St. Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Joseph enters the Gospel almost without a spoken word and leaves it before the public ministry. Matthew tells his side of the origin of Jesus: he is a just man, unwilling to expose Mary to the law, and obedient when the angel tells him to take her as his wife because the child is from the Holy Spirit. He names the child Jesus. He gets up at night and takes the child and his mother into Egypt. Luke places him at Bethlehem, at the Presentation, and at the finding in the Temple, where Jesus speaks of his Father and Joseph and Mary do not understand. After that, the Gospels are silent. The tradition that he died before the Passion is old and fitting. He is not at the Cross. John is.

The Church calls him spouse of the Virgin and foster father, or legal father, of the Son. He is not the biological father. The virginal conception is not a footnote to his feast. His fatherhood is real in another register: he receives the child, names him, protects him, and teaches him a trade. Pius IX declared him patron of the universal Church in 1870. Leo XIII, in Quamquam pluries, commended him to families and to the Church under pressure. Pius XII added a second observance, St. Joseph the Worker, on May 1, precisely so that labor would have a Christian patron without replacing March 19. John XXIII inserted his name into the Roman Canon. Francis added it to the other Eucharistic Prayers.

March 19 is a solemnity on the universal calendar. If it falls on a Sunday of Lent outside Holy Week, it is celebrated, because solemnities of this rank can outrank a Lenten Sunday. If it falls in Holy Week, it is transferred to the nearest open day before, according to the table of precedence. In the United States the day is not a holy day of obligation. Canon 1246 lists Joseph among the universal holy days, and the American bishops, with Roman approval, do not require Mass that day. The solemnity is still kept with Gloria and Creed, in white, even in Lent. The Alleluia remains suppressed if the day falls in Lent, because the Lenten ban on the Alleluia holds.

Devotion to Joseph grew slowly in the West and then very quickly from the sixteenth century, through Teresa of Ávila, who said she never asked him for anything he failed to obtain, and through the great modern popes. The danger in that devotion is turning a silent, obedient man into a general-purpose guarantor. The Gospel portrait is narrower and stronger: he does what he is told, he stays, and he disappears. That is already a complete theology of vocation.

The Gospel is Matthew 1:16–24, the annunciation to Joseph, or Luke 2:41–51, the finding in the Temple. The preface of the solemnity praises him as the just man given as spouse to the Virgin Mother of God. Vestments are white. St. Joseph’s table, a custom of feeding the poor especially in Italian and Sicilian parishes, and the burying of St. Joseph’s statue as a folk practice to sell a house, should not be confused. One is a work of mercy. The other is not the liturgy and is often superstition.