Last week, I blogged about whether Sundays count as a day of penance during Lent. One thing I meant to talk about was the issue of when Sunday starts.
Catholics have it really easy to go to Mass on Sunday. A variety of Mass time are available Sunday morning; lots of parishes even have one or more Sunday evening Masses. You can even go on Saturday night to Sunday Mass. Some churches even have a Saturday "night" Mass as early as 4:30 p.m. Saturday. I've always heard that Sunday begins after Vespers (Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of Hours/Divine Office) on Saturday, which is actually called "Evening Prayer I for Sunday." I guess the earlier you say it on Saturday, the more Sunday you can get. After "Evening Prayer II for Sunday" it's still Sunday till the stroke of twelve. So I suppose you could argue that Sunday liturgically on Saturday night.
Back in my college days, a group called "The Letter of the Law Club" would go out on Saturday nights to 7-11 after midnight to partake in whatever goodies they happen to have given up, or just to celebrate the fact that it was Sunday. They'd even leave campus at 11:50 since it took about 10 minutes to get there. If they'd been wilier, they'd have left at 11:45 so they could finish their purchases at midnight and not waste precious time shopping. We, I mean, they weren't crafty enough to go with a post-vespers scheme.
Tonight if someone were to celebrate "Letter of the Law Club" style, they'd invoke a special penalty. Daylight savings happens tonight, which means the clocks jump forward an hour and we lose an hour of sleep. This change might work to their advantage if the clocks changed from 9:59 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. but the "real" change is from 1:59 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning Mass is closer than you think!
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