September 11, 2007: During a visit to Austria Pope Benedict XVI voiced concern about giving up Sunday as the Christian day of weekly rest in favor of economic interests. He also criticized the transformation of Sunday into just a day of personal leisure. "Without the Lord and the day that belongs to Him, life does not flourish," the pope said in his sermon given at St. Stephen's cathedral in Vienna. "If leisure time lacks an inner focus, an overall sense of direction, then ultimately it becomes wasted time."

Since Benedict believes that Sunday was the day of Christ's resurrection, he views the day as the beginning of a new creation and as the "the Church's weekly festival of creation." As such, Sunday also emphasizes the equality and freedom of all creatures. In a somewhat odd reference, the German pope also mentioned the tradition of the Jewish Sabbath as a day of rest.

Benedict reminded his listeners that some martyrs had died for keeping Sunday as a day of rest. Although he said that attending mass on Sunday is not a command, he insisted that skipping church services "removes the foundation of life itself – its inner worth and beauty," making attendance at Sunday mass an "inner necessity." Benedict quoted former Munich Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952): "Give the soul its Sunday, and give Sunday its soul."

Generally considered to be an intellectual, Pope Benedict appeared to gloss over some basic historical facts in his "Sunday sermon". For example, he claimed that "early Christians celebrated the first day of the week as the Lord's day." However, there is no record that Jesus, His disciples or the first Christians ever kept Sunday as the weekly day of rest. Sunday does not appear as a day of worship in the Christian church until well after the death of the first Christian generation. Early Christians kept the biblical Sabbath, the seventh day of the week (Exodus 20:8-11). The Sabbath was instituted for man hundreds of years before there were any Jews on the earth (Genesis 2:1-4). Jesus said He was the Lord of the Sabbath, not Sunday (Mark 2:27-28).

The transition to Sunday-keeping, first instituted officially by Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 321 A.D., continues to this day. For example, today's Luther Bible translates the beginning of Acts 20:7 with "On the first day of the week..." In his original translation of 1545, Luther wrote: "On a Sabbath..." Even the official Bible of the Catholic Church, the Vulgata, renders it correctly as the Sabbath: "in una autem sabbati..."