Celebrating the Holy Family and Its Meaning for Us
We also recognize the other vocations in Catholic life
Today is the Feast of the Holy Family and I am sure priests across the country are going to speak about marriage in contrast to the current culture today. I want to focus on how we define family in the Church.
Understand that Mary and Joseph had the vocation to become the parents of Jesus. In the same way, marriage is a vocation, it is a calling from God, just as priesthood is. Therefore, in the Catholic Church we recognize marriage in the sacrament as a mission ordained by God to create a domestic church. Catholic marriage means a father and a mother with the two purposes being procreative and unitive. Marriage is about bringing forth children and the unity of the spouses in that order. However, anyone who teaches on marriage today who does not speak of the need to for a prayer centered family and marriage misses the point.
Prayer must be central
You can expect some priests across the country to rail against any idea of marriage outside what we as Catholics believe and never mention prayer. Prayer is the first and most important activity for the Catholic spouses and later the Catholic family. If you are a praying couple or later a praying family be ready for the Lord to send you challenges. That is the way it works. You might end up with a difficult child and not know what to do. If you are a praying person, you know that the Lord sent you that child so that he could work through you for his salvation. By the way, I think I was the difficult child in my family.
You might have a challenge with a spouse. I just told you that I think I was the difficult teen in my family and my father and I had our disputes. However, I will always remember how faithful my father was to my mother who from a car accident in 1967 to his death in 1985 was there helping her in slowly growing disability. He watched her go from: “I am having trouble with my legs” to eventually a wheelchair after years of misdiagnoses. He stayed devoted to her all the time and obviously vice versa.
Other vocations
However, there is something else we must realize about this day. There are other vocations that are not to a Catholic marriage. Obviously, there is priesthood and religious life but there is also the unmarried.
Any anthropologist will teach you that no society thrives without the unmarried who do not contribute to the gene pool. The single, many will tell you, must remain celibate. Ok but they are called to deep personal Christ centered friendships. This is a central aspect of the vocation of the unmarried.
There is an interesting article in the Atlantic of which I only read the tease. David Brooks, most famous for Bobo’s in Paradise, explains that the nuclear family is a modern invention, previous the extended family lived together. I am sure you are aware of the TV show the Waltons which may have been an idealized family but the concept was real.
Many times you may visit the Eastern European family that came over to the United States You will find the Bubuska lives on the second floor. She is the grandmother who immigrated with her husband and young children who now lives alone upstairs and does not speak a word of English.
That concept of the extended family is more long term. Also the unmarried men and women who live in Christ centered friendships that at times were stronger than even the married couple’s relationship.
Other relationships
St. John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John had such a friendship. They shared a house and even were buried together. When Ambrose St. John died, he felt John Henry Newman's grief, he said, had to be deeper than even a married couple he suffered so much pain.
These too are relationships that can assist in building the community in Christ and supplement the call of the married couple in their vocation to build the domestic church in prayer.
I remember long ago, while still a sailor, I visited a family, I think they were in Oceanside, I cannot remember how I met them but I remember the children would talk about things like riding somewhere in their car and the father would stop them and say: “not it is not our car, it is God’s car. This is God’s kitchen, that is God’s TV” et cetera because they were determined to make it clear that everything belonged to God for which they were thankful they could use it.
This can go wrong when we forget the importance of prayer for a married couple. I knew a woman once, devout in her Catholicism however, did not understand the need to be rooted in prayer as part of her vocation. If you ask her about her son, she would respond, “You mean the one I hate?”
Someone later explained to me that her son was a self-fulfilling prophesy, he felt her rejection and acted against it and she, therefore, rejected him more. This is what happens even among the devout if they do not bring all their struggles in prayer.
So today, we celebrate the Holy Family, we celebrate the meaning of a Catholic marriage and we celebrate the call that all Catholic have to a Christ centered relationships in our service to God and his people.
Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA
The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com
The newest edition of Fr Robert J Carr's latest book is now available. Christ in Our Humanity. You can find it here.