St. Patrick gets March headlines, but hidden saint has a moment
St. Joseph has seized spotlight in Allentown Catholic Diocese
For someone so central to the Christian narrative, St. Joseph was awfully quiet.
Never said a word, in fact — nothing that made it into the Gospels, anyway. For that, Mary’s carpenter husband is sometimes called the hidden saint.
Even so, he is not neglected by the Catholic faithful, especially now. This is not only the month of St. Joseph but, by Vatican decree, the Year of St. Joseph, and the foster father of Jesus is having a moment.
“These are flying out of here,” said Laura Smith, co-owner of Abundant Graces Catholic bookstore in Bethlehem, pointing to a stack of books called “Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father.”
The book contains a 33-day course of prayer and study meant to unite the reader to the saint’s virtues of faith, trust, patience and fruitful work. Smith said customers are snatching it up as soon as it comes in, along with St. Joseph statues and other devotional items.
What makes him so popular? To some extent, it’s his silence, says Bishop Alfred Schlert, leader of the 260,000 Catholics in the five-county Diocese of Allentown. Joseph is a doer, not a talker.
“The thing that’s appealing is that he’s always being asked to do something he’d rather not do and he always steps up and does it,” Schlert said.
Consider: Joseph is betrothed to a young girl and discovers she is carrying a child. He is prepared to abandon her,
but an angel appears to him in a dream, reveals the nature of the child and asks him to take on the responsibility of raising him. Later, the angel asks him to make the arduous trek into Egypt to protect Jesus from the wrath of Herod.
“He could have just walked away,” Schlert said. “But he was a faith-filled man, which led him to be a faithful husband.”
There is precious little said of Joseph after the Nativity. His last appearance is as a worried father, seeking the 12-year-old Jesus for three days after the boy wanders away from a caravan. Because Joseph isn’t present for the miracles or the Crucifixion, he is presumed to have died before Jesus began his public ministry.
Out of this scant narrative rose an important and beloved figure. Countless parishes bear Joseph’s name, including seven in the Allentown Diocese alone.
He is regarded as a model father and husband because he is a reliable, hard-working provider. Statues of the saint often depict him holding a carpenter’s square as the symbol of his trade.
“By performing his duties as husband, father, and carpenter with the utmost love and simplicity, he shows us that we all can find the path to holiness in everyday life,” said Springfield Township resident John Bailie, who runs the International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem and counts himself among the Catholic laity with a deep devotion to the saint.
Joseph, Bailie added, “is a model of quiet strength and absolute trust in the providence of God.”
Joseph’s feast day is March 19. It’s somewhat overshadowed by the feast of a certain Irish saint two days before, but Joseph’s day was never associated with revelry.
Under Pope Pius IX 150 years ago, the church named Joseph “Patron of the Universal Church.” The Vatican marked the anniversary of that honor on Dec. 8 by declaring the Year of St. Joseph. That date is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which recognizes Mary’s preservation from original sin, so it links husband and wife in a special way.
Honoring Joseph is a reminder that the church benefits from his strength, Schlert said.
“The church is going through many rough patches, so it’s good for us to remember that Joseph is the protector, provider and defender, not only of his family in Nazareth but of the church,” he said.
Monsignor Robert Wargo, pastor of St. Joseph the Worker in Orefield, said the saint is invoked for another reason, one especially poignant in this time of pandemic.
“He’s considered the patron saint of a happy death,” Wargo said. “We understand he died very peacefully.”
That understanding comes from tradition, of course, as the faithful imagined Joseph dying in the best possible company — Jesus and Mary. Another tradition is the tendency in art to depict Joseph as an older man. No telling how old he was, though he was certainly some years older than Mary. She is thought to have been in her early teens when they married.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Joseph is a practice that has grown up around him: Burying his statue in the yard of a home for sale. It is a practice so common that many stores sell St. Joseph home-selling kits, which contain a plastic Joseph and a set of instructions.
“It’s like buying a G.I. Joe,” Schlert quipped.
Smith sells the kits at Abundant Graces. She also knows the story of how the practice began. St. Teresa of Avila, a 16th century Carmelite nun and mystic, wanted to acquire property to build or expand a monastery.
The owner refused to sell. Teresa discreetly buried a medal of St. Joseph on the land and asked the nuns to pray for his intercession. Before long, the stubborn landowner came to Teresa and said he wanted to donate the property.
A Canadian saint of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Andre Bessette of Montreal — known as Brother Andre — had a nearly identical experience of acquiring land after burying a medal.
Somewhere along the way, though, burying medals turned into burying statues.
It’s a harmless enough practice if the faithful recognize that their sincere prayers for the saint’s intercession are the reason for success, rather than some magical property of the statue, Schlert said.
“If there’s no belief in the prayer, it’s superstition,” he said. “But I would always encourage people to pray for the intercession of the saints.”