Feast day: March 19
St. Joseph
The carpenter of Nazareth, husband of Mary and foster father of Jesus — the quiet man God trusted with His Son.
Joseph, the husband of Mary and the foster-father of Jesus, is called in the Gospel simply 'a just man' — and on that single phrase, with the trust God placed in him, rests all the honor the Church gives him. A carpenter of Nazareth descended from the royal line of David, he was betrothed to Mary when he found, to his bewilderment, that she was with child.
Unwilling to expose her and minded to part from her quietly, he was reassured by an angel in a dream that the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he took Mary into his home. Again and again the Gospels show him acting on such dreams without a single recorded word of his own: taking the family to Bethlehem, fleeing into Egypt to save the child from Herod, and bringing them home to Nazareth. He is the silent saint, who speaks only by his obedience.
In the hidden years at Nazareth he taught Jesus his trade and provided for the Holy Family by the work of his hands — which is why he is honored not only as guardian of the Redeemer but as the model and patron of workers and of fathers. He is last seen in the Gospels when Jesus is twelve, and tradition holds that he died before the public ministry began, in the presence of Jesus and Mary, making him the patron of a happy death.
Devotion to Joseph grew slowly but immensely. His feast was set on March 19, and in 1870 Blessed Pius IX declared him Patron of the Universal Church; a second feast, St. Joseph the Worker, was later placed on May 1. Quiet, faithful, and strong, he is invoked as protector of families, of the dying, and of the whole Church.
Not a single word of his is recorded in Scripture. He answered God entirely in action.
Image: Guido Reni (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08504a.htm
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