Feast day: December 30
The Holy Family
Honors Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the model of every Christian household — a feast of the ordinary, hidden years at Nazareth where the Son of God grew up in an ordinary family.
The feast of the Holy Family, kept in the days just after Christmas, honors Jesus, Mary, and Joseph together as the model and pattern of every Christian household. Having celebrated the birth of the child, the Church now contemplates the family into which he was born, and holds it up as a school of holiness for all families and a sanctuary of love, faith, and ordinary virtue.
The Gospels show this family in tender and difficult human scenes: the journey to Bethlehem and the birth in poverty; the flight into Egypt to escape Herod's sword, making them refugees in a foreign land; the return to Nazareth; and the anxious three-day search for the boy Jesus when he was lost in Jerusalem, found at last in the Temple. They are a family that knew hardship, displacement, work, and worry, as well as great joy.
Yet the greater part of the life of the Son of God — some thirty years — was spent in the silence and obscurity of that home at Nazareth, where Joseph worked at his carpenter's trade, Mary kept the house, and Jesus, the Gospel says simply, 'grew in wisdom and age and grace.' The Church draws from those hidden years a profound lesson: that holiness is made in the daily round of family life, in work and patience and love, far from the eyes of the world.
Established for the universal Church in the early twentieth century, the feast came at a time of growing pressures on family life, and it speaks all the more to our own. In the Holy Family the Church sees the dignity and the vocation of the home — and asks that every family may find in Jesus, Mary, and Joseph a model of mutual love and a sure help in its joys and trials.
Most of Jesus' life — some thirty years — was spent in the silence of family life at Nazareth, which the Church holds up as the school of holiness for every home.
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