Holy Family in the news
Every year right about now, all the major newsmagazines have traditionally done cover stories on Christmas in some way, whether it featured Jesus or Mary, or Christianity. I don’t recall a feature on Joseph, which is why I’m so glad he’s prominent this Christmas in “The Nativity Story.”
This week, two of the three major weeklies have stayed true to form, if not the message. Time opted out for now.
Newsweek’s cover is a beautiful Holy Family art piece, with the title “The World of the Nativity.” Inside, that cover story is titled “Holy Family Values.” Interesting that Newsweek devotes lengthy coverage to historical…well, family values. Here’s the subhead, right under the title:
The world into which Jesus was born and raised has shaped morals for two millennia. How Jewish mores became Christianity’s customs.
And that’s the gist of this whole article. It begins setting the scene into which Christ was born, and quickly raises the point that though the Nativity is a big celebration, the central event for Christians was the Resurrection.
But whatever one’s personal beliefs, no student of religion or culture should overlook the significance of the world of the Nativity, for the milieu into which Jesus was born—and in which he was raised—has fundamentally shaped the manners and morals of the ensuing two millennia. The Jewish family values that were prevalent in first-century Judea—the values of Mary and Joseph and of the young Jesus—became the values of Christianity, and of the regions of the world in which Christianity has long been a critical force.
This is big coverage for believers in traditional, civilizational family values. And a good reminder for those who argue against them. Aside from a couple of questionable passages in this article, it’s basically well done.
Which cannot be said for the U.S. News & World Report cover story “In Search of the Real Jesus.” Though it, too, has a beautiful art piece of Madonna and Child on its cover, superimposed over it is this giveaway: “New research questions whether he was more teacher than savior.” Here we go again…
And this story in U.S. News is actually called “The Gospel Truth.” The entire thing is a re-hash of Gnosticism, riding the new wave of fascination with it that was popularized in The DaVinci Code and the Gospel of Judas.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with these major news weeklies, they run big articles about very Catholic truths either without interviewing a Catholic scholar, or without interviewing a faithful one who has the authentic scholarship to answer the questions.
They do tend to call on pool rolodexes. The Gnostic go-to source Elaine Pagels has turned up in both these stories, and very much in the one called The Gospel Truth.