The Sunday Meal

From Fr Z:

I was watching part of a cooking show recently with the English chef Gordon Ramsay. Vocabulary aside, he is promoting a laudable project through one of his TV shows. He want to revive the Sunday Meal. He goes to a home, finds out what they do on a Sunday, and then shows them what they might be able to cook so as to get people, family and or friends, around the table to sit together for a while and enjoy the repast and company. He even changes their dining room furniture to help make the experience easier and more pleasant.

A big Sunday meal – call it supper – call it dinner – whatever.

It could perhaps even be "out". I think many people have a regular practice for going for Sunday "brunch", for example after Mass.

In Rome at a church entrusted to the Chinese community, people have a big "pot luck" meal together after Mass before they go their separate ways.

There is something about meals together. The Lord used meals for important moments in his ministry, both at Cana and the upper room.

I have good memories of, for example, the Sunday meal at the rectory of my home parish. After the Masses were over, the priests, and usually some seminarians and others, would enjoy a formal meal together taking us up to the time for Vespers and Benediction, sung each Sunday in the church in Gregorian chant. The meals were always cordial, leisurely, and packed with interesting and wide ranging conversation. These meals expressed a culture in the house and also shaped that same culture. One of the only places I have ever seen Presbyterorum ordinis actually lived in important respects.

Alas… that has been eliminated there and in so many other places … much to the harm of the bonds of society, whether that society is a family, a rectory community or larger society.

The bonds of society are important. Pull them apart and barbarity ensues. This is in large part what Dante was dealing with in his Inferno of the Divina Commedia. The souls in hell were being punished in proportion to how during life they had attacked or torn apart the bonds of society.
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There are people out there, on the Dies Domini, eating apart – even in families – when they might eat together and both strengthen each other and the bonds of charity. (cf. Dies Domini 72-73)