It is very common that during a confession a person might ask a question like: Father, recently I was on two weeks of vacation with my family, and on Sunday we couldn’t find the church. We tried, but we were unable to find a Catholic church, so we skipped the mass. Is that a sin? Or someone would confess: I had surgery and had to stay in the hospital and so I missed Sunday mass twice. Yes, we should come to mass on Sunday to hear God’s word and to receive the Eucharist, but there are times when we simply can’t get there. And I am not talking about the times when we are too lazy to go, or we just don’t want to go because we have other things to do. There will be some serious reasons that we can’t go to mass. You can’t punish yourself for not being able to be at mass because you were sick, you traveled, or you had to stay home because your child got sick. Remember what Jesus said: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”
