Holy Families

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, Year B
Genesis 15.1-6; 21.1-3 Psalm 105 Heb. 11.8, 11-12, 17-19 Luke 2.22-40

On this Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’d like to tell you the story of another family – a woman named Maria, a man named Luigi, and their four children. Maria Corsini was born in the mid-1880s in Florence, Italy. She was a military kid – her father was in the Italian army – and so they moved around quite a bit as Maria grew up. For a time, Maria attended a Catholic school, but her father had a disagreement with some of the nuns who ran the school, and so he withdrew Maria and sent her to a public school. She became a volunteer nurse with the Red Cross, eventually serving in both the First and Second World Wars, and she liked to write in her spare time on music and education. In 1905, Maria married Luigi Beltrame Quattrocchi. He was a lawyer, working for the Italian version of the IRS, and together they had four children. Their family life was always full – sports, vacations to the ocean, large gatherings with an extended family. Friends used to say that their house was particularly noisy at mealtimes. But this family never let their pastimes and busy-ness get in the way of their faith – Luigi, Maria, and their children attended mass daily; they prayed the rosary together every night; and they regularly participated in all-night vigils and weekend retreats. Their lives were in no way extraordinary – but they were full of life, full of faith, and full of love. Luigi died of a heart attack in 1951, and Maria died in 1965. Less than fifty years later, in 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified the couple – they are now Blesseds Luigi and Maria, one step away from sainthood. They made history as the first married couple in the life of the Church to be beatified together, and to be beatified primarily because they lived the best married life possible. Pope John Paul said in the homily at their beatification mass that Maria and Luigi “lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.” They became holy as husband and wife, as parents, as children of God living through the regular ups and downs of life.

Sometimes we can look at the life of the Holy Family – the family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – or even the families of the saints as being too perfect or too out of reach for us and our families. It’s true, our own families will never completely be like the Holy Family. But there are some lessons we can learn from their life in Nazareth that can shape our lives today, lessons that all holy families have learned through the ages. We can learn the lesson of silence – there are few words and few stories of the Holy Family recorded in Scripture. The silence of the gospels on the life of the Holy Family reminds us that we, too, need to find time in our busy lives for recollection, study, prayer, and reading. It is in silence that we grow spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. It is in silence that a family can learn how to communicate well. We can also learn the lesson of sorrow. Simeon told Mary that a sword would pierce her heart; even the perfect life of the Holy Family was not without pain and sorrow, all the way to Mary standing at the foot of her son’s cross. But from the right perspective, we can learn from our suffering and grow stronger because of it. And finally, we can learn the lesson of faith. Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus to the Temple because that was part of their religious tradition. We are all called to do everything we can to make our faith the point around which our entire family life rotates. When a family prays together – in the home as well as in the community of the Church – it is much easier to find the strength and wisdom to live a family life that is holy.

Of course, the reality is not the ideal. There are countless ways that our families are not like the Holy Family. We know all too well the pain of broken families, the challenges of single parents, the struggles of mistrust, infidelity, and heartache. But, with God’s grace and with conscious effort, we can make our families holy, no matter what the family looks like. With a foundation in faith, we can live very ordinary lives in an extraordinary way.