We're in the fading days of Lent. It's time to get ready for Holy Week (starting Sunday with Palm Sunday).

Next Friday is Good Friday, the day when Christ was slain. As a kid, I remember that there was a whole string of years where Good Friday was just an awful weather day. It was always cold and rainy and just sort of gloomy. A coincidence, I'm sure--but it sure seemed like God was pounding a lesson into my little head. Good Friday is a peculiar name for a day, isn't it? I mean yeah, it was good for mankind that Our Lord and Savior gave his life for all of humanity... but it was a pretty bad day for Jesus. Perhaps there's something in the name "Good Friday" that I don't know about; I don't even know what it's called in Latin. But from my English-Language-toned ears, it's an unfortunate moniker.

I'm really looking forward to Easter. Maybe I'm just looking forward to being finished with Lent? I can't really tell. In either way, let's bring it on!

That weekend is also another event. One that, frankly, has meant more to me over the course of my life than Easter. It's opening weekend for baseball season!

Was that an eye roll?

Hey, I didn't always try to be a very good Catholic. That's a fairly recent development. (Please note that I said that I'm trying to be a good Catholic. I don't trust anyone who says they are a good Catholic. Such a thing is impossible.)

Anyway, baseball's Opening Day coincides with Good Friday this year. It's an unfortunate occurrence, but it's the cards we're dealt this year.

The truth is that there are lots of calendars in the world and sometimes they don't line up how we want. Like when Christmas falls on a Wednesday, so there's that weird Monday-or-Friday arrangement at work where you've got to go in one day between 2-day breaks... for those people lucky enough to have a day off before or after Christmas!

On Good Friday, there is a particular moment of the day that is known as the "Holy Hours" where tradition holds that Jesus specifically hung on the Cross. Holy Hours are from Noon to 3:00 PM; a number of churches hold their Good Friday service at that time. Good Friday is the only day of the year where the Church does not offer the Mass. It's a specific liturgical service, but not Holy Mass.

This year, the Detroit Tigers are the first team to play ball when they host the Texas Rangers at 1:05 in glittering Detroit Michigan. Right smack in the middle of Holy Hours. For some people, scheduling the game during Holy Hours "is an insult for Catholics". Frankly, in all my fuddy-duddy crankiness, I can't muster up enough gumption to agree. There are far many greater insults to the Faith than a baseball game, though I think it's in poor taste (and a strange decision) to schedule Opening Weekend on Easter Weekend. Even people who are not traditionalist cranks like myself know that Easter is an important day in the calendar. People who are very casual Christians still go to church on Easter, they go to their mothers' house and have dinner, they send their kids out in the long-respected tradition of eating chicken-shaped-marshmallows.

I wonder what turnout is going to be like on the Sunday day-games at the park? I guess it'll be a good day to be an Atheist/Jewish/Muslim baseball fan, you should get the place to yourselves. Is this just turnaround for Christian Family Day at the ballpark?

I don't mean to be ridiculous on this topic, because I willingly accept that we live in a secular world with secular demands. Such is life--and it's always been that way. As Christians, we follow Christ's example to be in the world, but not of the world. Gentle reader, apparently the world plays baseball during the Easter Triduum. They've got a business to run and I guess they don't think that it's going to be a problem.

This situation isn't unique to Catholics in 2009. Sports and Religion end up on the same calendar from time to time. Perhaps the most famous example was Sandy Koufax, the premier Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher during the 1960's. He was the ace of the team and the most valuable player on the staff. In 1965, the Dodgers climbed tooth-and-nail to the World Series, led largely by the left-arm of Koufax. If you're not a baseball fan, let me explain it this way: for players, the World Series is the most important achievement of your professional career. Most players will play for their entire career and never get to play in that short match. As a kid, you dream about it. As a young man, you pine for it. As a professional, it becomes your singular goal. There's nothing more important than the World Series. In 1965, Koufax was pitching at the top of his game. That year, he posted a nearly superhuman Earned Run Average of 2.04 and was credited as winning 26 games; he pitched 335 innings and struck out 382 batters. There was no doubt that Koufax would the #1 starting pitcher on the first game of the World Series. If he was Catholic, this season would count as one of the miracles required for his canonization.

But Koufax was not Catholic. Koufax is Jewish. And game one of the 1965 World Series fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish Calendar.

Back then, Koufax was considered to be a "three day Jew" who only went to synagogue on a couple of times of year (the Christian equivalent is the "Creaster" who joins us only when their mother demands it). But Yom Kippur was one of those days with which you did not tinker. Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of his era, the most valuable player on his team, quietly announced that he would not take the pitcher's mound on Yom Kippur. It was the holiest day of the year, and with that, he would not play.

Baseball fans who didn't know two Jews in their whole lives suddenly had a profound understanding of the seriousness of Yom Kippur.

1965 was not all that different than 2009. Then, as now, the secular world was shedding themselves of religion. It was a modern era. It is a modern era. People were telling themselves that they were too evolved to believe in rules of organized religion. People are telling themselves the same thing today: such is life in the world.

This year, the baseball season is beginning during the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Opening day on Good Friday is one of those events with which I will not tinker. It is not specifically the holiest day of the Christian calendar. That day happens on Easter. But Good Friday is a solemn moment in the year, the saddest day and the beginning of Christ's Glory. It is because of this day that St. Paul commands that we preach Christ crucified!

And because Christ was crucified on Good Friday, I'm not going to partake in baseball's festivities. I'll fulfill my work obligation, then skitter off to Church to be with Jesus in his last hours. Good Friday is not a Holy Day of Obligation (but it should be... at least in a unique non-Mass kind of way), so Catholics are not bound to go to Church. But it is entirely unfitting for a Catholic to go to the ballpark on that day.

I wonder if Catholic ballplayers--and there are many--will sit out opening day this year? Probably very few. In my opinion, it is excusable for a professional ballplayer to play ball on Good Friday. They're just going to work in the same way that I'm going to work--to fulfill my obligations to my job. It is less excusable for Catholics--indeed, Christians--who will go to that game and party it up on this solemn day.

To me, it's not sad that baseball has a game scheduled for that day. Such is life in a secular world. I'm just sad to know that everyone's going to the game. Is nothing sacred?

Or maybe these games are sacred events too? We call the stadia "Cathedrals of Baseball", right? The first words of the Bible are "In the big inning".

Ha. The jokes seem a little hollow this year.

Play ball. And Christe Eleison.