Church calls on Saint Joseph as Protector, Guide
by Pope Paul VI
 During the Holy Mass celebrated in Saint Peter's on the
feast of Saint Joseph, the Holy Father gave the following homily:
Dearest brethren, sons and daughters!
Today's feast invites us to meditate about Saint
Joseph, Our Lord Jesus' legal
and foster father. Because of that function
which he performed in regard to Christ during His
childhood and youth, he has been declared Patron or Protector
of the Church,
which continues Christ's image
and mission in time and reflects them in history.
At first sight there seems to be no material for a meditation on Joseph,
for what do we know of him, apart from his name and a few events that occurred in Our Lord's childhood? The Gospel
does not record a single word from him; his language is silence. It was his attention to the angelic
voices which spoke in his
sleep; it was that prompt and generous obedience which was demanded from him; it was manual labor, in the most
modest and fatiguing of forms, which earned Jesus
the reputation of being "the son of the carpenter"
(Matthew 13:55). There, is nothing else known of him,
and it might well be said that he lived an
unknown life, the life of a simple artisan, with no sign of personal greatness.
But that humble figure which was so near to Jesus
and Mary, Christ's
Virgin Mother, he
who was so intimately connected with their life and so closely linked with
the genealogy of the Messiah as to be the
fateful and conclusive representative of the descendants of
David (Matthew 1:20), is revealed as being full of
significance if we look at him attentively. He is seen truly to possess those qualities which
the Church attributes to him in her liturgy,
which the devotion of the faithful also attributes to him, and which gave rise to a series of
invocations that have taken the form of a litany.
 A celebrated modern shrine of the saint, erected through the efforts of a simple lay
brother, Brother André of the Congregation of the Holy
Cross, at Montreal in Canada, illustrates those
qualities in a series of chapels arranged behind the high altar
(shown). All the chapels are dedicated to Saint
Joseph in honor of the many titles which have been offered to him, such as Protector
of Childhood, Protector of
Spouses, Protector of the Family,
Protector of the Workers, Protector of Virgins, Protector
of Fugitives, Protector of the Dying
...
If we look carefully into this life that was apparently so unremarkable, we shall find
that it was greater and more adventurous, more full of exciting events, than we are
accustomed to assume in our hasty perusal of the Gospel story. The Gospel
describes Saint Joseph as a Just Man (Matthew 1:19). No greater praise
of virtue and no higher tribute to merit could be applied to a man
of humble social condition who was
apparently far from being equipped to perform great deeds. A poor, honest, hardworking,
perhaps even timorous man, but one with unfathomable interior life, from which
very singular directions and consolations came, bringing him
also the logic and strength that belong to simple and clear souls,
and giving him the power of making great
decisions, such as that decision to put his
liberty at once at the disposition of the Divine Designs,
to make over to them also his legitimate human calling, his conjugal happiness, to accept the conditions,
the responsibility and the burden of a family, but, through an incomparable virginal love, to renounce that natural conjugal love that is the foundation and the nourishment of
the family; in this way he offered the whole
of his existence in a total
sacrifice to the imponderable demands raised by the astonishing coming of
the Messiah, to Whom
he was to give the everlastingly blessed
name of Jesus (Matthew
1:21), Whom he
was to acknowledge as the effect of the Holy Spirit,
and his own Son
only in a juridical and domestic way.
So Saint Joseph was a "committed" man, as we might say nowadays.
And what commitment! Total commitment to Mary, the elect of all the women of the earth and
of history, always his virgin
spouse, never his
wife physically; and total commitment
to Jesus, Who was his Offspring
only by legal descendance, not by the flesh. He
had the burdens, the responsibilities,
the risks and the labors
surrounding the holy family. His was the service,
the work, the sacrifice,
in the shadows of that gospel
picture in which we love to meditate on
him; and we are certainly not mistaken, for
we all know him
now and call him Blessed.
This is Gospel in which the values of human existence take on a
different dimension from that with which we are accustomed to appreciate them. What is
little becomes big, and in this connection we do well to remember Jesus'
fervent words in the eleventh
chapter of Saint Matthew: "I give Thee praise, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because Thou hast
hidden these things (the things or the kingdom of
the Messiah!)
from the wise and learned, but hast revealed them to little ones".
In the Gospel's account, what is lowly becomes
worthy to be the social condition of the Son of God
made Son of
man; that which is elementary and the product of fatiguing and rudimentary
handwork served to train the Maker and Continuator of the cosmos in the
skills of human hands (cf. John 1:3; 5:17), and to give humble bread to Him Who was to describe Himself
as "the Bread of Life" (John
6:48); what was lost for love of Christ is here rediscovered (cf. Matthew
10:39), and whoever sacrifices his
own life for Him in this world saves it for everlasting life (John 12:25).
Saint Joseph was the type of the message
of that Gospel that Jesus
was to announce as the programme in the redemption
of mankind, once He
left the little workshop at Nazareth and began His
mission as Prophet and Teacher.
Saint Joseph is the model of those humble
ones that Christianity raises to great destinies, and he is the proof that in order to be good and
genuine followers of Christ there is no need
of "great things"; it is enough to have
the common, simple, human virtues, but they
need to be true and authentic.
Our meditation now shifts from the humble Saint
to our own personal circumstances, as is usual in the practice of mental prayer. We now
turn to make a comparison and I contrast between him
and ourselves; we have no reason to feel proud of the comparison, but we can derive some
good suggestion from it for imitating him in
some way which our own life condition allows, in our spirit
and in concrete practice of those virtues
which are so vigorously depicted in the Saint,
and one especially, poverty, of which there
is so much talk nowadays. And let us not be upset by the difficulties which poverty brings
with it today, in this world which is all devoted to conquest of economic wealth, as if
poverty were in contradiction with the line of progress which must be followed, a paradox,
an unreality in a society of welfare and consumption.
Let us think again of Saint Joseph in his poverty and hard work, all his energy engaged in the effort of earning
something to live on, and let us then remember that economic goods are indeed worthy of
our Christian interest, on condition that they do not become ends in themselves, but are
understood and used as means to keep going life which is directed towards other and higher
goods, on condition that economic goods are not sought after with greedy
egoism, but be rather a source and stimulus of provident
charity, on condition again that they be not used
as authorization for soft and easy indulgence
in the so-called pleasures of life but rather be used for the broad and honest interests
of the common good.
This Saint's laborious and dignified
poverty, can still be in excellent guide for us to follow the path traced by Christ's footsteps in the modern world, and can
also eloquently instruct us in positive and honest well-being, so that we may avoid losing
Christ's path in the complicated and giddy
world of economics, to avoid going too far on one side into tempting
ambitions of conquest of temporal riches, and too far on
the other side, into making use of poverty for ideological ends, as a power to rouse social hatred and systematic subversion.
So, Saint Joseph is an example for us,
and let us try to imitate him; and we shall
call upon him as our Protector,
as the Church has been wont to do in these
recent times, for herself in the first
place, for spontaneous theological reflection on the marriage of divine
with human action in the great
economy of the Redemption, in which economy
the first, the divine one is wholly
sufficient to itself, but the second, human
action, which is ours, though capable of nothing (cf. John 15:5), is
never dispensed from humble but conditional and ennobling collaboration.
The Church also calls upon him as her
Protector because of a profound and most
present desire to reinvigorate her ancient
life with true evangelical virtues, such as
shine forth in Saint Joseph. Finally, the Church invokes him
as her Patron
and Protector through her
unshakeable trust that he to
whom Christ
willed to confide the care and protection of His
own frail human childhood, will continue from heaven
to perform his protective task in order to guide
and defend the Mystical Body
of Christ Himself, which is
always weak, always under attack, always in a state of peril. Finally, we call upon Saint Joseph for the world, trusting that the heart of the humble working man of Nazareth,
now overflowing with immeasurable wisdom and
power, still harbors and will always harbor
a singular and precious fellow-feeling for the whole of mankind.
So may it be.
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