God Entered History Through a Refugee Family
Christmas is a season that reveals who is saved: the displaced outside our walls and the unwanted inside them.
Dear friends —
I hope you and those you love have been able to spend meaningful time together during this Christmas season.
To my surprise, the Advent Reflection Series became one of the most widely read and shared parts of Letters from Leo in 2025.
Many of you wrote to tell me that these reflections helped steady your hearts during a difficult year for our nation — one marked by political division, anxiety, and real moral uncertainty.
Because of that response, I’ve decided to make these reflections a permanent part of this work.
Beginning today, I’ll publish a weekly Sunday reflection, rooted in the Mass readings of the day, and written to help us think more clearly about what it means to follow Jesus in the middle of today’s political realities — not by retreating from public life, and not by baptizing any party or ideology, but by letting the Gospel form our conscience, our courage, and our compassion.
These reflections will be available to all paid subscribers, as a small but sincere way of saying thank you for making Letters from Leo possible.
Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.
If you’d like to invest in our mission during this sacred season, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Whether you give $0, $1, or $1,000, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
“Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you.
Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” — (John 1:5)
Secular culture gives Christmas a single day and then rushes on.
The Church refuses that amnesia. Christmas is a season — an octave of eight days that insists the miracle lingers.
And for a long stretch of Catholic memory, the last echo of Christmas wasn’t New Year’s, but February 2 — Candlemas — forty days after Bethlehem.
It’s inside that wider frame that the Feast of the Holy Family makes sense. The devotion is old, but the feast on the universal calendar is modern: Benedict XV spread it to the whole Church in 1921, and the post–Vatican II calendar placed it deliberately inside the Octave of Christmas.
Not to sentimentalize “family values,” but to show us what God actually chose to enter.
Today’s Gospel is a midnight evacuation: Joseph rises, takes the child and his mother, and flees into Egypt. Call it what it is — forced migration. Despite public claims to the contrary, Jesus was from an immigrant family. He crossed a border as a toddler because a ruler wanted him dead.
Pius XII said it without flinching: “The émigré Holy Family…fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family.”
Christmas, then, is not God hovering above human danger. It is God joining it.
But exile isn’t only on maps.
