The Wealth of the Holy Family

A very happy Christmas to all my readers!

I have begun to contribute articles to 'Pelican+', which is very like Substack, but created for Catholic content. My articles go onto Peter Kwasniewski's 'Traditional and Sanity' section, as text and audio (read by me). I aim to do one a month.

The first of these was inspired by the Christmas season, and reading J.D. Vance's autobiographical work Hillbilly Elegy. We all know the Holy Family was poor, but in terms of Vance's concept of 'social capital' they did have a certain wealth, and the way that clan-based societies function continues to have relevance to us today.

Here is an illustrative portion:

When St Joseph knocked on Bethlehem’s doors with his pregnant wife, he wasn’t a vagrant or a refugee. He would have been practically everyone’s second cousin, and if someone hadn’t rustled up a reasonable place for his family to stay, the entire clan would have died of shame.

This attitude may be unfamiliar to some readers, but it can still be found in the modern world. A priest friend of mind had a similar experience visiting the village in Ireland that his parents had left more than 50 years earlier. I was powerfully reminded of it, again, when reading J.D. Vance’s autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy (which I recommend, though with a profanity warning). Vance’s grandparents had moved to Middletown, Ohio, from Kentucky, and maintained strong links to their relations in the old place; many other “hillbilly” families made the same migration at around the same time. The Vances, and many of their neighbors, had a strongly clannish culture, inherited from the hills of Appalachia, which survived not only the geographical dislocation, but also the economic privations that followed the closure of the local industries that had made Middletown an attractive destination in the first place.

J.D. Vance’s book is about how close he came to the extremely grim fate of many thousands of children growing up in these circumstances. He unflinchingly describes a culture that pays only lip-service to an ethic of education and hard work; which falls too easily into domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse; and in which women like his own mother burn through boyfriends and husbands, picking up babies along the way; and its calamitous consequences. Vance is also very clear, however, that the clannishness, the feeling of family solidarity, saved him. He was able to get through his childhood with a functional level of education and sanity thanks to the emotional and practical support of his grandparents, his half-sister, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Read the whole thing there.

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