Although the Church only commands the faithful to abstain from servile work and attend Mass and does not make it obligatory to attend Vespers, still She desires this and through out her history, She has repeatedly recommended it.
Communal dinner not only feeds your body, it feeds your spirit as well.
For in this our age, we are not being deprived of our rights, our freedom, or our humanity with the force of arms; jackbooted thugs need not prowl the streets to ensure ideological conformity or at least silence against the ideology of the day; no, for they attack us now with the blade of social media and the gun of isolation.
It is one of the peculiar failures of modernity that so many Catholics attend Mass but do not belong to their parishes. They slip in and out of pews like shadows, avoiding eye contact, avoiding conversation, avoiding community. St. Francis de Sales would gently chide them: “The secret to Christian devotion is not to withdraw from society, but to embrace it in love and humility.”
In an age of unprecedented mobility, when man can traverse continents in hours and switch careers as easily as he changes his gender, the most radical act has become the simple art of remaining still.
There are many things that stand out when reading of the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII of happy memory. For me, two points that come into greater focus are the venerable Pontiff’s stridency in exercising His teaching authority and His diagnosis that any “solution: will be useless without a restoration of Christian morals and life—Chistian culture—will prove useless.