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One Bread, One Body

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All Issues > Volume 33, Issue 1

<< Friday, December 30, 2016 >>

Holy Family

Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14
Colossians 3:12-21
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Psalm 128:1-5
Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
Similar Reflections

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THE FAMILY FIGHTS BACK

"The Lord sets a father in honor over his children; a mother's authority He confirms over her sons. He who honors his father atones for sins." �Sirach 3:2-3

The Christian family is being assaulted with a vehemence which is unprecedented. Promiscuity, contraception, abortion, abuses, addictions, and divorces are rampant. Bitterness, resentments, and unforgiveness poison family relationships. Fewer families are surviving.

The Lord wants this Christmas season to be the time for a counter-assault by the Christian family on the culture of death. We need parents like St. Joseph, who will obey immediately and act decisively to save their children from death (see Mt 2:13-14). The Lord is calling spouses and parents to be ministers of reconciliation (see 2 Cor 5:18) and peacemakers (see Mt 5:9), who have accepted the grace of forgiving and being forgiven. Then these spouses and families can pray together daily and share the Scriptures together daily. These are first steps toward the family becoming what the Church has traditionally called a "domestic Church" (Catechism, 1655-1657). These family churches have the freedom to be obedient and submissive (see Eph 5:18-21). In this obedience, there is unity, and in these families' unity there is power to bring down the enemies of the family, the Herods of this world, and to replace our culture of death with a civilization of love and life.

This Christmas, make Joseph-like decisions for your family's salvation.

Prayer: Father, send the Holy Spirit, the true Christmas Spirit, to show me the threats to my family.

Promise: "Husbands, love your wives. Avoid any bitterness toward them. You children, obey your parents in everything as the acceptable way in the Lord." �Col 3:19-20

Praise: The Holy Family models what being of "one heart and one mind" is like (Acts 4:32).

Prayer at an Abortion Chamber

Father, I come to this place as to a new Calvary,
I wish to stand here with Mary
and those others who stood by the cross of Jesus
the day he sacrificed himself for us sinners.

I firmly believe the sorrowful scene before my eyes
is nothing less than a reenactment of Jesus’ suffering and death,
already anticipated in the massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem
and repeated in the slaughter of the least of his brethren,
the tiny children brought here today to be slain.

Father, I realize I cannot stop the killing of most of these children,
any more than Mary could have stopped the slaying of her Child that fatal day.
But in faith I unite my heart with hers
and humbly adore YOUR Divine purpose in allowing such bloodshed.

I offer You the blood of Jesus,
and, mingled with it,
the blood of these little ones,
for their own salvation and for that of their parents,
the abortionist, and our whole generation.
Remember Jesus’ own prayer from the cross
with its echo in Mary’s heart:
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

But perhaps the hour has not come for some of them.
Once you told Joseph to take the Child and his mother
far from those seeking the Child’s life.
I offer myself to you, as St. Joseph’s helper,
ready to do everything I can for my beloved Jesus and Mary
in the person of the child and mother you entrust to my care.

Dear Father, accept my prayer in the name of Jesus.

Amen.