The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

The Holy Family is the household of Nazareth — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The Catholic Church has long held this small family as the great model of Christian domestic life, the icon of what God intends every household to participate in. The feast of the Holy Family was added to the universal calendar by Pope Leo XIII in 1893 and is celebrated each year on the Sunday within the octave of Christmas, drawing the Christmas story directly into the life of every Christian home.

What makes the Holy Family the model is not unusual circumstances but exquisite ordinariness. They lived in a small Galilean village. They worked. They worshipped together at the Temple in Jerusalem. They observed the laws of Moses, presented their child for the formal rituals, returned to Nazareth and stayed there. The Gospel records almost nothing about thirty years of their life beyond Luke's line that the boy Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." Whatever happened in that long hidden time happened in the daily texture of family life — meals, work, prayer, rest.

For Catholic couples, the Holy Family is a quiet challenge. The challenge is not to imitate Mary's sinlessness or Joseph's special vocation; those are unrepeatable. The challenge is to take seriously the truth that ordinary family life — meals, dishes, work, sleep, raising children, getting along — is itself the place where God is forming us. The Holy Family did not have to escape ordinary life to become holy. Neither do you.

Pope John Paul II's apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio and Pope Francis's exhortation Amoris Laetitia both develop, at length, the implications of the Holy Family for ordinary Catholic family life today. Many Catholic homes consecrate themselves to the Holy Family, often through a ritual blessing of the home and a placed image or statue.