BRIDGEPORT— Families cannot expect to be perfect but we are called to fidelity to one another and as members of the family of faith, Bishop Frank J., Caggiano said in his homily for the Feast of The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph on Sunday, December 27
“We ask the intercession of Our Lord, Our Lady, and St. Joseph to guide us in family life. We need not seek perfection but can we dare to seek greater fidelity to one another, “ said the Bishop in his online Mass from the Catholic Center chapel.
The bishop said that we are living at a time when many families are struggling and “family life as it is modeled doesn’t find a place for God or faithfulness in its midst.” Likewise, we are all too quick “to know each other’s imperfections and what we’re lacking.”
The bishop began his homily by recalling the year when his family gave his mother the perfect Christmas gift– all 206 episodes of the 1950’s TV program, “Father Knows Best,” about the perfect family and their understanding father.
The bishop quipped that his mother loved the show, which was cancelled in 1960 when he was just one-year old, but he managed to watch every episode, and he immediately noticed that the TV family didn’t really resemble his own.
When he watched, he wondered, “How come we’re not like them,” noting that the TV family was placid, congenial, well mannered, and rarely fighting.
“Those words didn’t describe my family growing up. We loved each other, but it was much more rough and tumble than that,” he said.
By the time he got to high school he realized that every family has it problems and that most families were not perfect like the “Andersons.”
“That is not its purpose, but there’s something more noble God has given us on the Feast of the Holy Family,” the bishop said as he discussed the need for fidelity within the family.
He said that as we gather to honor the Holy Family, we should remember that they did not fit the model of family life in their own time. Mary was pregnant out of wedlock and Joseph was a foster father caring for a child who was not his biological son.
However, they were “the perfect family because they were perfectly faithful to one another, to the love they gave to each other and to the place they gave to God the Father.”
The bishop said the Holy Family teaches us “that biology alone does not a family make.” In addition to sharing the same blood, the family must also strive to become the “domestic Church,” a place where all are nurtured and loved in faith, and there is room around the table for Jesus.
“We need to make a choice 100 times every day for each member of family–to love to it hurts, to love in self-sacrifice, to live for what really matters,” he said. Spouses should live their vows faithfully and children should be grateful that their parents brought them into the world.
He said parents should remember that children are a gift “even when they’re awfully annoying.” They should not seek to be their children’s friend, but rather form them to live in goodness and “accompany and challenge them,–even when they don’t want to hear it.”
Fidelity to one another as family members begins with the commitment “to share our sacrifices, love each other, will each other’s good, and accompany each other in the struggles we face in the larger world,” he said.
“As we gather to pray for own families and to pray for the strengthening of the family we have formed in Jesus Christ–you and I as family members of the Church– let us seek great fidelity to one another to stand by each other in thick and thin, sickness and health, joy and sorrow, in challenge and triumph—for that is what our heavenly Father asks us and our heavenly Father is the one who knows best.”
At the end of Mass, the bishop thanked all those who had joined him on the Feast of the Holy Family and sent his prayers and wishes that all have “a blessed Christmas Season and a joyful and healthy New Year.”
Bishop Caggiano also announced that soon after the New Year he will consecrate the diocese to the protection of St. Joseph, and commence a full year of festivities that will “ask St. Joseph’s intercession on the work of renewing the Church that you and I, please God, will put our hand to, and also that the pandemic will begin to recede in our midst.”
The Bishop’s Sunday Mass is released online every Sunday morning at 8 a.m. and available for replay throughout the day. To view the Bishop’s Sunday Mass, recorded and published weekly, click this link or visit the YouTube Mass Playlist.
