Blessed are those who Fear the Lord and Walk in His Ways"

Today's Mass Readings


The devotion to the Holy Family began in Canada in the late seventeenth century and grew steadily. Does the 1700’s remind you of the industrial revolution? That is when families began to be disintegrated. Men began to move away from the traditional families and women began to be absent from their homes and spent more time at dingy industrial environment. Children spent less and less time with their natural parents. The establishment of the feast was a response the imminent crisis in the most basic institution of society: the family. In 1893 Pope Leo XIII signaled his approval by composing the hymns for the office of the feast, and in 1921 Benedict XV ordered the feast to be kept by the universal Church. To a God fearing, genuinely soul-searching people, the readings for the feast day propose a way in which the sanctity of the institution of the family can be restored.

The first thing is to rediscover the “sanctity” of the human family. Where does its sanctity come from? While, we can trace the history of the feast to the seventeenth Century, the sanctity of the family comes from the fact that at creation God gave man and woman as companions to each other and gave then the gift of procreation. The family is God’s creation as much as human kind is. The family is as much in the image and likeness of God as human beings are. We know God as family, as community: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is the image of every family.

Its sanctity also emerges from the fact that of all the innumerable ways God had to be incarnated in the world and in our lives, he chose the family. Jesus was born into a family and grew up in a family. By that choice God reiterates the sanctity of the human family. And to think what we have made of the family. Just as may of us do not safe guard the image of God in us, we do not safeguard the image of the family as the image of God as family and community.

Let us strive to make our families like the family of Nazareth.

- Fr. Satish Joseph