A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. When the day came to purify them according to the law of Moses, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus up into Jerusalem so that he could be presented to the lord. For it is written in the law of the lord, every firstborn male shall be consecrated to the lord. The holy family came to offer in sacrifice a pair of turtledoves or a two young pigeons in accord with the dictate of the law of the lord. Now there lived in Jerusalem at that time a certain man named Simeon.
He was just and pious and awaited the consolation of Israel, and the holy spirit was upon him. It was revealed to Simeon by the holy spirit that he would not experience death until he had seen the anointed of the lord. He came to the temple now inspired by the holy spirit. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform for him the customary ritual of the law, Simeon took the child in his arms and blessed god in these words. Now, master, you can dismiss your servant in peace.
You have fulfilled your word. For my eyes have witnessed your saving deed displayed for all the peoples to see, a revealing light to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people, Israel. The child's father and mother, Mary and Joseph, were marveling at what was being said about this child. And Simeon blessed them and then said to Mary, the mother, this child is destined to be the downfall and the rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed, and you yourself shall be pierced with a sword so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare. That's mysterious stuff.
There was also a certain prophetess, Anna by name, daughter of Fanoel of the tribe of Asher. Anna had seen many days, having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage and then as a widow until she was 84. She was constantly in the temple worshiping day and even at night in fasting and in prayer. Coming on the scene at this moment, she gave thanks to god and talked about the child to all who look forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. When the pair, as Joseph and Mary, had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of god, they returned to Galilee way up north and to their town of Nazareth.
The child grew in size and in strength, filled with wisdom, and the grace of god was upon him. And this is the gospel indeed the good news of the lord. The shepherds ran to Bethlehem where they found Mary and Joseph and their baby, and the baby was lying in a manger. These words, as you will all recognize, are from Saint Luke chapter two. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Well, as I've said, as you well know, today, we are celebrating the feast of the holy family and it's had a rather turbulent history. I couldn't get a hold of very much of it, but it was founded by the established it was instituted by Leo the thirteenth in 1893. And then when Saint Pius the tenth came along, he threw it out. I don't know why, but he threw it out. But it was then reinstated, and then it was reassigned.
In other words, the date of the feast was changed so that now we are celebrating the feast of the holy family on the first Sunday or the Sunday within the octave of the birth of our savior. Now let me say right this is one of the toughest subjects I've touched. Now I'll tell you why it's tough, because it's so sensitive. I realize and I I want you to listen to this carefully. I realize I can say something up here that's going to hurt somebody's feeling.
I know that. I don't want to, but the way things are in this world today, not as we read about it in the bible, not as we read about it in the text of the of the church, not as we read about it in sermons, but as the so called family exists in the world today, you're treading on very sensitive ground when you talk about it. Now the feast was reinstated. It was founded for two reasons at least. And one, of course, was to pay attention, to give reverence and respect and honor to the holy family, to Jesus and his parents, Mary, his mother, and Joseph, his foster father.
That's the first thing. And and whatever else I have to say, speaking to you good people, not to the world at large, but to you as you sit in those pews this morning, this is what you should try to get a hold of. Whatever the state of your family, whatever your family is in quotation marks, And it can be very different for everybody. Believe me today, there's no paradigm which is universally instituted and in existence. Whatever it be, as good Catholics, Christians following Christ, hold up as your model, the model of the family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and their child.
And if there's anything in there that you can be sure of and that becomes obligatory without any question, and that's the word I emphasized in my opening words, respect. Respect. Because let me tell you, in my misspent life, I marvel at the respect you find on people riding on an elevator between two floors of a building. And sometimes you don't find even that much respect for members of the family towards one another. Now isn't that I'm talking from experience.
In my own family, in my own self. Familiarity can and too often does breed contempt. And where in fact love, whatever that word means, so I use the word respect. Whatever the word we know what respect means pretty well. We should begin doing it, working on it.
It's it's hard work in our own families. Those who are near and dear to us and who are really near and dear. I mean, they they're cherished. And when the chips are down, a a helping hand goes out. But too often in trivial affairs, in the superficialities of life, which are so often important, We don't have that respect for one another except maybe on occasions when it's formal, you know, when we get the best silver out.
So whatever else I have to say, the feast was established to bring home to us the importance of the family, how it ought to be honored, how it ought to be cherished, how it ought to be worked on. It's like marriage, you see, the two are very close together. You you hardly You see, this is a very tough subject to talk about, believe me, if you want to keep your thinking straight because it's so easy to get caught up in marriage and all all that that brings in. So that's why the feast was established. But there was another very fact very practical reason.
Because even in Leo the thirteenth time, 1893, he was he was seeing what was happening to the family. Notice that's nearly a hundred years ago. And the situation hasn't changed. Believe me, it's it's deteriorated horribly, awesomely. So the idea was that in the face of a deteriorating attitude towards the family that would we would try to bring home a Christian conception of it.
The same as for marriage because you can't just simply separate these two things, not from a Christian point of view. Now, sometimes we can find learn something from the opposites of things. And I want to give an illustration of what I consider the supreme contradictory of any conception of family. It was in the Washington Post for the day after Christmas and it told the story of something that had happened early Christmas morning. We're out here in Temple Hills about 07:30 on the morning of the twenty sixth, a 12 old baby was found in the desk drawer of an abandoned desk covered with a paper towel.
It was born on Christmas day. Now if anything can be held up as the antimony, as the absolute contradictory of any definition you give of the family, that is it. All it was covered with was a paper towel. This was '26, it was a cold morning. It was twelve hours old, the estimate, and it was found in in the filing drawer, you know those deep drawers of an abandoned desk.
That's how that little baby came into the world. For your information, you may have read it, the baby was taken to the community hospital and was recovered very well and the last word I had was in full vigor of life and probably would be put up for adoption and then at last it would be in a home with a father and the mother. Now, I would standing before you good people today who are have some awareness of what's going on in your world. You I cannot stand up here and give you even remotely a definition of family. Now that's an awful situation to be in to try to talk about something that you can't even define.
Why can't I define it? Because today, it's almost a meaningless word. Now I said almost, depending how you look at it. Not if you look at it from the point of view of the church, not if you look at it from the point of natural law, regardless of all religion. It's boiling down now to a mere legality, to a mere legality.
Of course, when I think of family, when I use the word family, unless I'm very careful and do some reflection, I think of the families I knew, grew up with, that I read about in in in the bible, that I read about in in the church in church documents, which I read about in the encyclicals, where you have a mother and a father united in in marriage. And in and there's some kind of a fixed location. And there's also, in most instances well, in practically every instance, there is a a background, a system of kins of kinship. That's what I would call the traditional notion of marriage. And I would say it is still held to be the traditional traditional notion, which means that in many instances, it's almost totally ignored or totally explicitly rejected rejected.
Because that conception of the family is is today no no question about it, it's it's under attack and has been for years. Goes back to at least Leo the thirteenth's time. But we are now seeing the culmination of it. Only last week and I read it hurriedly, and I did couldn't recover the the notice. But as I read it, in California, in one of the cities and which but it's it's not for the state as I recall, but for one city out there, one city, they have defined the family as simple.
Any two people of any sex or any combination of sex who appear before a court clerk and declare themselves a family. And so they become a family, and then they see, this is all legalities. And then they enjoy the privileges of of being a family. Now this see, my first acquaintance with this problem of the definition came when I was a Catholic eug, when a a religious order tried to settle in a certain part of Montgomery County. Now this religious order was made up of men, of a religious order.
Some of you may be aware of this. It goes way back about thirty some years or more. But this brought home the is a family? When they they bought a house out there, no problem, until the neighbors got news of it, and then it was discovered that this house was in a area zoned for family only. And some of their good god fearing neighbors, were affronted by the fact that this was not a family.
It was not a mother and a father with some children. It was a group of handful of religious, whatever they were. And they were actually in the house of a family only zoning area. I think the case went all the way to the supreme court. I don't know, but it went from court to court.
Finally, it the courts found in favor of the religious society. They said that they constituted a family. Now since then, you see, this whole business of what a family is has become very confused not only around Montgomery County but throughout the nation, throughout the nation. What is certain, nobody disputes this, is that the traditional notion of the family is being attacked. Let me read what I gathered on that.
Here are the things that some of our critics these are from people who both respect and admire or who don't respect and admire the traditional family. Couples are living together without marriage. It's a union completely at their wish or their inclination. Divorce and remarriage, extramarital relationships, that's the fancy word for adultery, spouses, each one of which is pursuing a career, not nearly working but pursuing careers. Working mothers, single parent family, homosexual and lesbian marriages and, families.
If that isn't a cute little cutie. Renewable contracts. That's another one. That's putting it really on board. These are some of the things today which are every any anybody who's following this situation, they know that how true this is and how the family is deteriorating.
And the gloom and the doomers have nothing to say but that the family is on the way out. Well, I happen to not believe that at all. Not at all. Just because you get a lot of people in a jail who have committed murder, that doesn't prove that that that murder is right or wrong and or or that it automatically became good because a lot of people did it. Although, we have a lot of thinkers who think along those lines, if enough people do something, it's alright.
I don't think that at all. But I do know for sure that families, however you define it, at least as if you define it as a good union of people married who are have an idea of bringing up children, that that kind of a thing is being attacked in practice. In practice because a lot of this stuff is extremely practical. This isn't high level academia. This isn't ivory tower ruminations.
This stuff touches the the very essence essence of many human beings lives and that's why it's so terribly sensitive, terribly sensitive. Think of it I can't give you the figures. I didn't have a chance to get a hold of them. Think of what they're available, however work, however authentic they are, how we have now so many families without a father. Notice, I didn't say husband, there never was a husband.
I have been told and not far from this city, part of the city, there is a whole area of nothing but women and children. Then we have a great increase in the single parent family, and the single parent being single for a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons, not just widowhood. You see, we are living in a curious world which lacks the basic stability. Because let me tell you, nobody disagrees with this statement. If you go all the way back, well, you can't include Plato, but if you go back to Aristotle, that the core, the very essence of a civilization or of a state, of a nation, is the family.
Nobody denies that. It's the social unit. It's the brick. Now a a a brick doesn't make a cathedral, but a lot of bricks do. A single stone doesn't make a cathedral, but a lot of stones do if they're properly united.
You don't get a cathedral out of a big pile of bricks or a big pile of stone. There's gotta be a plan. There has to be action. There has to be design, and there has to be production. Somebody has to do the laying of these things.
It's hard work. Now if it's true that the family is the core of your of our society or any society, then what must use how must you view the future of a society where that core is being denigrated, rejected, and in many instances eliminated? What do you think of that? And you can't It's a horrible thought. It's awesome.
It's worse than thinking about the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Oh, that's bad enough. And so I have I have no easy solution to this problem. We are living in a time which is much changed from from Leo the thirteenth. We in my little town when I was going you could go around any house in that whole area and knock on the door at about 03:00 in the afternoon and the and we would say the the lady of the house would come to the door.
That was especially true when I was collecting chickens for the annual dinner. It would to find a house without the lady of the house in it was absolutely exceptional. You felt like calling up the police. That was a one man man, if you could find him. Today, it's almost exceptional to find the lady of the house in at about two or three p.
M. So many are working. The workforce now is at least it's over 50%. Now, these are the facts of life. I'm not going into whether that's good, bad or indifferent.
It's a fact, and it's not going to decrease. Think of what it cost to buy a house. Think what it costs to live to put some food on the table. These are facts of life. And a young man or a young woman joining their lives because this is the basis of the family.
We are all sexual beings. We have relationships which are called sexual and babies come out of it and they need a little attention for a few years, to put it mildly. And this is this is the way it is today. How do we handle this? I do not know.
I can't give you any ready made answers. I can only say this. Where the family is not going to perish, I am as long as men and women keep their sexuality, as long as they keep something of a semblance of what we call the virtue of piety, that they feel some responsibility for the human beings they bring into the world. These are facts which are indisputable and I have that much confidence in human nature by and large that that will endure. There may still be instances of abandoned babies in an abandoned filing cabinet on a cold winter's day in December.
But I feel confident that there will be something that will endure. Now in conclusion, I I I have felt very very inadequate to this topic. But I only say this, I come back to the opening text that these good old shepherds beating it across the Bethlehem, coming up into this whatever was some kind of a cave or something. Notice we're told that they saw the parents, the father and the mother, and then they add and the baby lying in a manger. Manger.
Now that you as you many of you know, the word manger comes from the French verb, which means to eat, to get food, where the horses and the cattle got their nourishment to keep living, to keep moving, to keep working. And when I think of the family today, and in so many issues, we have good families, dedicated men and women who are giving their very life's blood to keep together what they have, be it one child or two child or whatever, or taking care of an a ailing husband or an ailing wife. We the the woods is full of these people, and don't you ever forget that it isn't. And listen to the the doomers and the gloomers. There are plenty of these sacrificial people living, but it's not the pauper thing.
It's not the thing that it's not the shake thing. No. So I wind up with words which are pretty foreign, to the text of the birth of Jesus Christ and that's to the our own Lord's own words in Saint John. I am the bread of life. Come to my manger.
He didn't say that. I've seen that. But in Saint John quoting our lord our lord and this is the, you know, the the the discourse on the Eucharist. I am the bread of life, and you have to eat that bread of life to live, to endure, to work, to hold up your end of the job. So you come to the manger.
You come to where you get your food. You come to where you get your nourishment. It is the manger, the manger to eat where the son of God was born and lived and had his being. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.