Epiphany, La Befana, and the Faith I Had to Find for Myself
I did not grow up immersed in Italian Catholic tradition. Not really.
My parents divorced when I was young. My father was Catholic. My mother was Lutheran. I lived with my mom, so most Sundays were spent in her Lutheran church. It was sincere and reverent, but stripped down. No saints. No feast days. No sense of the liturgical year as a living cycle. Christmas and Easter were there, of course, but everything else felt flat and interchangeable.
Catholicism entered my life only in fragments. Weekend visits with my father. Time at my grandparents’ house. Occasional Mass at his parish. Even that faded when my father stepped away from the Church for a while. Whatever Italian Catholic inheritance I had was not handed to me whole. It came in pieces, and then it mostly stopped coming at all.
That is the context in which I now approach the Feast of the Epiphany and the tradition of La Befana. Not with nostalgia for a childhood I never had, but with a deliberate desire to reclaim something that slipped through the cracks.
Discovering Epiphany as an Adult
In the Lutheran world I grew up in, Epiphany existed mostly as a word. It might show up in the church calendar, but it did not shape how we lived. There were no customs attached to it. No sense that Christmas was still unfolding.
Catholicism sees things differently. The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates Christ revealed to the nations through the visit of the Magi. It is not a quiet wrap-up. It is a declaration. The child born in Bethlehem is not only for Israel, and not only for the devout or the prepared. He is for outsiders, travelers, seekers.
Learning this as an adult Catholic changed how I understood the season. Christmas does not end in a single day. It moves outward, like ripples. Epiphany is where that movement becomes explicit.
For someone who grew up between traditions, never fully rooted in either, that message matters. The Magi were not insiders. They came late. They came from far away. And they were still welcomed.
Meeting La Befana Later Than Most
I did not grow up hearing about La Befana. No stories. No candies left behind. No Epiphany Eve rituals.
I encountered her later, while trying to understand Italian Catholic culture beyond stereotypes. At first, she sounded almost silly. An old woman on a broomstick delivering gifts did not seem especially theological.
Then I learned the story behind her.
According to tradition, the Magi asked an old woman for help finding the Christ Child. She refused to go with them. Later, filled with regret, she set out to find Him herself, carrying gifts. She never finds Jesus, so she gives gifts to children instead, hoping one of them might be Him.
Seen through a Catholic lens, La Befana is not a distraction from the Gospel. She is a commentary on it. She represents repentance, missed chances, and the stubborn hope that love can still make amends.
That story resonates deeply with someone who came to Catholicism slowly, unevenly, and with long gaps. It speaks to the fear of having missed something essential, and the faith that the search still matters.
It is worth addressing the claim, often repeated online, that La Befana is pagan or even “evil.” That accusation says more about modern suspicion than about history or theology. La Befana developed within a Catholic culture that understood how to teach through story. She is not worshipped, invoked, or treated as a spiritual power. She is a folk figure attached to a Gospel event, much like medieval mystery plays or saint legends. The Church has long distinguished between superstition and symbolic storytelling, and La Befana clearly belongs to the latter. Her broomstick is not a sign of witchcraft but of humility and domestic life. Her journey is not magic but repentance in motion. Far from undermining the faith, the tradition reinforces a core Catholic truth: even when we hesitate, even when we miss Christ the first time, grace still invites us to go looking.
Growing Up Without Saints
My mother’s Lutheran church was thoughtful and Scripture-centered, but saints were absent. Their feast days were absent too. The faith I learned there emphasized belief, but not memory. There was little sense that Christians across centuries and cultures had lived the same faith in richly different ways.
Catholicism, by contrast, remembers everything. Saints, feast days, seasons, customs. Italian Catholicism does this with particular intensity. Faith spills into food, stories, local legends, and household rituals.
Because I did not grow up with that, I had to choose it later. That choice feels more conscious, and sometimes more fragile. I am not continuing a seamless tradition. I am rebuilding one.
Reclaiming What Was Interrupted
Reclaiming Epiphany and La Befana now is not about pretending my upbringing was something it was not. It is about honoring the part of my heritage that was interrupted by divorce, distance, and time.
It looks simple. Leaving Christmas decorations up until January 6. Reading the Gospel of the Magi slowly. Learning the stories my grandparents likely knew without thinking about them. Letting Catholic time shape my year, instead of letting the secular calendar rush me along.
These practices do not erase my past. They integrate it.
As an Italian American Catholic who did not grow up fully Catholic, Epiphany feels especially fitting. It celebrates a God who reveals Himself to those who arrive late, from far away, carrying questions instead of certainty.
La Befana reminds me that regret does not have to end in paralysis. It can become movement. Searching. Giving.
In reclaiming these traditions, I am not going backward. I am finally stepping into something that was always waiting for me.
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