples initiative, I proposed to everyone in the diocese four holy habits to embrace. So my mantra was always imagine if every Catholic in our diocese did these four things on a regular basis. And they were Sunday Mass, daily prayer, monthly confession, and some form of penance or mortification on Fridays. So I'd like to look at that first holy habit, Sunday Mass, because we see in Sunday Eucharist really the cornerstone of our faith and the kernel of the whole liturgical year. So for the Jewish people, of course, Saturday was the Sabbath, the seventh day when the Lord rested from his work of creation. Jesus rose on a Sunday. So for us as Christians, the Sabbath moved from Saturday to Sunday as we honor the resurrection of the Lord. So every Sunday is a mini Easter where the church gathers with solemnity and joy to celebrate the resurrection of Christ and to give thanks to the Father for the gift of salvation, mercy, forgiveness offered to us through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. So we know that the Eucharist for us as Catholics is the center of everything for us. It's the Eucharist that creates the church. It's in the Eucharist that we receive the bread of life, the antidote to eternal death. It's in the Eucharist that we pray together and once again enter into the great paschal mystery, Jesus' death and resurrection. In receiving the body of Christ, we are once again joined not only to Christ, but to one another. Therefore, the church would cease to exist without the Sunday Eucharist. The Sunday Eucharist is everything for us as Catholics. It's sad that in our country, even with our recent growth, only something like 30% of baptized Catholics are at Mass on any given Sunday. So imagine inviting ten people over for dinner and seven don't show up. So you're looking at seven empty plates, three people responded. I've always been convinced that if people both understood and believed the Eucharist, there's nothing that would keep us away from Sunday Mass. I always put it this way every week God gives us one hundred and sixty-eight hours of life, seven times twenty-four. He asks for one hour back to give him gratitude, to give him praise, and to offer our hearts to him, and we receive these tremendous gifts of hearing his holy word, once again entering into the worship of heaven and receiving the living body of Christ. So imagine if that thirty percent going on Sunday increased to forty or fifty or sixty. Imagine if every practicing Catholic brought someone back to the practice of the faith or to the faith, let's say every five years we'd be doubling our numbers. You can't plop somebody down in a pew that has no context to understand the mass and think that somehow they'll instinctively get it. So the mass is a complex ritual in some ways that needs catechesis, formation, and experience to be fully understood and entered into. It's why in the early church the catechumens were not allowed to stay. They were dismissed after the liturgy of the word, um, because they were not yet initiated into uh the mysteries of the Eucharist. Back in the 90s, St. John Paul II wrote a beautiful encyclical letter on uh the importance of Sunday. And we know that Sunday as Sabbath extends beyond simply going to Mass, as central as that is. It'd be a day to rest and to be with relatives and friends. It was a day different than any other day in the week. When we look at the intensity of activity in people's lives and kind of the growth of sports into every nook and cranny of life, Sunday often becomes just another day to do more sports events or to get caught up in everything that we didn't have a chance to do during the week. St. John Paul II calls for a return to that sense of sacred Sabbath that we see Orthodox Jews practice so beautifully and reverently on Saturdays, on their Sabbath. So that first holy habit, keeping holy the Sabbath, Sunday Mass, again, imagine if every Catholic went to Mass every Sunday and honored the Sabbath. It's the key to the whole Christian spiritual life, and it's the gift that the Lord wants to give us the most important.