December 27, 2009
The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Read

Like Mary and Joseph, our families face many challenges. Read the second part entitled, “Families Are Challenged by Change and Complexity” of the bishops’ pastoral, Follow the Way of Love, and discuss the reflection questions with your spouse or family members.

Daily Readings

Pray

Prayer for Families (CHB&P, pg. 188)

Reflect

Pope Benedict XVI , Family, 109

The Holy Family
In the Gospel we do not find discourses on the family but an event which is worth more than any words: God wanted to be born and to grow up in a human family. In this way he consecrated the family as the first and ordinary means of his encounter with humanity. In his life spent at Nazareth, Jesus honored the Virgin Mary and the righteous Joseph, remaining under their authority throughout the period of his childhood and his adolescence (cf. Lk 2:41-52). In this way he shed light on the primary value of the family in the education of the person. Jesus was introduced by Mary and Joseph into the religious community and frequented the synagogue of Nazareth. With them, he learned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as the Gospel passage offered for our meditation by today’s liturgy tells us. When he was twelve years old, he stayed behind in the Temple and it took his parents all of three days to find him. With this act he made them understand that he “had to see to his Father’s affairs,” in other words, to the mission that God had entrusted to him (cf. Lk 2:41-52).
 This Gospel episode reveals the most authentic and profound vocation of the family: that is, to accompany each of its members on the path of the discovery of God and of the plan that he has prepared for him or her. Mary and Joseph taught Jesus primarily by their example: in his parents he came to know the full beauty of faith, of love for God and for his Law, as well as the demands of justice, which is totally fulfilled in love (cf. Rom 13:10). From them he learned that it is necessary first of all to do God’s will, and that the spiritual bond is worth more than the bond of kinship. The Holy Family of Nazareth is truly the “prototype” of every Christian family which, united in the Sacrament of Marriage and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, is called to carry out the wonderful vocation and mission of being the living cell not only of society but also of the Church, a sign and instrument of unity for the entire human race.

Angelus
December 31, 2006

Act

The feast of the Holy Family is an excellent opportunity to have families gather at the end of Sunday Mass to talk about how they can apply the Catholic Framework for Economic Life to their own lives

For more information on Catholic  teaching on Economic Life visit:   www.usccb.org/jphd/economiclife/families.shtml