Imagine a world where no Christian is named for St. Joseph, where no church or religious organization bears
his name. Picture St. Joseph absent from the Mass, the Breviary, the Church's calendar, and the Litany of
the Saints. No shrines, no special devotions, no hymns, no solo images, no popular customs, no festive
foods pay homage to St. Joseph.
This world without St. Joseph was Christendom until the 14th century. Up to that point, St. Joseph was
almost universally ignored, reduced to a mere spear-carrier in the pageant of Salvation.
He still remains in the background for Byzantine Christians today. Their tradition accords St. Joseph no
independent cult or feast day but merely includes him among other holy ancestors of Christ remembered on
December 16. In fact, St. Joseph is an ecumenical stumbling block for some Greek Orthodox, who rate him as
only a minor figure in the story of Christ's life.
The long obscurity of this saint, whom we now account one of the greatest, seems incredible, especially to
people who can remember when his altar stood on the Epistle side of every Catholic church. With all its
twists and turns, St. Joseph's long march to fame is a fascinating episode in the history of Catholic
spirituality - and one relevant to certain contemporary problems in the
Church.
An Absent Father?
Scripture provides minimal
material for a popular cult of St. Joseph. The gospels mention him by name
(the name "Joseph" means "God adds" or "God gathers") only 15 times:
He appears briefly in connection with the early life of Jesus, then simply
disappears. The Evangelists record not a single word spoken by St. Joseph.
And without a traditional burial place, he didn't even leave bodily relics.
None of the above would have necessarily pushed St. Joseph into the
background. Imaginative histories were concocted for nameless New Testament
cameo players later called Saints Longinus, Veronica/Bernike, and Martial.
But the early Church was anxious to defend the Virgin Birth and the
perpetual virginity of our Lady. It seemed to many Christians that
minimizing St. Joseph magnified Mary. The Church fathers remained
studiously incurious about his life. Although they mention him occasionally
in passing, there's not a single listing for St. Joseph in the saints'
index to Migne's Patrologiae Latina, a 221-volume collection of
Church writings up to 1216.
St. Joseph's obscurity in the East ensured
that Mohammed never heard of him from Christian informants. The unmarried
Virgin Mary, on the other hand, enjoys favorable attention in the Koran,
where Surah 19 is titled "Mary."
Finally, the most influential of the
apocryphal gospels, the Greek Protevangelium of James, assigned St.
Joseph a less-than-flattering part. Here he's a timid, elderly widower with
grown children. Even after the heavenly sign of a dove emerges from his
staff, he tries to beg off marrying young Mary "lest I should become a
laughingstock to the children of Israel," but the high priest insists.
When Mary is found to be with child, St. Joseph frets that she's been
deceived by Satan, as Eve was before her. Later in Bethlehem, St. Joseph is
off looking for a midwife when Mary gives birth to Jesus with miraculous
ease.
Although condemned by popes in the West, the Protevangelium
provided the East with its preferred solution for the pesky "Brethren of
the Lord" problem: Those identified as siblings of Jesus must have been
children from St. Joseph's first marriage.
Redone in Latin as the
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew between the eighth and ninth centuries, the Joseph
legends of the Protevangelium spread throughout Western Christendom. They
appear in The Golden Legend (1298), the Middle Ages' favorite book about
saints, where St. Joseph is discussed only on feasts of our Lord or our
Lady because he lacked a feast of his own.
An elderly St. Joseph,
subordinate to Mary, was a stock figure in medieval literature. For
instance, in the 15th-century English mystery play Joseph, he's a querulous
codger who fears he's been cuckolded.
The low point of St. Joseph's
position in medieval devotion has to be the story of Blessed Herman Joseph
of Steinfeld (d. 1240), a Norbertine priest. The culmination of the cozy
apparitions he'd enjoyed from childhood was a mystical marriage with his
"sweetheart," the Blessed Virgin. The holy man added "Joseph" to his
birth name, Herman, symbolically taking St. Joseph's place in Mary's
affections.
Despite his debut in an illustrative mosaic at St. Mary
Major in Rome (circa 440), St. Joseph was marginalized in medieval art. He
didn't rate a separate image, even in prayer books. Northern Gothic artists
did give him an active part in caring for the Christ child - but only in
menial tasks such as finding water, cooking, or swathing the Infant in his
woolly hose.
Fourteenth-century Tuscan painters developed a peculiar
motif known as the charivari of St. Joseph, in which Mary's disappointed
young suitors (those whose staves failed to blossom or generate a dove in
the High Priest's fitness test) watch angrily and make threatening
gestures during the wedding of Mary and Joseph. These images reflect
contemporary social problems that left many vigorous young men unable to
marry while older men snapped up tender maidens with rich dowries.
Even
at the end of the Middle Ages, St. Joseph was still being pushed to the
background in the Holy Kindred - group portraits of our Lady's whole family
that were popular in northern Europe. Like the other male relatives, he
merely watches the reading women and playing children from behind a
barrier. Only after 1500 does St. Joseph move into the circle of activity
and get to touch Jesus.
Out Of Obscurity
While fashion was
rearranging the Holy Kindred, illuminated manuscripts began giving St.
Joseph slightly greater prominence. He now escorts Mary to St. Elizabeth's
home for the Visitation and holds the Infant for the Presentation in the
Temple, a role previously reserved for the Blessed Mother.
Medieval
parents, however, continued to avoid the name Joseph. Only one Giuseppe
appears on a list of 53,000 Tuscan householders collected before 1530,
whereas that name is now one of the most popular Italian names. The first
Catholic saints named for St. Joseph came along later still: Canary
Islander Blessed Joseph de Ancheita (b. 1534) and Spaniard St. Joseph
Calasanctius (b. 1556).
Nevertheless, small changes were accumulating
in the script - changes that would drastically revise St. Joseph's part in
the play.
One finds early evidence of positive attention being paid him
in another piece of apocrypha, The History of Joseph the Carpenter,
written in Egypt between the fourth and fifth centuries. Although it makes
the saint a widowed father of six who is 90 years old when he marries
twelve-year-old Mary, this story describes him as still hale and healthy up
to his death at 111. Jesus tenderly consoles His dying foster father,
mourns him, and promises to bless those who honor his memory. Coptic
Christians did just that; they had given him his own feast day (July 20) by
the end of the first millennium.
The year 1000 found St. Joseph
mentioned on two or three local saints' lists in Germany and Ireland.
Latin-rite Catholics celebrated his feast for the first time in Winchester,
England, around 1030. The first oratory dedicated to St. Joseph was opened
in Parma in 1074. Later, a church was dedicated to the saint in Bologna
(1129) and a chapel in Joinville, France (1254).
St. Joseph's union
with the Blessed Virgin was declared a true marriage during twelfth-century
theological debates on matrimony. The Church decided that consent, not
consummation, was the sacrament's essential element.
But these were
isolated exceptions to general indifference, although St. Joseph did manage
to attract the private devotion of Saints Bernard of Clairvaux, Gertrude
the Great, and Birgitta of Sweden, as well as the Spiritual Franciscan
Peter Olivi. He had entered the special Breviaries used among Servites,
Franciscans, and Carmelites by the end of the 14th century, with his feast
day celebrated on March 19.
St. Joseph Takes His Place
Still, this slowly building interest would not necessarily have brought St.
Joseph to his later prominence. What propelled him to saintly stardom were
the calamities of the 14th century. That era opened with unprecedented
famine around the shores of the North Sea. The Hundred Years' War broke out
between France and England. Civil war tore at Castile. Portugal, Scotland,
and Poland-Lithuania battled for their national lives. Peasants and urban
artisans rose in revolt from Tuscany to Flanders, England to Estonia.
Heresies, corruption, and religious hysterias disfigured the Church while
she suffered the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Western Schism. And
over all these miseries rode the Black Death, killing a quarter of Europe's
people in its first assault alone.
The horrors inflicted on families
and communities needed heavenly healing. Reform-minded French theologian
Jean Gerson (d. 1429), chancellor of the University of Paris and a noted
spiritual writer, turned the spotlight on St. Joseph as the ideal family
model and protector. Gerson's 2,957-line poem about St. Joseph, the
Josephina, promoted the saint and his marvelous virtues across western
Europe.
Gerson's ideas were echoed by his contemporary, St. Bernardine
of Siena, a spellbinding preacher and reformer of the Franciscan order. St.
Bernardine laboured to evangelize Italy's powerful city-states, whose proud
consumerist culture let money distort marriage patterns among the elite.
Sodomy and widespread attempts at contraception also disfigured these
societies.
Gerson and St. Bernardine gathered up existing fragments of
devotion to St. Joseph and rewrote his role in the Church. Rejecting the
elderly St. Joseph of the Church fathers and the Greek Church, they
declared that the saint must have been a strong young man, well able to
care for the Holy Family. St. Bernardine struck an especially sympathetic
note with his urban audiences by calling St. Joseph a "diligent
administrator" who anxiously worked day and night to support his loved
ones.
Furthermore, according to Gerson and St. Bernardine, St. Joseph
was a virgin, not a widower, and he had been cleansed from original sin
before birth so that he would be a fit spouse for Mary. Gerson and St.
Bernardine also believed that St. Joseph was assumed into heaven after
death. Thus the Holy Family had already been reunited, in body as well as
in soul, maintaining the same bond of charity that had held them together
on earth. Gerson wrote, "O venerable trinity Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,
which divinity has joined, the concord of love!"
By the 16th century,
devotion to St. Joseph was flourishing in Spain. St. Teresa of Avila became
his great advocate because she believed his intercession had healed her of
paralysis. Referring to "the glorious St. Joseph" as her "father and
lord," St. Teresa praised him as a helper in every need and burned with
eagerness "to persuade all to be devoted to him."
By the 1550s, St.
Teresa was also dreaming of reforming her Carmelite order. She placed this
difficult project, and the dangerous journeys it required, under St.
Joseph's protection. Twelve of the 17 new monasteries she founded were
dedicated to the saint, and all of them were adorned with his statue -
honors hitherto unknown.
St. Teresa's enthusiasm spread to others,
notably her friend and fellow Discalced Carmelite, Jeronimo Gracian. This
friar's highly popular Josephina (1597) repeated earlier praises for the
saint, adding the significant proposal that St. Joseph was the man who most
resembled Christ in "countenance, speech, physical constitution, custom,
inclinations, and manner." Gracian also plucked the command "Ite ad
Joseph" ("Go to Joseph") from the story of the Old Testament patriarch
Joseph (Genesis 41:55) and made it the New Testament saint's catch phrase,
a quote that was often inscribed on his altars and images.
Carmelite
devotion to St. Joseph spread to other orders within Spain and throughout
the Spanish empire. The first foundation of St. Teresa's nuns in France
(1604) planted her spirituality into the French "Century of Saints." In
particular, her love of St. Joseph took root in St. Francis de Sales, the
great champion of holiness in everyday life.
St. Francis built
Joseph-based piety into the Order of the Visitation, which he founded with
St. Jane de Chantal. The Visitandine nuns were directed to say a daily
chaplet, litany, and meditative prayers to St. Joseph. St. Francis himself
preached eloquently to them about his favorite saint.
Conference 19 in
St. Francis's influential Spiritual Conferences celebrates the
chastity, humility, courage, constancy, and strength of St. Joseph -
virtues that are envisioned as flowers embroidered on his heavenly
garments. As the Savior's guardian, St. Joseph had to be "more valiant
than David and wiser than Solomon." As the human being closest to Mary in
perfection, he was worthy of the special intimacy he enjoyed with Jesus.
St. Francis was also the liveliest advocate of a special resurrection
and assumption for St. Joseph, following that of Christ. He presented the
saint as "the glorious father of our life and our love," a tremendous
intercessor and patron of parents, workers, and the dying.
St. Joseph Thrives In The Counter-Reformation
St. Joseph, the stalwart
family saint, meshed nicely with Counter-Reformation strategies for
reevangelizing Christendom. His strength and dignity fit early modern
ideals of patriarchal authority: Families were encouraged to imitate the
harmonious order of the Holy Family headed by St. Joseph.
The saint's
growing reputation also left its mark on Renaissance and Baroque art. At
the turn of the 16th century, Italian paintings of St. Joseph's wedding to
Mary exalted the religious significance of matrimony over its social and
economic aspects. He became a model husband dutifully marrying in a Church
ceremony, unlike Tuscan aristocrats who wed at home before a notary.
Raphael's Betrothal of the Virgin (1504) is one famous example. This public
relations campaign was rendered moot after the Council of Trent required
everyone to marry before a priest and two witnesses.
In 1570 Johannes
Molanus, the Counter-Reformation's arbiter of religious art, demanded a
clean sweep of legendary material in Christian art. Among the subjects his
writings denounced were the Holy Kindred and apocryphal accounts of St.
Joseph's selection as Mary's spouse. Molanus insisted that St. Joseph be
depicted as young and vigorous, with the Christ child firmly under his
paternal authority.
Baroque artists didn't entirely obey these rules:
St. Joseph kept his miraculous flowering staff and sometimes his grayness.
But they did meet market demand for fresh images of St. Joseph, especially
in the Hispanic world, where he enjoyed royal support. Among the masters,
both El Greco and Zurbaran painted a strong, black-bearded St. Joseph
walking hand in hand with the Holy Child. This motif of a man leading God
by the hand would be often imitated because of the way it captured the
saint's fatherly love for our Lord.
A more formal treatment is
Zurbaran's Coronation of St. Joseph (1636), in which the risen Christ
awards His foster father a floral crown of glory. Murillo's delightful
genre scene The Holy Family with Little Bird and his tender St. Joseph with
the Christ Child (1670s) depict the saint as a young, darkly handsome
Spanish father.
Engravings made in the Spanish Netherlands spread such
imagery throughout Catholic Europe and carried it to the New World. In
Mexico and the Andes, where the Spanish Conquest and European diseases had
left cruel scars, the Indians embraced St. Joseph as their own. Colonial
artists created charmingly naïve paintings of their saint well into the
18th century, often depicting him with a bell-shaped Baroque crown and
spangling his garments with gilt flowers.
More honors were showered on
St. Joseph in early modern times. He was named official patron of Mexico
(1555), Canada (1624), Bohemia (1655), Austria (1675), the Chinese missions
(1678), and all of Spain's dominions, including Belgium (1689), which still
remains under his patronage. Of course, St. Joseph continued to be invoked
by families, carpenters and woodworkers, doubters, travelers, househunters,
and the dying.
Although the Roman calendar had first listed St.
Joseph's feast day in 1479, it wasn't until the 17th century that grandiose
Latin hymns were written for this celebration. He received his own special
office in the Roman Breviary in 1714, and his name was inserted in the
Litany of Saints in 1729.
The first religious order dedicated to the
saint was the Congregation of St. Joseph, founded in Le Puy, France, in
1650. Most of the three-dozen orders now operating under his name in the
United States stem from that original French community.
But this
glorious period of Joseph-centered piety was rudely disrupted by the French
Revolution and the coming of the modern era. Familiar habits of hierarchy
collapsed under pressure from industrialization, liberalism, and
anticlericalism. As the backdrops of their lives changed, family,
community, and the Church were under immense pressure throughout the
Western world.
In troubled times, St. Joseph remained the refuge of the
faithful. Not only were new religious orders dedicated to him, but the
Little Sisters of the Poor, founded by the Breton Blessed Jeanne Jugan (d.
1879), made St. Joseph the de facto patron of all its homes for the aged.
Blessed Andre Bessette (d. 1937), a Canadian brother in the
Congregation of the Holy Cross, reportedly healed thousands by rubbing them
with "St. Joseph's oil."
Montreal's Oratory of St. Joseph, begun by
Brother Bessette in 1904, grew into a huge basilica that still draws
legions of pilgrims and promotes the saint worldwide.
Popes likewise
saw St. Joseph as a prime healer of modern woes. In 1847, Blessed Pius IX
ordered the feast of his patronage to be celebrated everywhere on the third
Wednesday after Easter. In 1870, the same pope, now "the Prisoner of the
Vatican," declared St. Joseph patron of the Church.
Leo XIII's 1889
encyclical on devotion to St. Joseph, Quamquam Pluries, invokes the
saint against the religious and social crises of his day. Besides echoing
familiar thoughts on the saint's singular virtues, Leo XIII asks the poor
to take St. Joseph, not socialists, as their guide in seeking justice.
The rise of communism made this last thought more timely than even Leo
could have predicted. In 1930, Pius XI named St. Joseph a special promoter
of Russia to counteract Soviet persecution of the Church; he invoked him
again in 1937 against atheist communism in general. In 1955, Pius XII
replaced the Patronage of St. Joseph with a new feast of St. Joseph the
Worker on May 1, the traditional holiday of the working class. (Since then,
new images of the saint show him holding carpenter's tools rather than
lilies.)
To draw blessings from the Church's patron, Pope John XXIII
made St. Joseph patron of Vatican II (1961) and inserted his name in the
canon of the Mass (1963). But John Paul II's apostolic exhortation
Redemptoris Custos (1989) broadens his predecessors' concerns.
For John
Paul II, the mystery of St. Joseph's heroic obedience to God plays out in
the family, the "sanctuary of love and cradle of life." He emphasizes the
reality of the saint's marriage and paternity despite the absence of sexual
activity: Self-giving love is what matters most. Outside the family, St.
Joseph "brought human work closer to the mystery of the Redemption." He's
our model for harmonizing the active with the contemplative life. Inheritor
of the Old Covenant, his association with Jesus and Mary in their
"domestic church" makes him a fitting patron of the universal Church born
of the New Covenant.
Redemptoris Custos places St. Joseph firmly
in the foreground of efforts to renew family, society, and the Church. With
married fatherhood disparaged, workers devalued, and the true faith fading,
now more than ever we must "Go to Joseph."
St. Joseph And Popular Customs
The oddest popular custom involving St. Joseph is the
practice of burying his statue upside down on real estate one hopes to
sell. St. Joseph is being challenged to answer quickly so "he" won't stay
standing on his head in the dirt. It's the survival of a medieval
superstition known as "degradation of the saints," in which images were
insulted until their tormentors' requests were granted.
Far more
appealing (and less problematic) is the St. Joseph's Table (the tavola or
cena di San Guiseppe). This Sicilian and southern Italian custom has
emigrated to the United States and is starting to filter out beyond the old
ethnic parishes. Originally the cena was a public festival held in the town
square. There, a trio representing the Holy Family dined at a heavily laden
central table, sharing their bounty with the poor. The day closed with
bonfires and dancing. Public festivities continue here and abroad, although
in America they may take the form of potlucks at the parish hall.
Italians everywhere also like to celebrate at home among family and
friends. In fulfillment of vows, they erect home altars as thanksgiving for
favors received from St. Joseph. These elaborate structures, built on three
levels to honor the Holy Family and the Holy Trinity, are decked with
greenery, flowers, fruit, and fantastic bread sculptures.
Priests bless
them before festivities begin. Visitors are invited in to admire the altars
and partake of the sometimes extravagant hospitality, which can include
scores of different dishes, featuring special fried pastries. After
donating money for the poor, guests take away mementos - fava beans for
prosperity and bits of ceremonial bread as protection from storm or sudden
death. S.M.
Sandra Miesel, a medievalist and a Catholic journalist,
writes from Indianapolis.
© 2002 Morley Publishing Group, Inc.
This article was published in April 2002 by Morley Publishing Group Inc,
Washington, DC in 'Crisis' pp 34-39.
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