Feast of the Holy Family - 10 January AD 2010

“Have mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and forgive one another. . . . may the peace of Christ reign in our hearts.”[1]

I looked over my notes for the past few years, to see what sort of sermons I have been giving you on this feast of the Holy Family. There really wasn't a great deal of variety—I mentioned that the feast was instituted 118 years ago this year by Pope Leo XIII—that its main purpose was to counteract the decline in Christian family life which accompanied the so-called “Enlightenment,” and the Industrial Revolution—and that the way in which this could be done was by imitating the model family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. There were more details, of course, but those were the essentials.

I started to read through the writings of some of the great Church Fathers, to see what they had to say on this feast. There were one or two interesting topics. A few talked about the amazing humility of our Lord in “being subject to Mary and Joseph.” One, particularly pertinent to our times, talked about obedience; picking up on the fact that our Lord had to be about the business of His Father in heaven, even though it wasn't exactly what His earthly parents were pleased with—the idea being, of course, that God always “out-ranks” earthly lawgivers, no matter who they might be.[2]

But then my attention was distracted to a piece of mail that I had received a few days past, which contained the rather distressing statistic that in the years since 1973, thirty‑seven years ago, when the Supreme Court “legalized” the murder of the unborn, over 50 Million[3] children have been put to death. That's almost 3,800 a day, or one every 23 seconds, in the United States alone. Those are frightening numbers.

Mass murder is a difficult thing about which to get accurate statistics. Hitler is said to have killed about 6 million Jews, Gypsies, and Christians.[4] Stalin is said to have killed somewhere around 20 million in Russia and Ukraine to bring about the Communist Utopia.[5] World War II cost about 400 thousand American lives; the Civil War was a bit worse, with brother fighting brother and about 498 thousand deaths. Up through Viet Nam, American wartime deaths totaled about 1.2 Million. Iraq and Afghanistan added a little over 5 thousand.[6] So, if you roll all of that together, you still come up 20 Million or so short of the number of babies murdered in the United States in the past 37 years.

There isn't much of any explanation for this massive slaughter, other than for the fact that we—you, and I, and our neighbors—have lost many of the values exemplified by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. As a nation, we have become materialistic; concerned with personal possessions, and to heck with everything and everyone else. We have lost any notion of Chastity or Modesty, except maybe a backwards idea which tells a young woman (or her parents or her boyfriend) that she should be more ashamed of having a child than of killing it. We have lost all fear of God, and any concern for keeping His law as a people. Indeed, many of our leaders, and many so-called “Catholics” among them. have gone down the road to Socialism, with its denial of “unalienable rights” with which men and women are endowed by their creator—endowed from the moment of conception until natural death. And these failings go on and on.

Perhaps even more importantly, it is possible to see that these 50 Million deaths are just the ‘tip of the iceberg.” I say that for two reasons. First because the deaths will go on, even if Roe v. Wade is overturned—those preparations are being made right now in many state-houses across the nation. But, more to the point, because this very same moral bankruptcy is responsible for so many other ills in modern society. It doesn't take great intellectual powers to see that most all of our social ills flow from the abandonment of Christian Family Virtue. If Christian Family life were even nominally intact, the TV newscasters would be out of business. There wouldn't be wife beaters, and child molesters, and broken homes, and homeless people, and AIDS epidemics and teen suicides. There wouldn't be terrorists, and dope lords, and people trying to steal each other's life savings.

Do you think Joseph could have come home to Mary after doing any of those things? Of course not! It's just unthinkable!

So, I guess, after all, we still need to hear about the Holy Family every year. We need to incorporate their values in our thinking. That means a certain amount of political agitation and activity. It means a certain amount of prayer and asking for God's guidance. But, even more surely, it means making the values of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph our own personal values. Pope Leo XIII tells us:

If we are of modest means, they show us a certain resignation and trust in God's providence.

If we are men or women, we have in Joseph and Mary and example of how we should conduct our self, and the respect we must have for the other.

If we are single, or even if we are married, we have in Mary and Joseph a reminder to preserve Chastity, at least according to our own state in life.

If we are youngsters, we have in Jesus Himself a model—and if we are parents, we must see something of the Infant Jesus in our own Children.

By imitating Jesus, Mary, and Joseph here on earth, we cannot help but share in the peace of that Holy Family, and to look forward to being united with it in heaven.

NOTES:

[1] Epistle: Colossians iii.

[2] Saint Ambrose, homily on the Gospel.

[3] 50,663,344 -- http://www.all.org/

[4] http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/ww2-loss.htm

[5] http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin
Note Matthew White’s disclaimer about the huge variance in Stalin era murders.

[6] http://icasualties.org/

Feast of the Holy Family—10 January A.D. 2010

Catholic Family Values