An English Tribute to Saint Joseph, by Father Frederick William Faber

The mysteries of Saint Joseph rise up like a beautiful cloud of incense from the Sacred Infancy. He belongs wholly to it. It seems the one end for which he was created and so wonderfully sanctified, the one work which God gave him to do. He is altogether detached from the Passion. It does not even cast shadows over him beforehand as it does over the Mother of Sorrows. Nay, even before Jesus has left the Holy House for the toil of His Three Years Ministry, Joseph has been taken to his rest. Worn out with divine love, he has died in a sweet ecstasy, pillowed on the bosom of Jesus, and, with Mary by his side, in the very lap of all that was most beautiful and most holy and most heavenly on earth. No thought of violence mingles with the memory of his peaceful though anxious offices. The Blood of the Circumcision was his Gethsemane and his Golgotha.

His early life is lost in obscurity, and of his boyhood we can form no idea, beyond what is supplied by a vision of Sister Emmerich. But who can doubt that all was a preparation for the great office to which God had appointed him? Who can doubt that all was forming and consecrating him as the Foster-father of the Word made flesh? Belonging, as he does, exclusively to the Sacred Infancy, we shall not be surprised to find that the spirit of devotion to him is the spirit of devotion to the Sacred Infancy; and that with two additions of the most touching sort. First of all, he seems to represent ourselves in the Cave of Bethlehem, the Sojourn in Egypt, and the House of Nazareth. All the intimacy and familiarity to which the infant Saviour vouchsafes to give us right and title by His Incarnation, all the minute ministries of tenderness and devotion which He condescends to receive from us, all the daring joy which His infantine infirmities cause in our hearts, and all the trembling adoration which the nearness of His hidden Divinity demands from us, all these things Joseph is there to receive and to pay, to feel and to show, as it were on our behalf. He is there as the representative of all the future generations of the faithful, especially of those whose hearts are drawn by a singular attraction to these first mysteries of Jesus.

But, secondly, Saint Joseph is in Bethlehem, Egypt, the Wilderness, and Nazareth, as the shadow of the Eternal Father. This is the immensity of his dignity. The incommunicable and ever-blessed Paternity of the Father is in figure communicated to him. He is the Foster-father of Jesus. To the world without he passes for His father. He exercises the authority of a father over Him, and performs for Him the affectionate and anxious offices of a father. Nay, in His human nature our Lord is subordinate to Joseph, whereas in His Divine nature He never could be subordinate to the Eternal Father. The unspeakable treasures of God, Jesus and Mary, are committed to Saint Joseph's keeping, and he is himself a treasure, as well as the treasure-house of God. He is part of the scheme of redemption. Like Jesus and Mary, he has his types and forerunners and prophecies in the ancient covenant. He assists God in keeping the mystery of the Incarnation secret; and as the representative of the Eternal Father, he is to us, in his attendance upon the Holy Child, a perpetual memorial of His Divinity. By his very office, by that in heaven which he adumbrates, he reminds us at every turn that the Babe is Very God of Very God. Thus, while he teaches us the greatest familiarity, he also teaches us the greatest distance. While he encourages us to come near and kiss, he bids us also fall down upon our knees and adore profoundly the hidden Majesty of the new-born Eternal. Thus heaven and earth meet in him at Bethlehem, in his double office of representative of the Eternal Father and representative of faithful Christians. What wonder theologians should tell us great things of his copious graces and mighty gifts? What wonder the faithful should believe that with him the resurrection of the just had been anticipated, that he was one of those who walked the streets of Jerusalem at Easter in his risen body, and that he had borne it with him into heaven, when he went up as part of our Lord's equipage and retinue on the Thursday of the Ascension?

What a gift it was which Jesus gave to His Church in this tender and sublime devotion! Already had the doctrine of our Blessed Lord been fixed and ascertained. . . . The adoration of Jesus and the devotion to Mary had taken their places immovably in the sense of the faithful and in the practical system of the Church, one shedding light upon the other, and both instructing, illuminating, nourishing, and sanctifying the people. But there was still one more of the "earthly trinity," as it is called. Devotion to Saint Joseph lay as it were dormant in the Church. Not that there was anything new to be known about him, or any fresh revelation to be made of him. He belonged exclusively to the Sacred Infancy. The beginning of Saint Matthew's Gospel contained him. By two evangelists he had been left in complete silence, and the third had barely named him in the genealogy. Tradition held some scanty notices of him, but they had no light but what they borrowed from Saint Matthew. All we have known of Saint Joseph was there then, only the sense of the faithful had not taken it up; God's time was not yet come. The sense of the faithful was not like the complete science of the apostles; it was not equal to it, it had to grow to it, to master it, to fill it out with devotions, to animate it with institutions, to submit to it as a perfectly administered hierarchy. But God's time came for this dear devotion, and it came, like all His gifts, when times were dark and calamities were rife. . . . Then it spread over the Church. Gerson was raised up to be its Doctor and theologian, and Saint Teresa to be its Saint, and Saint Francis of Sales to be its popular teacher and missioner. The houses of Carmel were like the Holy House of Nazareth to it, and the colleges of the Jesuits its peaceful sojourns in dark Egypt. The contemplative took it up and fed upon it; the active laid hold of it, and nursed the sick and fed the hungry in its name. The working people fastened on it, for both the Saint and his devotion were of them. The young were drawn to it, and it made them pure; the aged rested on it, for it made them peaceful. Saint Sulpice took it, and it became the spirit of the Secular Clergy. And when the great Society of Jesus had taken refuge in the Sacred Heart, and the Fathers of the Sacred Heart were keeping their lamps burning, ready for the resurrection of the Society, devotion to Saint Joseph was their stay and their consolation. So it gathered into itself Orders and congregations, high and low, young and old, ecclesiastical and lay, schools and confraternities, hospitals, orphanages, and penitentiaries, everywhere holding up Jesus, everywhere hand in hand with Mary, everywhere the refreshing shadow of the Eternal Father.