Reader Question: Our Sunday Duty and Holy Communion

Today's reader question was submitted through our new submission form, Readers Respond: Do You Have a Question About Catholicism? It's a frequently asked question:

At what stage in the Mass when you come in can you not take Holy Communion?

The short answer is "Once Communion is no longer being distributed." In other words, even if you walk into Mass during the distribution of Communion, and you are the last person in the Communion line, you can receive Communion (provided, of course, that you are properly disposed to receive the sacrament). The reception of Holy Communion is in no way conditioned on your participation in the Mass.

But I suspect that the reader, like most Catholics who ask this question, has confused the ability to receive Communion with the fulfillment of our Sunday Duty.The Sunday Duty is one of the Precepts of the Church, and it says that "You shall attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor."

The Sunday Duty is a fulfillment of the Third Commandment: "Remember to keep holy the sabbath day." It is binding under pain of mortal sin, so if we deliberately do not fulfill it, we cannot receive Communion again until we have gone to Confession. However, this is a separate question from whether we can receive Communion without participating in a Mass.

If you come into Mass on Sunday or a holy day of obligation at the time that Communion is being distributed, you may receive Communion, but you have not fulfilled your Sunday Duty. To fulfill your Sunday Duty, you need to attend the entire Mass. If, through no fault of your own, you arrive late, or important circumstances require you to leave early, you've still fulfilled your Sunday Duty. But if you leave early to get a better seat at the buffet, or you arrive late because you decided to sleep in, then you haven't fulfilled your Sunday Duty.

You do not have to have fulfilled your Sunday Duty in order to receive Communion. But the flipside is that receiving Communion, in and of itself, does not fulfill your Sunday Duty. And, as I noted above, if you deliberately fail to fulfill your Sunday Duty, you cannot receive Communion in the future until you have gone to Confession.

So the long answer to the reader's question is this: If you come in late to Mass on a Sunday or holy day, through your own fault, you can still receive Communion. But you will need to attend another Mass, in full, that day in order to fulfill your Sunday Duty.

One other thing to note: On days when you are not required to attend Mass (for instance, any weekday that isn't a holy day), you can receive Communion whenever it is distributed without having taken part in the Mass. In fact, it used to be common practice in many parishes to distribute Communion before weekday Mass, during the Mass itself, and after Mass, so that those who could not attend the entire Mass could still receive Communion daily.

Readers continue to ask interesting questions through our new submission form; so far, 17 questions have been submitted. I won't necessarily answer them in the order in which they were submitted, but I will eventually answer each one. And if the pace keeps up, I may expand the Reader Questions series to twice per week.

If you have a question that you would like to have featured in our Reader Questions series, please use the "Ask Your Question!" link in the "Readers Respond" section of the Reader Questions page. If you would like the question answered privately, please send me an e-mail at catholicism.guide@about.com. Be sure to put "QUESTION" in the subject line, and please note whether you'd like me to address it privately or on the Catholicism blog.