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His obedience of faith was manifested, as the Gospel tells us, after an angel of God revealed to him that it was through the Holy Spirit that the child had been conceived in Mary. When Joseph awoke, “he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, and took his wife into his home” without hesitation or objection.  (Matthew 1:20)  When Herod sought to kill the infant Jesus, Saint Joseph obediently took him and the Blessed Mother to safety. (Matthew 2:13-14) As Pope Saint John II pointed out in Redemptoris Custos, “already at the beginning of redemption, after Mary,...

Growing up in New Albany, Ind., during the 1950s, I never heard the term “domestic church,” but I knew what it meant. I knew it because my parents and my friends’ parents made their homes domestic churches, even before that phrase from our Catholic tradition was retrieved during the Second Vatican Council. I guess you could say that my childhood friends and neighbors were at home in church and in church at home. But what did it mean in practical terms that we experienced the family as a domestic church? For one thing, it meant that nearly every Catholic family...