Sunday, December 29, 2024: Take advantage of today to celebrate this original vision of the Holy Family

There might not be a feast in the church year that feels less hospitable to queer Catholics than the Feast of the Holy Family. It seems to follow the welcoming message of God’s incarnation for all with the quick caveat, “except for you.” This is true not just for queer folks, but for all families who have suffered death, separation, divorce, deportation, imprisonment, or any other circumstance that prevents their household from resembling—or sometimes even striving to resemble—the model heteronormative, nuclear family: Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

Yet the idyllic 1950s-style, fuzzy-focus graphics of the “traditional” nuclear family that grace bulletin covers and inspire homilies are deceiving.

In scripture, the real Holy Family is queer and nonconformist. Mary, a young woman already betrothed to a man named Joseph, conceived Jesus out-of-wedlock in apparent infidelity. The nearest analogy to Jesus’s conception is artificial insemination by a donor, a method the Vatican prohibits.

Adding to the story’s complexity, Mary would have been a single mother if not for a dream that encouraged Joseph to marry her anyway and serve as Jesus’s stepfather. Far from living untroubled lives, they were forced by Roman occupiers to travel to Bethlehem on the cusp of Mary’s due date, requiring her to give birth in filth and poverty, and then to flee to Egypt as refugees of a murderous Herod.

And we have not even explored the supernatural events surrounding the star, the Magi, the hosts of angels, and the shepherds, the wild and crazy behavior of Jesus’s cousin John, or St. Mary and St. Joseph’s first-century gender-bending rhythms of submission to God and resolute strength in adversity. In the gospel of Luke, which tells the most detailed story of Jesus’s early life, the Holy Family are three mostly-unrelated people, under stress, doing their best to survive together.

In sum, from the vantage point of the gospels, the Holy Family is 180 degrees removed from the idealized heteronormative family. Instead, it queers family in so many directions that one wonders why Catholics have revered it as a family model at all. For example, according to theologian Carrie Frederick Frost, in Orthodox Christianity “the Holy Family” usually refers not to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph but to the straightforwardly heterosexual household of Mary, the Mother of God, with her parents, Anna and Joachim.

Maybe this scriptural queerness explains the lectionary’s surprising ambivalence about stressing the Holy Family as a model of heterosexual marriage and parenthood. Instead, it provides a rich portfolio of possible reading options. Depending on your parish, the first reading might admonish you to revere your father, who is set in honor over you (Sirach 3). Or, it might remind you that when God answered Hannah’s prayers for a son, Hannah contradicted devotional ideals of motherhood and wifely submission by plucking the child Samuel from her household, dedicating him to the Lord, and leaving him at the temple (I Samuel 1).

The psalm you hear might praise the wife who is like a nearly-invisible fruitful vine and the children who are like olive plants (Psalm 128), or it might express a yearning to dwell in God’s house (Psalm 84). The epistle might direct wives to be subordinate to their husbands (Colossians 3:18), admonish you to “put on love” and “let the peace of Christ control” your heart (Colossians 3:12-17), or remind you that it is God’s love for us that makes us children in God’s family (I John 3:1-2).

The only mandatory reading is the gospel, Luke’s account of twelve-year-old Jesus’s decision to ditch his parents and converse with learned rabbis in the Jerusalem temple (Luke 2:41-52). Besides Jesus’s credible disobedience and his parents’ understandable worry, it amplifies Luke’s thoroughly queer vision of the Holy Family. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus asks, much like a lost-then-found middle schooler who rolls his eyes and says to his mother and stepfather, “Well, it was my turn to go to Dad’s house last weekend!” In other words, the lectionary accommodates “traditional” family ideals, but it forwards other visions of family as well.

This ambivalence feels less surprising when we realize that, according to patristics scholar  Michael Foley, the term “the Holy Family” was probably first applied to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph by Saint Bernadine of Siena (1380-1444). It wasn’t until the 17th century that Western Christians developed devotions around each of the family members, and it wasn’t until the late 19th century—with the ideal of nuclear rather than extended family firmly in place, and real nuclear families under threat from the injustices of industrial labor—that Pope Leo XIII drew a bright line from The Holy Family to Christian households. Indeed, Foley writes, “For the first thirteen hundred years of Christianity, the term ‘holy family’ was used only in reference to Christ’s members rather than His kin; that is, the holy family was the Church."

Indeed, as the theologian Elizabeth Stuart has argued, all our human connections and identities pale before our baptismal identity, which claims us as beloved offspring of God and siblings in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Take advantage of today to celebrate this original vision of the Holy Family, and to give thanks for the queer, complicated, loving network of human relationships that magnify your joys and ease your adversities. Nothing could be more biblical.

--Cristina Traina, December 29, 2024

Today's reflection is from Cristina Traina, the Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. Chair of Catholic Theology at Fordham University and a Bondings 2.0 contributor.