Holy Family

Merry Christmas! Today, on this, the fourth day of the Octave of Christmas, Holy Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The family: child, mother, and father, forms the basic unit of the church and is the root through which the tree of life and salvation grows, as evidenced by the Holy Family.

In 1964, Pope St. Paul VI, while he was visiting the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, said, “Nazareth is the school in which we begin to understand the life of Jesus. It is the school of the Gospel. Here we learn to observe, to listen, to meditate, and to penetrate the profound and mysterious meaning of that simple, humble, and lovely manifestation of the Son of God. And perhaps we learn almost imperceptibly to imitate Him. Here we learn the method by which we can come to understand Christ.”

A reminder, Nazareth was not the place where Christ was born. It is, and specifically in the location where the Pope was speaking, is the location where the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce that she would conceive a son, and then later the location of the house that Jesus grew up in. From even before His birth, Jesus was part of the family even while in the womb, and thus part of a newly formed domestic church in Nazareth. The domestic church, the counterpart to the ministerial Church, is how the Church envisions the Christian household: it is where the faith is lived, taught, and handed on through prayer, devotional life, and daily love. It means that parents are the first teachers of the faith, and the home is the first place where the Church is present and active, as it was in Nazareth.

In 1892, Pope Leo XIII issued an apostolic letter, Breve Neminem Fugit, in which he highlighted the importance of the Holy Family for the world as a model for every virtue necessary for human growth. He wrote, “To all fathers of families, Joseph is verily the best model of paternal vigilance and care. In the most holy Virgin Mother of God, mothers may find an excellent example of love, modesty, resignation of spirit, and the perfecting of faith. And in Jesus, who was subject to his parents, the children of the family have a divine pattern of obedience which they can admire, reverence, and imitate.”

As we honor the Holy Family, one of the best ways to do so is to prayerfully ponder the daily life that the Holy Family shared. Because Scripture does not record many of their family interactions in Nazareth, much is left to our prayerful imagination. What we do know is that human familial virtue within the Holy Family, especially between mother and Son, was at a level of perfection. The kindness, respect, obedience, unity, charity, and every other Christian virtue that they lived must become the model for Christian living and for family life. Through imitating the Holy Family and building up our own domestic church, our families too can be holy.