Holy Family

On December 30, within the Octave of Christmas, the Church celebrates the feast of the Holy Family — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the household of Nazareth, the model of Christian family life. The feast was extended to the universal Church by Benedict XV in 1921, and in the current calendar it is kept on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas (or, when no Sunday falls in the octave, on December 30).

The household of Nazareth — where the Word was made flesh and grew in age and wisdom, where Mary kept all these things in her heart, where Joseph worked at his carpenter's bench — is the central icon of Christian domestic life. The pilgrimage sites of the feast are the sites of the Incarnation: the Basilica of the Annunciation at Nazareth, built over the grotto where Gabriel came to Mary; the Holy House of Loreto at Loreto, the dwelling of the Holy Family, which tradition holds was carried by angels from Nazareth to Italy in 1291; and the Holy House of Walsingham at Walsingham in England, the replica of the Holy House founded in 1061 by Richeldis de Faverches, "England's Nazareth."

The Loreto tradition — that the house of the Holy Family was translated first to Tersatto in Dalmatia and then, in 1294, to the hills above Ancona — gave the Holy House to the Italian pilgrimage tradition; the Walsingham tradition — that an English noblewoman was shown the dimensions of the Holy House in a vision and built a replica in Norfolk — gave it to the English. Both houses are, in the devotion of the faithful, the same house: the one in which the Holy Family lived, and to which the feast of December 30 returns the Church's attention at the close of the Christmas season.