Mandeville, LA - Today is the day we celebrate the Feast of The Holy Family, given to us by God as The example to model our lives by and for the young to aspire to begin families in their image. In a world gone mad and given to the most hideous practices of "family-life" e.g. the obsession with helping 5 year olds to "transition", the Holy Family's example deservedly shines as a beacon to illuminate this age of familial sacrilege.

The Holy Family by Juan Guiterrez

The recognition of The Holy Family has roots that extend all the way back to the writing of the Gospels when Saint Luke tells us that after finding Our Lord in the temple “he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them”.

Bishop Fulton Sheen.

In his speech titled Obedience and Love, Bishop Fulton Sheen takes this passage and explains the beauty and humility of Our Lord and the holiness of his family as the greatest example there ever was.
“What adds particular emphasis to the fact of His obedience was that Our Blessed Lord was subject to parents so much His inferiors --- even as a creature is far below a Creator. One day the sun in the heavens, in obedience to the voice of a Man, stopped in its course. So, obedient to the voice of Mary, the Light of the World submitted for thirty years --- I might almost say that it stopped in full midday to illumine, embrace, and enrich her for all eternity.”
And that Our Lord was subject to the greatest model of fatherhood God ever created, the Bible’s only “just man”, Saint Joseph. Bishop Sheen continues.
“If Joseph ever bade Him search for a tool that was lost, it was the Wisdom of God and the Shepherd in search of lost souls who was actually doing the seeking. If Joseph taught Him carpentry, He Who was taught was One Who had carpentered the universe and Who would one day be put to death by the members of His own profession. If He made a yoke for the oxen of a neighbor, it was He Who would call Himself a yoke for men —-- and yet a burden that would be light.”

Raimundo de Madrazo Garreta - The Holy Family

I have spoken of the fact that the entire civilization of Man can be brought into existence and made to flourish through the Divine prose of the 4th Commandment, that is the Family, made Holy by God's Grace, contra the example of the Prince of this world; Bishop Sheen concurs.
But there is no evidence that Jesus limited Mary and Joseph to the mere nominal right to command. The Gospel says: "He lived there in subjection to them." Two great miracles of humility and exaltation are involved --- God obeying a woman, and a woman commanding her God. The very fact that He makes Himself subject endows her with power. By this long span of voluntary obedience, He revealed that the Fourth Commandment is the bedrock of family life. For, looking at it in a larger way, how could the primal sin of disobedience against God be undone except by the obedience in the flesh of the very God Who was defied? The first revolt in God's universe of peace was the thunderbolt of Lucifer: "I will not obey!" Eden caught up the echo, and down the ages its infraction traveled, winging its way into the nook and crevices of every family where there were gathered a father, a mother, and a child. By making Himself subject to Mary and Joseph, the Divine Child proclaims authority in the home and in public life to be a power granted by God Himself.

The Life of Saint Joseph, available in paperback!

In her one of a kind work, Maria Cecilia Baij, O.S.B., The Life of Saint Joseph, Our Lord manifested revelation to Sister Cecilia about the life of Saint Joseph. In one of them, the fining of Our Lord in the temple is revealed in detail.
The divine youth, meanwhile, had concluded his expositions. And everyone applauded. Jesus now hastened to his mother who was lovingly waiting for him, and who declared: “son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have sought you amid great sorrow.