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Á¦¸ñ The Family's Duty and The the Holy Family (2015-01-11)
ÀÛ¼ºÀÚ °ü¸®ÀÚ ÀÛ¼ºÀÏ 2015-01-13

 



 


The Family's Duty and The Feast of the Holy Family(11th January 2015)


¡°God is charity¡± (1 Jn. 4:8). He knows about love, much more than we do. His Law, far from preventing true love, is a condition for true love. The first and fundamental Law of God is a law of love: ¡°Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.

 

And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself¡± (Mt. 22:37-39). Archbishop Lefebvre used to point out that even in the material realm God has set the Law of universal attraction as an image of the law of love! Thus God has so ordered human life at the natural level that it should blossom in families, where love is learnt and exercise according to God¡¯s marvellous laws. Thus families are the building blocks of human society.

 

Sin is incompatible with the love of God, with true love. Sin is the destruction of true love, and it leads to the destruction of family and ultimately to the destruction of human society. It is very important to remember these great truths in our modern world, where love has been so corrupted, that many today search for love in what is really nothing else but the corruption of love, distortion of true love, all kinds of sexual perversions. No! True love is only in love according to God¡¯s Law!

 

True love is first of all a gift: ¡°The Father loveth the Son: and he hath given all things into his hand¡± (Jn. 3:35). Before giving al things in His hands, the Father has given to His Son His own divinity! And as a consequence, everything created is necessary in the hands of the Son as they are in the hands of the Father.

 

And God¡¯s love for us is first of all a gift: ¡°God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting¡± (Jn. 3:16). ¡°Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends¡± (Jn. 15:13). Thus nothing is more opposed to true love than selfishness: since we ARE not by ourselves, we cannot find happiness by ourselves, by enclosing ourselves on ourselves. Since our whole being is from God, it is only from God that we can get our happiness, by giving ourselves to Him.

 

There are two kinds of love: a giving love, such as a mother¡¯s love for her children, giving of herself to them, and a taking love such as when we love chocolate, or when people love gold: they love gold not to give it, but to take it for self.


A good and holy family is a school of true love, when every member of the family learns to love, first to love God and to love one another, by the giving of self in a manner worthy of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus a family is founded by a contract between a man and a woman giving themselves to the other for the whole life, in such a way as to give life to children, according to the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ and His church.


It is an absurdity to claim that there could be a true family that would not be founded by one man and one woman: all those un-natural loves are nothing but the perversion of the most beautiful thing made by God. Man did not make himself: God gave us a nature that we cannot change; a man is not a woman and can never become one; a woman is not a man and can never become one: only the union of a man and a woman can cooperate with God to give birth to children; any anti-natural union is fundamentally struck with sterility, bareness.

 

Humans can destroy themselves by abominable medical operation, but they can never change themselves in the other: the DNA of each cell of their body is there to claim how God has made them, and they can never change the DNA of each cell of their body! We need to pray much for such poor souls, led astray by our modern world.

 

It is modern man¡¯s pride that rejects what God has made, and wants to make himself according to his own will, rather that receiving his nature as God has made it, and conforming his will to the Holy Will of God. By rejecting God¡¯s way, they make it impossible for them to find true joy and peace which can only come from God.

 

When one is not at peace with God, one will never find peace: ¡°There is no peace to the wicked, saith the Lord¡± (Is. 48:22). Yet there is remedy for them if they come to the Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ, with a contrite heart, truly repenting for their sins and ready to change their lives with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Now the first and most important good of a family is the children: one sees this in the Holy Family, where the greatest good was indubitably our Lord Jesus Christ. Good children are the joy and the reward of good parents! God often blesses the parents in their children: what a marvellous reward for the parents of St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, than to make a saint of their daughter! It is always a great joy for parents to see the virtues of their children.

 

It is hard work indeed, but well worth the effort! If the father is an architect and build houses, his work is not as great as the work of building up the soul of the children, for which work both father and mother must work hard.

 

Our Lord Jesus Christ being absolutely perfect, and worth alone more than all others together, it was not possible for St Joseph and Our Lady to desire any other children; moreover, they had much too much respect for God¡¯s marvellous gift of having preserved the Virginity of our Lady for destroying that gift! So the Church always taught that Our Lady did not have any other child, neither did St Joseph.


For normal families, who do not have such a great child, it is good and normal to have many children. This is the very first commandment that God gave to Adam and Even, even before forbidding them to eat of the forbidden tree. ¡°And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth¡± (Gen. 1:28).

 

Now for two parents, if they have only two children, that makes no multiplication: one does not multiply by 1; the smallest multiplication is by two, hence two parents should have four children, but often more.

 

If you have an apple tree in your garden, and it brings for to you only one or two apple, you reckon it is not a good tree; you want that God bless your trees and harvest with great growth and multiplication, yet you do not want to accept all the many children God wants to give you? Fecundity is a gift of God, which man does not have the right to destroy by contraception. Welcome all the children which God wants to give you! They will be your reward in old age.


The second good of a good family is fidelity itself, and the mutual support which husband and wife give to one another. When we celebrated my grant-parents¡¯ fiftieth anniversary of marriage (they reached 67 years of marriage), my grand-father said to us: ¡°when you reach fifty years of marriage, the joys are not the same as at the beginning of marriage; but if you can look back at all those years, and see fifty years of fidelity, the joy is not less!¡±

 

Great wisdom indeed! Fidelity itself is the source of great consolations; one must earn it day by day, but it is worth all the efforts. And because fidelity is so important in marriage, so virginity is important before the marriage, as a preparation for that fidelity; virginity before the marriage is to reserve oneself for one¡¯s future spouse: it is the same as fidelity after the marriage.

 

The best gift a young man and a young woman can give to one another on their marriage date is their virginity, marvellous guarantee of fidelity for the whole life. It is evident that God will bless in a very special way those young couples who, for the honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, following the example of St Joseph and our Lady, prepare their marriage in purity and virginity.


The third good of a Catholic family is the good of the sacrament of marriage: by this sacrament, the union of a Catholic man and woman signifies the union of Christ and His Church, and receives from this most sublime and holy union very special graces to fulfil their duties, both to grow and multiply and to be faithful.


One sees these three goods in a sublime way in the Holy Family Jesus, Mary and Joseph. One sees also there that sometime (more often than people usually think) a young man or a young woman are called to a higher life: yet there also one enters into a family, a higher family, supernatural family such as a religious order or society, and acquires greater spiritual fecundity and fruitfulness; one finds there a very beautiful mutual support in the trials of life and even in old age.

 

And one lives at the level of the very union of Christ and his Church, living as brides of Christ. There also, there is need to be faithful. This is even a higher virtue of chastity: when one so gives one¡¯s heart so totally so totally to Christ that one will not have any other love, yet one acquires thereby a greater spiritual fecundity. Marriage is good; consecrated life is better.

 

By the grace of God this is possible. It is possible – nay enjoyable – to have a good and holy family; it is possible, and supernaturally enjoyable, to live a life consecrated to our Lord Jesus Christ. The great condition to achieve a good catholic family, (and even more to live a consecrated life), is PRAYER: there must be prayer in the family; there is need of family prayer.

 

The key to a good family prayer is regularity, even more regularity than length. It is better to say just one or two decades every single day than the whole rosary from time to time. Especially when children are small, a long family prayer may be difficult, but a regular one is not. And the parents can easily finish their rosary on their own. A family that prays together is guaranteed to be blessed by God. A family that prays together stays together.


In particular there should be a great devotion towards the Holy Family, where each member of the family finds a most perfect example: St Joseph model of fathers; the Blessed Virgin Mary model of mothers and spouse, and the Divine Child a most excellent model for all children.


Sin is the destruction of love, and the destruction of families. Parents should be careful that there should be no occasion of sin in the family: no evil book, no evil picture, no bad language, no immodesty, no TV etc. Parents should weed the soul of their children to make of it a beautiful garden where all kinds of virtue will blossom.


May the Divine Child through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Joseph grant to all of you these blessings of a holy family. Amen!

 

Fr. F. Laisney (sspxasia)