Painting from the Cathedral at Limburg showing the genealogy of Our Lady and Our Lord, also known as the Tree of Jesse.
This elevated teaching takes examples from the public administration of government and from other offices usually held by the bourgeoisie. But it also brings to mind the couple of the royal line of David in whose house, at once princely and working-class, the God-Man was born and lived for thirty years.
Such a reflection is found in the allocution of Pius XII to the Noble Guard in 1939:
Pontifical Noble Guard
“You were already noble, even before serving God and His Vicar under the gold and white standard. The Church, in whose eyes the human social order rests fundamentally on the family, however humble it may be, does not disdain that family treasure that is hereditary nobility. Indeed, one may even say that Jesus Christ Himself did not scorn it: The man to whom He entrusted the task of protecting His adorable Humanity and His Virgin Mother, was of royal stock: “Joseph, of the house of David” (Luke 1:27). And this is why Our Predecessor Leo XII, in his brief on reform of the Corps of February 17, 1824, attested that the Noble Guard is “consecrated to render the most proximate and immediate service to Our very Person and constitutes a Corps, which, as much for the end for which it was instituted as for the quality of the individuals composing it, is the first and most respectable of the arms of Our Princedom.”
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII: A Theme Illuminating American Social History (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), 43-44.
