We make ourselves biblical lepers when we avoid Sunday Mass

A few weeks ago I read an advertisement for the Baton Rouge Marathon which was to be run on a coming Sunday.  My initial reaction was, “It’s great to have a Baton Rouge Marathon but why on a Sunday?”  We used to keep Sundays, or at least Sunday mornings, clear of big athletic or social events to allow our people to worship God.  Slowly but surely during the past 50 or so years,  Sunday worship has lost its place of honor to whatever secular event some people believe is more important.  I don’t think our Lord Jesus or his heavenly father would be pleased by this.  And it hurts us because we need worship.
On the Sunday after the Epiphany with the three Wise Men visiting the baby Jesus, we Catholics celebrate the baptism of the Lord as the adult Jesus begins his public ministry. He is baptized to signal a new beginning with the coming of the kingdom of God in and through himself.  Out of a cloud, which was a sign of God’s presence to the Jews during their wandering in the desert, God the father’s voice is heard to proclaim, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”  And then, in St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus begins his ministry by healing a leper.
It is significant that Jesus, after healing the man from an awful disease which made him a pariah to be shunned, tells him to “go, show yourself to the priest.”  Because of his dreaded disease, he had been forbidden entrance to the temple, the place then where all devout Jews worshiped the presence of God.  The priest would readmit the leper to God’s presence as a member of his community.  He could worship with them again with his life exteriorly ordered to the living God.  
Bishop Robert Barron writes worship is so important because “to worship is to order the whole of one’s life toward the living God, and in doing so, to become interiorly and exteriorly rightly ordered.  To worship is to signal to oneself what one’s life is finally about.  It’s nothing that God needs but it is very much something we need.”
We should be able to understand the importance of worship that the story of Jesus healing the leper teaches us.  We had, until rather recently, a leper colony in our own diocese, just a mile or so from St. Gabriel in Carville.  It was there a drug was discovered by U.S.  Health Care doctors which can arrest, if not totally cure, what is now called Hansen’s Disease.  The stories that came out of that hospital pretty well matched biblical reality.  
I first went inside the hospital when I was a college seminarian in New Orleans.  A fellow seminarian who was to be ordained that year asked me if I could arrange for him to celebrate one of his first Masses in the hospital chapel for the lepers.  He had an aunt who was one of the residents.  The Sisters of Charity, who nursed the lepers, were often in the nearby country store owned by relatives of mine, and I had met them.  Through my cousin, who was postmistress of the U. S. post office which was located in the store, I made arrangements.  We drove up the evening before and slept in hospital quarters.  One of the sisters was kind enough to give the two of us a personal tour of the hospital.  
Leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, is something no one would want to contract.  We got the full tour, beginning from patients who only had digits on their hands or feet gnarled and damaged because they had lost all sensitivity in them and cut their fingers and toes or burnt them without realizing it.  These were often patients who had suffered damage before the “miracle drug”  had been discovered.  We moved on to some, usually elderly patients, in whom the disease had progressed to damage much of their facial features.  These truly suffered and usually remained at the hospital until they died. They had no hope of being accepted again in society.  The doctors and nuns at the hospital really did heroic work in not only relieving physical pain but also giving loving, psychological and spiritual care to these patients.  
Our Catholic Church provided regular Masses and sacraments through the pastor of St. Gabriel Church in St. Gabriel in whose church parish the hospital was located.  There is a very nice Catholic chapel on the hospital grounds where the whole community, patients and staff, as well as visitors, could worship together.  The disease is not very contagious and with care visitors could mingle with  the patients.  When the disease was detected and treated with the proper drugs, patients could experience remission and return to normal living in society.  Years later, as pastor of the neighboring parish of St. John the Evangelist Church in Prairieville, I occasionally helped the pastor of St. Gabriel by celebrating Sunday Mass at the hospital chapel.  It was always inspiring.  The lepers cherished their spiritual community and God’s presence among them, uniting them in common hope and faith.  
Today the chapel and the buildings that formerly served the hospital are still in use by the federal government but not to house or treat lepers.  The disease more rarely appears today and can be controlled by drugs.  Today the buildings are used as a “bootcamp” for at-risk teenagers.  People who contract Hansen’s Disease today can be medicated as out-patients.  Their needs for worship can be met along with ours.  But it is a safe bet they recognize that need more acutely than we do, we who make ourselves spiritual lepers when we do not join what St. Paul called “the body of Christ” at Sunday Mass.
Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].