Saint Joseph, the man in whom heaven trusts

Alessandro De Carolis – Vatican City

The “challenge” has been relaunched every day for 40 years. The recitation of Lauds and then that of an old prayer found in a 19th century French devotional book. The addressee of that daily “true challenge” is Saint Joseph because, after having entrusted everything to him, “serious situations and difficulties”, that old prayer ends like this: “Let it not be said that he invoked you in vain”. The Pope reveals this custom of his in a short note in the middle of the Letter of heart, a text that returns the memory of the Church to what Pius IX did on the day of the Immaculate Conception in 1870, proclaiming Saint Joseph the patron saint of the universal Church.

A tight bond

The anecdote confirms and enriches Francisco’s predilection for the figure of Maria’s husband. A familiarity already known by the custom – recounted during the trip to Manila – of keeping under the statuette of “José Durmiente”, kept in his study in Santa Marta, a paper with his concerns written on it. “The unnoticed man”, who welcomes the mystery and puts himself at its service while remaining “decentralized”, is also the solver of impossible things and in of heart the Pope chooses to describe the multiple qualities that make Joseph a true father and husband, the fiancé who “welcomes Mary without preventive conditions” and the man in whom “Jesus saw the tenderness of God.”

Names for a Pope

But Francis’s is, so to speak, the last piece in chronological order in a mosaic of admiration that the Church has built over the centuries to highlight the merits of a great soul sculpted in and by silence. The Popes certainly contributed pages and hearts to this narrative, beginning with Sixtus V who, in the late 15th century, set the date of the feast at March 19. From Pius IX onwards, and especially during the pontificates of the 20th century, the magisterium sheds new light on the “man in the shadows”, whose name is never chosen by a Pontiff, although in recent decades it has become an almost constant In the name of Baptism of those who ascend to the Throne, Pius X (Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto), John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyla), Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger). Francisco does not name José but celebrates Mass at the beginning of the ministry on March 19, a different bond and the same proximity.

Potatoes for a name

Confirming the will of Benedict XVI, on May 1, 2013 Francis decreed the addition of the name of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Eucharistic Prayers II, III and IV. Previously, on November 13, 1962, it was John XXIII who established its inclusion in the ancient Roman Canon of the Mass, along with the name of Mary and before that of the Apostles. Pope Roncalli himself, wanting to entrust the Second Vatican Council to the earthly “father” of Jesus, wrote the Apostolic Letter in 61. The voices, in which he makes a kind of summary of the devotion to Saint Joseph fed by his predecessors. They are not gray operations of the liturgical “bureaucracy”. Behind each new decree an increasingly deep-rooted ecclesial sentiment and conscience can accumulate which, for example, as with Pius XII, can also affect civil life.

The saint of those who work

May 1, 1955 is Sunday and a crowd of workers fills the Plaza de San Pedro. They are members of the ACLI and many of them remember the meeting with Pius XII ten years earlier, which took place on March 13, 1945, a month and a half before the end of a war that deeply tore Italy apart. Now there is a country that is growing impetuously, the “boom” is not far off, but among the ranks of Italian Catholics, Pope Pacelli recognizes the “disappointed”, those who complain about the lack of incisiveness of the Christian presence “in public life, “while the Socialist ideology seems to dominate. Pius XII makes an energetic speech, calls the Acli to their identity so that they commit to “social peace” and at the end, almost like a twist, the “gift” that surprises and excites:

“For this meaning to be present (…) we love to announce to you Our determination to institute – as in fact we do – the liturgical feast of Saint Joseph the artisan, assigning it precisely the 1st of May. Dear workers, do you like this gift from us? We are sure that it is, because the humble craftsman of Nazareth not only personifies the dignity of the worker arm in arm before God and the Holy Church, but is also always the provident guardian of you and your families ”.

“Papa José” can’t

Four years later, the Church is led by a man who would have liked to be called “Pope Joseph.” He renounced it because, he says, “this is not the custom among the Popes,” but the explanation reveals nostalgia and reveals the strong attachment of John XXIII to Saint Joseph. The occasion is the meeting that Pope Roncalli holds on March 19, 1959 with a group of garbage men. The following year, in a radio message on May 1, 1960, the “good Pope” concluded by singing a prayer to Saint Joseph the worker:

“Make your protégés also understand that they are not alone in their work, but that they know how to discover Jesus with them, receive him with grace, keep him faithfully, as you did. And you achieve that in each family, in each workshop, in each laboratory, wherever a Christian works, everything is sanctified in charity, in patience, in justice, in the search for the good done, so that the gifts of the heavenly predilection. “

The risk man

Paul VI does not name Joseph either, but from 63 to 69 in particular there is no year in which he does not celebrate a mass on the solemnity of March 19. Each homily thus becomes a piece of a personal portrait in which Pope Montini is fascinated by Joseph’s “complete and submissive dedication” to his mission, by the man “perhaps shy” but endowed with “a superhuman greatness who love it “. And that does not make him back down, despite accepting a wife like Mary and a son like Jesus means being a stranger among the men of his time. He says in a 1969 consideration:

“A man, then, Saint Joseph, ‘committed’, as we say now, by Mary, the one chosen among all women on earth and in history, always his virgin wife, not physically his wife, and by Jesus, by virtue of legal descent, not natural, his descendants. For him the burdens, the responsibilities, the risks, the problems of the small and singular holy family. To him the service, to him the work, to him the sacrifice, in the dim light of the evangelical picture, in which we like to contemplate it, and certainly, not without making mistakes, now that we know everything, call it happy, blessed. This is the Gospel. In it the values ​​of human existence acquire a different measure than what we usually do appreciate: here small becomes big ”.

The sublime groom

In the 26 years of his pontificate, Juan Pablo has countless occasions to speak of Saint Joseph who, he will say, prays intensely every day. This devotion is summarized in the document that he dedicated to him on August 15, 1989, the day of publication of the Apostolic Exhortation Redemptoris Custodio, written 100 years after the Plurios Quamquam of Leo XIII. In the document, Pope Wojtyla explores the life of Joseph in each act and, despite being sensitive to aspects of Christian marriage, offers an in-depth reading of the relationship between the two Nazareth spouses. In other words, the “grace of living together the charism of virginity and the gift of marriage”, which he returned to a general audience in ’96, also demolishing a false myth:

“The difficulty of approaching the sublime mystery of their conjugal communion has led some, since the second century, to attribute an advanced age to Joseph and to consider him the guardian rather than the husband of Mary. It is appropriate to suppose, however, that he was not then an old man, but that his inner perfection, the fruit of grace, led him to live his conjugal relationship with Mary with virginal affection ”.

“Robust interiority”

Of the man whom Matthew in the Gospel calls “just”, Patron of the universal Church, of workers and of an infinite number of cities and places, no words are known but only silences. That therefore must be understood as if they were words and thoughts. Benedict XVI also enters this apparent absence and extracts from it the richness of a complete life, of a man’s background that, he argues in a 2005 Angelus, with his example without proclamations will affect the growth of Jesus the man-God:

“A silence thanks to which Joseph, in unison with Mary, keeps the Word of God (…) a silence interwoven with constant prayer, a prayer of blessing from the Lord, of adoration of his holy will and of unreserved surrender to his providence . It is not an exaggeration if one thinks that it was precisely from “father” Joseph that Jesus learned, on a human level, that robust interiority that is the presupposition of authentic justice, “superior justice”, which he will one day teach his disciples.