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Catholics can fulfill their Sunday obligation by going to Mass either on Sunday itself or on Saturday evening.
Jewish people often reckon the day as beginning at evening, so are the two practices connected?
Can Christians fulfill their Sunday obligation on Saturday night because that’s when Sunday began for Jews?
In this episode, Jimmy Akin takes you through the history of how Jewish people reckoned such matters and how “vigil Masses” were introduced into the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Coming Up
Jewish people worship on Saturday, while Christians worship on Sunday.
Catholics are famous for going to Mass on Sundays, but they can also go to a “vigil Mass” on Saturday evening.
And some people think this is because of an ancient Jewish custom.
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
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What the Law Says
According to the current Code of Canon Law:
A person who assists at a Mass celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite either on the feast day itself or in the evening of the preceding day satisfies the obligation of participating in the Mass (can. 1248 §1).
Sunday is a holy day of obligation (can. 1246 §1), and as a result, you can fulfill your Sunday obligation either by going to Mass during the 24 hours of Sunday—which is reckoned from midnight to midnight in both civil and canon law—or you can fulfill your Sunday obligation by going to Mass on Saturday evening.
This same principle applies to holy days of obligation that fall on other days of the week—though we won’t go into that here.
Masses celebrated on the evening of the preceding day are commonly called “vigil Masses,” though this isn’t their official name.
Instead, they are formally known as “anticipated Masses” since they anticipate the Mass of the next day by using the same readings rather than the special readings designed for a vigil service.
We don’t need to worry about that, though, and here in America basically everyone calls them vigil Masses, and people wouldn’t know what you mean if you just started talking about anticipated Masses.
A Proposed Explanation
Many people want to know why this is permitted. Why can we fulfill our Sunday obligation by going to Mass on Saturday evening?
A common proposal is that it is because—in the Jewish timekeeping system—the day begins at sunset, and so there is a sense in which Sunday begins on Saturday evening.
For example, you can see that in Genesis 1, where the days of creation begin with evening. Thus we read:
God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day (Genesis 1:3-5).
That first day was a Sunday, and so it began on the evening of what we today would call Saturday night.
The principle is that the day begins with the period starting at evening—or the nighttime hours—and then concludes with the period following morning—or the daytime hours. The other days of creation all follow the same pattern.
From that, people infer that the Jewish way of reckoning the day has its beginning at evening.
And—even today—the Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday.
So people have wondered if that’s why Catholics can fulfill their Sunday obligation on Saturday evening in honor of Christianity’s Jewish heritage—as if Sunday in a sense begins with Saturday evening.
It’s a plausible explanation, but is it true?
Unfortunately, there are three problems with it.
1) Jewish Practice Was Inconsistent
The first problem is that the Jewish reckoning of when the day begins was inconsistent.
The days of creation in Genesis 1 indicate that some Jews—at some period in history—reckoned the day as beginning at sundown, but that doesn’t mean that they all did.
And the fact that modern Jews begin the Sabbath at sundown on Friday means the same thing. Today they may use sunset, but that doesn’t mean that all Jews through all of history have.
And it turns out that this isn’t the case.
There are four logical points during the day where it makes sense to start a new day:
Different cultures have used various points for their day divisions. For example, in his outstanding work the Handbook of Biblical Chronology (2nd ed.), the scholar of biblical chronology Jack Finegan writes:
- In ancient Egypt the day probably began at dawn, in ancient Mesopotamia it began in the evening.
Among the Greeks the day was reckoned from sunset to sunset, while the Romans already began the day in the “modern” fashion at midnight.
Summing up the different reckonings among different people in his time Pliny [the Elder] wrote:
The Babylonians count the period between two sunrises, the Athenians that between two sunsets, the Umbrians from midday to midday, the common people everywhere from dawn to dark, the Roman priests and the authorities who fixed the official day, and also the Egyptians and Hipparchus, the period from midnight to midnight [Natural History 2.79.188].
But what about the Israelites? When did they reckon the day as starting? The answer is that it varied. Finegan continues:
- In the Old Testament the earlier practice seems to have been to consider that the day began in the morning.
In Gen 19:34, for example, the “morrow” (asv) or “next day” (rsv) clearly begins with the morning after the preceding night.
The later practice was to count the day as beginning in the evening.
So in the Old Testament it looks like the early practice was to reckon the day as beginning at sunrise.
Genesis 19 deals with the time of Abraham and Lot, so it looks like they were beginning the day in the morning in that early period. But later—by the time the book of Genesis itself was written—they were beginning it with evening, explaining what we read about the days of creation.
But did the later practice stick or did it vary over time?
Well, let’s take a look at they were doing in the New Testament. Finegan continues:
- In the New Testament in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts the day seems usually to be considered as beginning in the morning.
Mark 11:11 states that Jesus entered Jerusalem, went into the temple, and when he had looked at everything, since it was “now eventide” (asv) or “already late” (rsv), went out to Bethany with the twelve; verse 12 continues the narrative and tells that on the “morrow” (asv) or the “following day” (rsv) they came back to the city.
It is evident that the new day has begun with the morning following the preceding evening.
Likewise Matt 28:1; Mark 16:1f., and Luke 23:56–24:1 all picture the first day of the week beginning with the dawn following the preceding Sabbath.
And Acts 4:3, for an example in that book, tells how Peter and John were put in custody “until the morrow, for it was already evening,” thus clearly indicating that the new day would begin the next morning.
It has been suggested that this counting of the day as beginning with the morning is a continuation of the earlier Old Testament practice already described (§12), and that this usage was maintained in parts of Galilee and was followed by Jesus and the early disciples, which would account for its appearing so frequently in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.
But is there no trace in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts of the idea of the day beginning at sunset? And what about the Gospel of John? Finegan continues:
On the other hand, even though the common reckoning in the Synoptic Gospels is from the morning, in Mark 1:32 = Luke 4:40, the later Old Testament (§12) and Jewish usage of counting the one day as ending and the next as beginning at sunset is plainly reflected in the fact that the people of Capernaum were free to bring the sick to Jesus at sunset when the Sabbath came to an end.
As for the Fourth Gospel, in John 20:1 Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark, yet it is already “on the first day of the week.”
This can be explained by supposing that the late Old Testament and Jewish usage is in view, according to which the new day had begun at the preceding sunset, or it can be explained equally well by supposing that John is giving the description in terms of the official Roman day which, as Pliny told us (§11), began at midnight.
In either case, the new day had begun already before the sunrise.
So it seems that Jewish practice about when the day began was inconsistent over time.
The Old Testament uses both sunrise and sunset as points for beginning the day, and the New Testament isn’t consistent, either.
The Synoptic Gospels and Acts usually have the day starting with sunrise (though not always), and it isn’t clear whether John is using sunset or midnight for the start of the new day.
This is not a strong basis for saying the modern practice of vigil Masses is simply a continuation of a well-established Jewish practice from the days of Jesus.
However, there’s another problem.
2) The Practice Was Introduced in the 1960s
The second problem is that anticipated or vigil Masses date to the 1960s.
They aren’t something that the Church has been doing for the last 2,000 years—which is what you would expect if they were simply the continuation of an ancient Jewish practice.
Instead, what happened was that in 1964, the Vatican made an announcement (on Vatican Radio) that the faithful could fulfill their Sunday obligation on Saturday evenings in certain churches that had been designated for this purpose by the local bishop.
At the time, the permission applied only to Sundays—not other holy days of obligation—and it did not apply to all locations where Mass was being celebrated—only to specially designated churches.
Most fundamentally, it was only at the discretion of the local bishop—not part of the Church’s universal law.
That changed in 1983 with the release of the revised Code of Canon Law, which removed these restrictions and allowed the faithful to fulfill their Mass obligation on the preceding evening for Sundays and other holy days and anywhere a Mass is being celebrated, as long as it is “in a Catholic rite.”
Among other things, that means that the Mass you attend doesn’t have to use the next day’s readings. It doesn’t have to be an anticipated Mass.
The reason is that the readings you will hear at Mass vary from one Catholic rite to another. For example, the Chaldean rite uses a different lectionary than the Roman rite. But if you’re a Latin rite Catholic, you can still fulfill your Sunday obligation by going to a Chaldean Catholic Mass on Saturday evening, even though the readings will be totally different than the ones used in the Latin rite on Sunday.
The key thing for our present purposes, though, is that this is not an immemorial practice. It was introduced to the universal Church—at the bishop’s discretion—in the 1960s and then broadened in 1983. It thus isn’t simply a continuation of an ancient Jewish practice.
Still, it’s possible that—in the zeal they had in the 1960s for restoring ancient liturgical uses—that the Vatican decided to restore an older practice that had fallen into disuse.
So is that what they did?
3) It’s Not What They Said
The third problem with the idea is that it’s just not what the Vatican said when they introduced the practice.
On June 12, 1964, Vatican Radio announced:
The faithful can also satisfy the Sunday precept of holy Mass by assisting at the celebration of the divine service in the afternoon of Saturday in churches specifically designated by the local ecclesiastical authority.
The Sacred Congregation of the Council, at the request of local Ordinaries [i.e., bishops], granted the faculty to celebrate holy Mass after first Vespers on Saturday together with the valid discharge of the Sunday precept.
It is left to the prudent judgment of the Ordinaries to indicate the times, localities, and churches which will enjoy this faculty as has already been done in some dioceses of Italy, Switzerland, and Argentina ([note,] This concession has also been recently granted to Catholics in Israel where, as is known, Sunday is considered a working day).
Among the considerations which have prompted this concession at the present time are:
- the enormous and ever-increasing frequency of weekend trips and of skiing excursions for whose patronizers the schedules of departure and return make it at least difficult to fulfill the Sunday precept;
- the situation in which numerous mountain villagers find themselves where, during the long periods of isolation brought about by accumulation of snow, part of the inhabitants would not be able to get to church and can at present have contact with the priest on Saturday;
- the serious dearth of clergy in some countries in which at present the priest by being able to celebrate four Sunday Masses including that on Saturday, will meet the greater number of the faithful [Canon Law Digest 6:670-671].
So the Vatican indicated that the reasons anticipated Masses were introduced included modern weekend travel, weather conditions, and a shortage of priests in some countries.
None of these considerations were restoring an ancient Jewish practice.
However, Vatican Radio did say that the named factors were “among the considerations” leading to the decision. That doesn’t completely rule out that the decision was influenced by an older Jewish practice in some way.
But it would indicate that this either wasn’t a consideration or wasn’t a principal consideration.
Conclusion
Today, Catholics are allowed to fulfill their obligation to attend Mass either on a Sunday or other holy day of obligation—reckoned from midnight to midnight—or on the evening of the preceding day.
And you don’t need any special reason to do that. While Vatican Radio mentioned some of the considerations that led the Church to begin experimenting with the practice, when the revised Code of Canon Law came out, it imposed no requirements whatsoever on the reasons the faithful might want to go on the preceding evening.
You don’t need a special reason.
Personally, I go on the preceding evening a lot. I don’t like to procrastinate with something as important as going to Mass, and I like to get my Sunday and holy day obligations out of the way early, and then I can relax and enjoy the rest of the holy day.
So feel absolutely free to go to Mass on Saturday evening. Do not be scrupulous about this!
God gave the Church the power of the keys, and it has used that divine authority to let us go to Mass on Saturday evenings.
Just don’t tell people that this option is available because of the Jewish way of reckoning days.
- Ancient Jewish practice was actually mixed, including at the time of Christ
- There was no continuation of the day-begins-at-sunset practice in the Church, and anticipated Masses were only introduced in the 1960s
- And when the practice was introduced, all the named factors leading to the decision were modern, not ancient
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If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!