A Catholic passover

The winter of 2015 is surely headed for the record books as people across the country have experienced record snows, sleet and bitterly cold temperatures. Week after week kept the lock on the weather freezer. School closings were matched by business closings. It wasn’t safe for anyone to venture out during this most extreme weather.

In the region where I live, we’ve had our share of weather-related effects – closings one day, openings the next, and back to closings again. One week schools simply closed for the entire week just to keep children safe and out of the extreme cold. The weekends defied predictions of improvement by gifting the area with 5 inches more of snow.

Local TV stations provided continuous crawl messages at the bottom of the screen reporting closures, and at the height of severity, I noticed that more and more churches were included in the posted closure announcements for events and activities. On one Sunday morning there were hundreds of churches listing cancelled worship services and other events. Service closures were from Churches of God, Baptist churches, Faith Tabernacles, Churches of Christ, Congregational churches, Lutheran churches, Presbyterian churches, Methodist churches, Fellowship churches and Community Churches. There were two or three Catholic churches in the listings but only for cancellation of public school religion events.

This leads me to believe that there must be a Catholic Passover. You know – when the snow, sleet and cold pass-over the driveways and streets of Catholic parishioners so that they alone can travel to attend the weekend Mass.

Yes, of course, we Catholics do take our Sunday obligation seriously and generally practice the postal carrier philosophy: Neither snow nor rain nor sleet can keep us from our duty.

But wouldn't it make more sense during such extreme weather occurrences for the bishop to broadcast a special "Mass for Weather Shut-Ins" that combines the usual Sunday liturgy for the day coupled with prayers for all those affected by weather? It would be a strong message that the Catholic church cares for everyone, body, mind and spirit. And it would ease the minds of faithful Catholics who shouldn’t venture out in awful weather but would do so anyway.

[Sr. Nancy Linenkugel is a Sylvania Franciscan sister and chair of the department of Health Services Administration at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio.]