Running in orthodox Catholic circles, I am never lacking in reminders about Holy Days of obligation. Self-consciously sarcastic images will pop up on facebook reminding me: “Tomorrow is the Feast of … now you can’t say you forgot.” It is a sin (albeit a venial one) to miss Mass on a Holy Day of obligation. But the culpability of the person is rendered highly questionable if they honestly forget. I now perhaps wonder if particularly scrupulous yet lazy Catholics have taken to avoiding facebook on the eve of the Holy Feasts in order to avoid the inconvenient reminders. I hope I never hear a positive answer to this question.
Contrary to the Holy Days, I am left almost completely in the dark concerning anniversaries, birthdays and the all-important days of remembrance for the dead. So it was with a pang of guilt (though not potent enough to be called Catholic), that I discovered I had forgotten the second anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. The rude awakening came in the form of an ‘On the Square’ column from First Things: “Christopher Hitchens: A Contrarian Remembered.” Two aspects of this piece further disgruntled me beyond the small guilt in my stomach. First, Hitchens hated to be called a “contrarian.” In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, he famously began with a preface about how stupid the title was. Second, the First Things piece got the date of Hitchens’s death wrong. He died on December 15th, not the 18th, with his New York Times obituary running the following day.
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