As we enter the new year we are confronted with laws and policies that seek to suppress the Catholic Faith. In the face of these obstacles, do we have the faith, hope, and charity to meet these obstacles before us? We are confronted with a multitude of temptations that make us believe that we are the ultimate authority over our lives. Yet in these times of grave difficulties, we can turn to our Our Lady. Through the 54-Day Rosary Novena, there is an opportunity to fortify our faith and meet the temptations of the world. This beautiful devotion affirms our commitment to God and stands as a bulwark against the ways of the world.

The Holy Family stands as an example of what a family should be. The Church itself is a family as well. Yet today there is a revolution that seeks to undermine the proper order of both human families and the Church family by removing their hierarchical structure in favor of a bottom-up approach to authority. Added to this is the temptation to view the family not as a home, but as a hub where each individual member may pass through living their own life, but without a common commitment to the good of the whole. This problem is exacerbated on contemporary distractions like electronic devices which allow people to shut themselves off from one another. To combat this errant individualism, families must commit to sharing a common life, ranging from taking meals together to praying together as one.

In 1892, Pope Leo XIII published an apostolic letter exhorting Catholic families to look to the Holy Family for inspiration and guidance. Fathers, for instance, should look to St. Joseph as a model of vigilance and care. They bear the heavy burden of being answerable to God for the spiritual welfare of their families. They must support their families in knowing, loving, and serving God. At the same time, mothers should look to the Blessed Virgin to cultivate the necessary virtues of love, modesty, resignation, and perfection of faith for the good of their families as well.

In various and often surprising ways, God reveals Himself through signs and miracles in order to draw humanity close to Him, including pagans such as the Magi. And it is the Magi who provide a model of adoration, knowing as they do that the most fundamental duty of man is to worship the true God. Through adoration and worship, we profess our complete dependence on God while acknowledging there is nothing higher than Him.

When God created Adam and Eve, he also created the family by uniting them in marriage. When Our Lord came down from heaven, He did so in the context of the family, specifically the Holy Family consisting of Himself along with St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is easy to conceive that it was within the Holy Family that Christ learned the practice of prayer. The Gospel of St. Luke testifies to the fact that, as a family, they visited the Temple to pray. And so we, too, can use the prayer life of the Holy Family as a model for how we ought to pray united as a family.

The blessed and holy name of Jesus is the one that God has chosen for Himself. While in the Old Testament God’s name was forbidden to be spoken, with the coming of Christ, God provides His people a name to speak aloud in prayer for their salvation. Jesus’s name is Who He is: Savior. However, even with this great gift, we are forced to ask ourselves, “Do we really want to be saved?” For out of our pridefulness and misplaced desire for self-reliance, we want to earn salvation on our own merits without the divine assistance of Our Lord.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we have the example of Ss. Peter and John putting Christ first by going to the Temple to pray. When they encounter a lame beggar, this poor man is healed through Jesus’s name. For the Apostles know that through the Holy Name of Jesus, everyone, even those who have fallen away from God spiritually, may be saved.

It is an immemorial custom to make resolutions at the start of a new year. Yet, rarely are these resolutions kept. Far too often we make broad resolutions that are impossible to keep. The better course is to particularize our resolutions, focusing on specific faults, and hoping, by the grace of God, we can overcome them.