Feast of the Holy Family honors ‘hidden life at Nazareth’ 

CV NEWS FEED // The Sunday after Christmas has been celebrated as the Feast of the Holy Family in the universal church since 1921. Given how recently the feast was adopted, Catholics can look to modern commentaries to understand the significance of the holy day.

On the feast day in 1964, Pope Paul VI gave a discourse in Nazareth reflecting on the Holy Family and their home. He opened the address by honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary and asking for her intercession. 

“Our very first thoughts must be turned toward Mary Most Holy,” he said, “to offer her the tribute of our devotion and to nourish that devotion with reflections that will make it genuine, profound and unique, in conformity with the plan of God.”

He later added, “We ask therefore the favor of joining Our Lady, mother of the home at Nazareth, and her humble but courageous husband St. Joseph, in their intimacy with Jesus Christ, her human and divine Son.”

Turning to the subject of Nazareth, Pope Paul VI said that it “is the school of initiation into the understanding of the life of Jesus. It is the school of the gospel.” The Pope added that Nazareth teaches us the importance of domestic life, the sphere of the family.

“May Nazareth teach us the meaning of family life, its harmony of love, its simplicity and austere beauty, its sacred and inviolable character;” he said, “may it teach is how sweet and irreplaceable is its training, how fundamental and incomparable its role on the social plane.”

He said that Nazareth teaches the lessons of silence and hard work, as well, embodied in the Holy Family.

He prayed that the home of the carpenter’s son leads the faithful to appreciate the “austere and redeeming law of human labor, here to restore the consciousness of the dignity of labor, here to recall that work cannot be an end in itself, and that it is free and ennobling in proportion to the values — beyond the economic ones — which motivate it.”

The Pope pointed to Christ as the great Model of workers, “their Divine Brother, the Champion of all their rights, Christ the Lord!”

Delivered at a time when family values and structures around the world were crumbling under the influence of the sexual revolution and Communism, the Pope’s words continue to be relevant today.

An excerpt from his address can even be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. CCC 533 states, “The hidden life at Nazareth allows everyone to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life.”