“Your church has a lot of rules.”
My husband said this to me as we packed for a long weekend in Colorado Springs: our first trip as a family of four. We were trying to figure out which days we wanted to spend at the Airbnb. I said I’d prefer to be home by Sunday so we could go to mass, but we could also find a parish in the Springs for that morning.
Josh didn’t understand why I couldn’t just skip a weekend. I’m happy to say that I haven’t missed mass since being confirmed in April, though I know at some point, I probably will. And I will repent, and do better the following week.
This is new for us, going to mass together on alternating Sunday mornings. If we go to his non-denominational church in the morning, I just go to mass on my own in the evening. He still doesn’t understand a lot of the liturgy; I have my own issues with “his church.” But where he goes, I go, and vice versa. And that man has followed after me to some pretty sketchy places, spiritually speaking, over the years, rather than let me wander off alone.
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There are sometimes legitimate reasons to stay home from church, like pretty much all of us did in 2020. I missed several Sundays after giving birth during peak RSV season. In the Catholic church, illness or recovery are valid reasons to miss. The only time it becomes a sin is when you could go, and deliberately choose not to.
This may sound harsh to outsiders. But for Catholics, Sundays aren’t just for listening to a sermon or hearing scripture: it’s a literal encounter with Christ in the flesh. Put that way, even if you don’t agree with how we view the Eucharist, you have to admit: if the bread and wine are really Jesus, then what else is more important?
I’ve barely been a Catholic for six months, but I do understand well where “Catholic guilt” comes from (and I thought the “Jewish guilt” was real!). There are holy days of obligation. There’s periods of fasting. There’s a minimum number of times one must go to confession to be in a state of grace. It all sounds, on the surface, like legalism.
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The more I think about it, the more I start to believe that the “rules” Catholicism imposes on my life is what it’s actually supposed to look like to put Christ at the forefront of every decision that I make. The life of a disciple is limiting, but in a good way. Our lives are supposed to look different; our priorities are not the same as everyone else’s.
But humans were made to worship something. Without an object to order our lives around, we will, in a sense, “worship” all the wrong things: our jobs, social lives, sports, sex, or any hedonistic venture that comes our way.
What looks like legalism to a Protestant is just part of picking up my cross. That is the object my world orbits around. Without it, nothing else makes sense, sparks joy, or provides any real guidance or contentment.
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Will I lose my salvation if I don’t fast on Fridays, or forget to go to confession? No. But this mindset is not the bar; it’s the floor. It’s no different than asking, will my husband will divorce me if we don’t prioritize date nights or intimacy? No, I don’t think so. But will our marriage suffer if we don’t prioritize our time together? Yes.
It’s one thing to cancel date night or turn down sex if one of us is legitimately sick. But because we are married, the “limits” of matrimony are actually good.
Sin doesn’t begin with an action, but in the heart.
Yes, my church has a lot of “rules,” insomuch as my marriage has a lot of boundaries: to protect what matters, and to live rightly.
Image from Unsplash
