The Holy Family: The Social Dimension of Redemption
One of the most interesting feasts the Catholic Church celebrates within the octave of Christmas is the Feast of the Holy Family. The designation of "Holy Family" refers to the family unit consisting of St. Joseph, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus. Devotion to the Holy Family has a Christological and Marian root so much so that the dignity of that institution can not be fully understood nor defended without some reference to Christ and to Our Lady. The family can not be fully understood unless seen from the perspective of God who deigned to institute it. The nature of the family, therefore, and its identity tend to be undermined in our modern society today in the absence of theology. I wish to offer in this blog some theological insights of the role of the family in the redemption and its practical implications in the modern world.
1. Why God chose the family?
One of the mysteries of Christmas is the choice of God to come to man in the incarnation through the family. St. Thomas Aquinas said that God does not act out of necessity that is imposed from the created order. In another words, there is no absolute necessity for God to come to us through the family for He can come by some other means according to His divine wisdom. Nevertheless, when God decreed something, it becomes a necessity, for He cannot NOT will His own decree. (1)
However, God's choice of the family through which mankind could be redeemed is understood from the point of view of fittingness or appropriateness based on the whole logic and finality of redemption, namely to bring man to a fellowship with the divine persons of the Holy Trinity by restoring his original dignity and image at the moment of creation.
"It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will. His will was that men should have access to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature." (2)
The fulfillment of this divine will is intrinsically bound up with the restoration of God's image in man by Christ:
"'Christ, . . . in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, makes man fully manifest to himself and brings to light his exalted vocation.' It is in Christ, 'the image of the invisible God,' that man has been created "in the image and likeness" of the Creator. It is in Christ, Redeemer and Savior, that the divine image, disfigured in man by the first sin, has been restored to its original beauty and ennobled by the grace of God.
The divine image is present in every man. It shines forth in the communion of persons, in the likeness of the unity of the divine persons among themselves (3)
In other words, God, according to the fittingness of His choice, decreed to redeem man by the very instrument through which man falls (4) namely the weakness of human nature; hence He assumed our humanity so that we might share in His divinity. But the restoration of man's humanity means being ransomed from sin and be introduced into the family of God. This is the finality of the incarnation, namely to bring man to communion with the Persons of the Holy Trinity. God has ordained to accomplish this through a human family, so as to shows us the same path through which we can be saved (5)
Since the Holy Trinity is a community of Persons, redemption is to be introduced through another community of persons, namely the Holy Family of Nazareth. In this perspective, redemption enters into the orbit that is characteristically social and communitarian. This means that God has willed that redemption is accomplished in social and communitarian context. This can be proven by the different analogies of family/community:
1. The domestic family. The first institution to introduce the faith to the children (6).
2. The Church as family. Salvation through the administration of the sacraments especially Baptism through the community of believers.
3. Salvation of the Gentiles was introduced by the preaching of the community of apostles through Christ's apostolic mandate before his Ascension.
2. Family as "Communio Personarum" (7)
The designation of a family as "communion of persons" became popular when it was used in the document of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes n. 12:
"But God did not create man as a solitary, for from the beginning "male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). Their companionship produces the primary form of interpersonal communion. For by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential."
Pope John Paul II, who was one of the authors of the document, Gaudium et spes of the Second Vatican Council further explained that this intrinsic image of man as one who is called to communion is grounded in the Trinitarian family, the archetype of all levels of personal communion, whose primary ethos revolved around "self-giving."
This Trinitarian communion of persons is echoed in the "image and likeness of God", namely, man, so that the same Church document states that "...man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake, man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (Gauium et spes n. 24)
In the created order, that self-giving of oneself which makes man realize his true dignity and participate in God's life requires a community of persons. There must be a context whereby man can give himself to another; autonomy and individualism are antithetical to redemption, as they are antithetical to the very human ethos, the very basis of which finds its standard in the image of God in man. In another words, autonomy and individualism are against the mystery of incarnation as they are against being human. The first community of persons is that of the family, an arena where self-giving love is made possible; a school whereby self-giving is learned by the members of the family.
It is the same principle that is operative in the Church as a communion of persons and believers. The self-giving of parents for their children is presupposed in the salvation of the children (8). The self-giving of the missionaries in their missions makes possible the conversion and incorporation of pagans and unbelievers. These and many other instances only show that that there is a social and communitarian dimension in the redemption and salvation of souls.
"In the created order, that self-giving of oneself which makes man realize his true dignity and participate in God's life requires a community of persons. There must be a context whereby man can give himself to another; autonomy and individualism are antithetical to redemption, as they are antithetical to the very human ethos, the very basis of which finds its standard in the image of God in man. In another words, autonomy and individualism are against the mystery of incarnation as they are against being human.
If redemption and salvation come to us through the family (in various analogates), we can see that the diabolical attack would be directed to families and to any communities of persons. The disintegration of the values of marriage, the proliferation of divorce and remarriage, the introduction of hedonistic and contraceptive mentality to various institutions are just some of the few attempts of the diabolical to hinder the most important work of redemption and salvation of souls.
Let us ask the intercession of the Holy Family to give us the grace to be docile to God's divine will, that same docility of Mary who allowed herself to be God's instrument in the redemption of man. By her docility, she initiated, for the first time, an authentic social mode through which man can be saved. Mary's FIAT inaugurates the maternal dimension of redemption; hence a social dimension, for motherhood is an instance of human relation. Through her, for the first time, the family becomes redemptive.
- Fr. Martin Mary, FIFootnote:
(1) Sum Theo. I, q. 19, a. 3. There are two ways in which a thing is said to be necessary, namely, absolutely, and by supposition. We judge a thing to be absolutely necessary from the relation of the terms, as when the predicate forms part of the definition of the subject: thus it is absolutely necessary that man is an animal. It is the same when the subject forms part of the notion of the predicate; thus it is absolutely necessary that a number must be odd or even. In this way it is not necessary that Socrates sits: wherefore it is not necessary absolutely, though it may be so by supposition; for, granted that he is sitting, he must necessarily sit, as long as he is sitting. Accordingly as to things willed by God, we must observe that He wills something of absolute necessity: but this is not true of all that He wills. For the divine will has a necessary relation to the divine goodness, since that is its proper object. Hence God wills His own goodness necessarily, even as we will our own happiness necessarily, and as any other faculty has necessary relation to its proper and principal object, for instance the sight to color, since it tends to it by its own nature. But God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end. Now in willing an end we do not necessarily will things that conduce to it, unless they are such that the end cannot be attained without them; as, we will to take food to preserve life, or to take ship in order to cross the sea. But we do not necessarily will things without which the end is attainable, such as a horse for a journey which we can take on foot, for we can make the journey without one. The same applies to other means. Hence, since the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them, it follows that His willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely necessary. Yet it can be necessary by supposition, for supposing that He wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will cannot change.
(2) CCC n. 51
(3) CCC n. 1701-1702
(4) S.T. III, 1. q. 1, a. 2."...Man's pride, which is the greatest stumbling-block to our clinging to God, can be convinced and cured by humility so great," as Augustine says in the same place. Fifthly, in order to free man from the thraldom of sin, which, as Augustine says (De Trin. xiii, 13), "ought to be done in such a way that the devil should be overcome by the justice of the man Jesus Christ," and this was done by Christ satisfying for us. Now a mere man could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it behooved Jesus Christ to be both God and man. Hence Pope Leo says in the same sermon: "Weakness is assumed by strength, lowliness by majesty, mortality by eternity, in order that one and the same Mediator of God and men might die in one and rise in the other---for this was our fitting remedy. Unless He was God, He would not have brought a remedy; and unless He was man, He would not have set an example."
(5) "The root reason for human dignity lies in man's call to communion with God. From the very circumstance of his origin man is already invited to converse with God. For man would not exist were he not created by Gods love and constantly preserved by it; and he cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and devotes himself to His Creator. Still, many of our contemporaries have never recognized this intimate and vital link with God, or have explicitly rejected it. Thus atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age." Gaudium et spes n. 19
(6) Pope Benedict XVI's Angelus Message on the Feast of the Holy Family, December 30, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI on the Holy Family
(7) Pope John Paul II, “By the Communion of Persons Man Becomes the Image of God,” General Audience of November 14, 1979, in Theology of the Body, pp. 45-46. The reference made to Vatican Council II in the text is to the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes), 12.
(8) An interesting indication of this is the Rite of Infant baptism that it is through the parents' profession of faith that the infant receive salvation and justification.
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