St. Joseph: Food for Thought – The Catholic Thing

The Church normally celebrates the Solemnity of St. Joseph on March 19 (transferred to March 20 this year), offering us a reprieve from Lenten penance as purple vestments yield to white; the Gloria makes a guest appearance; fasting gives way to the St. Joseph Table.  What food for thought might this happy celebration provide?

The Church had for a while exhibited a kind of skittishness with regard to St. Joseph. He had no feast in the Western Church until the seventeenth century and still has none exclusively his own in the East. This “nervousness” with giving too much prominence to Joseph was likely due to a concern that highlighting him might cause confusion regarding Mary’s perpetual virginity.

Saint Pope John XXIII inserted Joseph’s name into the Roman Canon – a move that shocked the Catholic world, not because of Joseph himself, but because it changed a text that had been untouched for close to fifteen centuries. Saint Pope John Paul II devoted an apostolic exhortation to St. Joseph in 1989, with Redemptoris Custos.

What examples does Joseph the Silent offer through his actions?

• Joseph points us all toward an intimacy beyond the sexual, which is otherwise good and holy within marriage.

• He demonstrates the value of work, which makes us “co-creators” with God, giving his trade to Jesus, so that He is rightly called “the carpenter’s Son.” John Paul II notes, “Work was the daily expression of love” in the home at Nazareth.

• Joseph is a witness to the sanctification of daily life, like Thérèse of Lisieux centuries later, doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

• His spirituality, rooted in his relationship with Jesus and Mary, and his strength of character, enabled him to make great decisions with great confidence.

• He exemplified the classical quality of pietas, so admired by the ancient Romans and summed up for the Jews in being “a just man.”  That means showing the virtue of religion in devotion, readiness of will, and submission to God.

• Joseph was the exemplar of both filial and paternal love: By being a true son of God, he was able to be a true father to the Father’s Son.

• He united in an integrated way contemplation and action: What was presented to him in dreams, which he then reflected upon, he translated into action.

• Joseph lived as a kind of proto-model of the evangelical counsels: poverty – materialism held no sway over him; chastity – his sexuality was under control; obedience – to God’s way, not his own.

• St. Joseph is the preeminent model of manhood and fatherhood, so desperately needed in our current crisis of masculinity. He offers an especially powerful witness for men today as no lust, no unbridled passion, no turning of persons into objects for personal gratification ever clouded his relationship to his holy spouse.

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The Catholic Thing