Pope Leo XIII and the Feast of the Holy Family

Pope Leo XIII holds a special place in my heart because he made Father John Henry Newman of the Oratory a Cardinal, even though he knew it might cause trouble, and referred to Newman as ‘Il mio cardinale’ (My Cardinal)! But I did not realize how important his influence was to the feast of the Holy Family, which we celebrate today!

According to this blog:

The Feast of the Holy Family is of recent origin. In 1663 Barbara d’Hillehoust founded at Montreal the Association of the Holy Family; this devotion soon spread and in 1893 Pope Leo XIII expressed his approval of a Feast under this title and himself composed part of the Office. The Feast was welcomed by succeeding Pontiffs as an efficacious means for bringing home to the Christian people the example of the Holy Family at Nazareth, and by the restoration of the true spirit of family life, stemming, in some measure, the evils of modern society. These motives led Pope Benedict XV to insert the Feast into the Universal Calendar, and from 1921 it has been fixed for this present Sunday.

To be clear: in the 1962 liturgical calendar of the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite, this feast is celebrated the Sunday after Epiphany (today the EFLR observes the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas); on the 1970 liturgical calendar of the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite, this feast is celebrated on the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas. If both Christmas Day and the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God are on Sundays, the feast is celebrated on December 30.

Pope Leo XIII composed the hymns for Matins, Vespers, and Lauds. The December 2020 Magnificat prayer magazine has a translation of his Matin hymn for today's Morning Prayer and of his Lauds hymn for Evening Prayer. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The opening words of the hymn for Matins of the Feast of the Holy Family. The Holy See instituted the feast in 1893, making it a duplex majus (greater double) and assigning it to the third Sunday after Epiphany. Leo XIII composed the three hymns (Vespers, Matins, Lauds) of the Breviary Office. The hymn for Matins contains nine Sapphic stanzas of the classical type of the first stanza:

Sacra jam splendent decorata lychnis
Templa, jam sertis redimitur ara,
Et pio fumant redolentque aerrae
Thuris honore.

(A thousand lights their glory shed
On shrines and altars garlanded,
While swinging censers dusk the air
With perfumed prayer.)

The hymns for Vespers (O lux beata caelitum) and Lauds (O gente felix hospita) are in classical dimeter iambics, four-lined stanzas, of which the Vespers hymn contains six and the Lauds hymn seven exclusive of the usual Marian doxology (Jesu tibi sit gloria). All three hymns are replete with spiritual unction, graceful expression, and classical dignity of form. They reflect the sentiment of the pope in his letter establishing a Pious Association in honour of the Holy Family and in his Encyclical dealing with the condition of working-men.

More about these hymns and translations may be found here.

It's still Christmas: Merry Christmas!

Image Source (Public Domain): Miniature in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, 1503-08, by Jean Bourdichon