Don and Rosalie (“Posie”) McPhee began the Nazareth Family Apostolate in the early 1980's. Don and Posie responded to God's call to restore Catholic families to Christ, modelled on the hidden life of the Holy Family. Both Don and Posie were converts to the Catholic faith. The apostolate began as a series of family retreats given at a retreat centre in Combermere, Ontario. In the early 1990's. Posie co-founded the popular Nazareth Family Journal, which ran quarterly from 1991 to 1997.

After the retreats had been running for several years, Don had the foresight to produce a video series of six tapes based on the teaching and sharing of Nazareth spirituality. He asked several of the key associate families to participate in the video project. Today, we have access to this wonderful legacy for our summer retreat weeks.

In 1992, Don (now an ordained Deacon) and Posie moved with their family to Minnesota to work in a pastoral mission. Nazareth retreats continued to be offered under the direction of associate families in an abbreviated weekend format until the mid-1990s.

In the fall of 2000, a group of families east of Ottawa, were encouraged by their pastor to begin running Nazareth retreats using the videotape series at the Dominus Vobiscum Retreat Centre, north of Montreal. The summer retreats have been running ever since, now offering families a choice of three weeks each summer.

The Dominus Vobiscum Retreat Centre is owned by the Archdiocese of Montreal and is on loan to the Newman Centre at McGill University. It consists of over 250 acres on the shores of Lac Maskinongé in the Quebec Laurentians. A very dedicated group of volunteer families have been restoring the camp to operational status little by little after the camp fell into disrepair and abandonment in the 1980s. The retreat centre has a history of ministering to families dating back to the 1930s.