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The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Feast

Feast Day
December 27

The Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph celebrates the household of Nazareth in which the eternal Son of God lived for thirty years in obedience to his Mother and his foster father. Devotion to the three persons of the Holy Family together as a single object of veneration is comparatively recent: it is associated with the seventeenth-century Canadian missionary, Saint Francois de Laval, first bishop of Quebec, who founded the Confraternity of the Holy Family in 1665. The feast was extended to the universal Latin Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1893 (originally on the Third Sunday after Epiphany) and given its present place on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas (or December 30 if Christmas falls on a Sunday) by Pope Saint Paul VI in the 1969 calendar reform. In 2026 the feast falls on Sunday, December 27, displacing the Feast of Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist ordinarily kept that day.

The Gospel readings at the Mass span the three Synoptic accounts of the Holy Family's life, year by year: the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (Year B), the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple (Year C), and the flight into Egypt (Year A). Pope Francis named the Holy Family the object of his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016) and dedicated the year 2021-2022 to Saint Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church.

The Holy Family is held up by the Church as the archetype of Christian family life: faith, obedience, hidden labor, mutual love, fidelity, hospitality, and the willingness to suffer in defense of the child. Pope Saint John Paul II in Familiaris consortio (1981) called the family the domestic church - the first place where the faith is received, lived, and handed on.

Patronages

Christian families

From The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

"He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them."
— Luke 2:51, on the boy Jesus's return from Jerusalem with Mary and Joseph

Catholic Churches Named After The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

17 parishes on Catholic Church Times share The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph's name. Find their Mass times, confession schedules, and adoration hours:

Sources