“Happy Gaudete Sunday!“
By Fr. Isaiah Schick
Happy Gaudete Sunday! “Gaudete” means “Rejoice”, and on this Third Sunday of Advent, we rejoice that Christmas is almost here! As we are preparing for a very common season of travel to visit good friends and family to celebrate the Birth of our Savior Jesus Christ, and the New Year (when we celebrate Mary as Mother of God!), I wanted to share a resource with you all to help you find Mass times wherever you may happen to find yourselves, as amidst the travel, we have the normal Sundays when we attend Mass as well as two holy days of obligation in addition to those: Christmas (Dec. 25th ) and Mary, Mother of God (Jan. 1st ).
It is a website called MassTimes.org, and you can access it from your internet browser or via their app if you download it on your phone or tablet. You can either type in the location you will be, or click the “Find a Mass Near Me” button which uses your phone/computer’s GPS.
It will then pull up the Catholic churches nearest you, and you can sort either by the time they normally have Mass or by distance. Now, make sure you have the correct day of the week selected, and then make sure you have either “Mass” times or “Confession” times selected. It is a crowd-sourced website, so it is not 100% accurate, but it can be a great way to then click on the church in the list to go through to the parish’s website to double-check their officially posted times. One last thing: often parishes will have different Mass times for holy days of obligation (especially Christmas and Christmas Eve!) – the best way to find out these would be to visit the individual parish’s website and find their most recent copy of the parish bulletin, which will usually have the upcoming Mass schedule in it (or at least the parish phone number to call and find out!). The best thing to do for finding Mass times when traveling is to plan ahead, but MassTimes.org can be a helpful tool if you don’t remember to do so.
I hope you all have a very blessed remainder of Advent, and a beautiful and Merry Christmas! Don’t forget to celebrate with Jesus at Mass, who is the reason for the season!