The example of these martyrs (Saints Saturninus, Davitus, and many others February 11) condemns the sloth with which many Christians in this age (1844) celebrate the Lord’s Day. When the judge asked them, how durst they presume to hold their assembly against the imperial orders, they always repeated, even on the rack: “The obligation of Sunday is indispensable. It is not lawful for us to omit the duty of that day. We celebrated it as well as we could. We never passed a Sunday without meeting at our assembly. We will keep the commandments of God at the expense of our lives.” No danger nor torments could deter them from this duty. A rare example of fervor in keeping that holy precept, from which too many, upon lame pretenses, seek to excuse themselves. As the Jew was known by the religious observance of the Sabbath, so is the true Christian by his manner of observing Sunday. And as our law is more holy and more perfect than the Jewish, so must be our manner of sanctifying the Lord’s Day. This is the proof of our religion, and of our piety towards God. The primitive Christians kept this day in the most holy manner, assembling to public prayer, in dens and caves, knowing that, “Without this religious observance, a man cannot be a Christian,” to use the expression of an ancient father. Butler’s Lives of the Saints.Sanctification of Holydays
Pope Michael has written on this subject many times. Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII, 15 May, 1891From this follows the obligation of the cessation from work and labor on Sundays and certain holy days. The rest from labor is not to be understood as mere giving way to idleness, must less must it be an occasion for spending money and for vicious indulgence, as many would have it to be; but it should be rest from labor, hallowed by religion. Rest (combined with religious observances) disposes man to forget for a while the business of his everyday life, to turn his thoughts to things heavenly, and to the worship which he so strictly owes to the eternal Godhead. It is this, above all, which in the reason and motive of Sunday rest; a rest sanctioned by God’s great law of the Ancient Covenant-“Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day.” And taught to the world by His own mysterious “rest” after the creation of man: “He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.”
