This week, we will celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is our parish’s patronal feast, which is one of the most important celebrations for a parish community. (It outranks most Sundays, for example.) I encourage you to join us for Mass at 6pm on March 19 and for our celebration afterwards. I’ve been thrilled to see so many people RSVP, and am excited for us to come together to celebrate our parish and our patron. Pope St. John Paul II beautifully reflected on St. Joseph in his Apostolic Exhortation Redemptoris custos. St. Pope John Paul II is, for me, always a bit challenging to read, because you usually need to read his work a few times and meditate on it in prayer to understand the beauty and depths of it. I’d like to share a few selections from sections 17, 20, and 25 of Redemptoris custos, where Pope St. John Paul II meditates on Joseph as a just man and husband to Mary. It might take a second or third read (as it did for me!), and maybe some meditation, but meditating on St. Joseph would be a wonderful way to celebrate our holy patron.

In the course of that pilgrimage of faith which was his life, Joseph, like Mary, remained faithful to God’s call until the end. While Mary’s life was the bringing to fullness of that fiat first spoken at the Annunciation, at the moment of Joseph’s own “annunciation” he said nothing; instead he simply “did as the angel of the Lord commanded him” (Mt 1:24). And this first “doing” became the beginning of “Joseph’s way.” The Gospels do not record any word ever spoken by Joseph along that way. But the silence of Joseph has its own special eloquence, for thanks to that silence we can understand the truth of the Gospel’s judgment that he was “a just man” (Mt 1:19).

One must come to understand this truth, for it contains one of the most important testimonies concerning man and his vocation. Through many generations the Church has read this testimony with ever greater attention and with deeper understanding, drawing, as it were, “what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52) from the storehouse of the noble figure of Joseph.

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Through his complete self-sacrifice, Joseph expressed his generous love for the Mother of God, and gave her a husband’s “gift of self.” Even though he decided to draw back so as not to interfere in the plan of God which was coming to pass in Mary, Joseph obeyed the explicit command of the angel and look Mary into his home, while respecting the fact that she belonged exclusively to God.

On the other hand, it was from his marriage to Mary that Joseph derived his singular dignity and his rights in regard to Jesus. “It is certain that the dignity of the Mother of God is so exalted that nothing could be more sublime; yet because Mary was united to Joseph by the bond of marriage, there can be no doubt but that Joseph approached as no other person ever could that eminent dignity whereby the Mother of God towers above all creatures. Since marriage is the highest degree of association and friendship involving by its very nature a communion of goods, it follows that God, by giving Joseph to the Virgin, did not give him to her only as a companion for life, a witness of her virginity and protector of her honor: he also gave Joseph to Mary in order that he might share, through the marriage pact, in her own sublime greatness.”

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The same aura of silence that envelops everything else about Joseph also shrouds his work as a carpenter in the house of Nazareth. It is, however, a silence that reveals in a special way the inner portrait of the man. The Gospels speak exclusively of what Joseph “did.” Still, they allow us to discover in his “actions” - shrouded in silence as they are - an aura of deep contemplation. Joseph was in daily contact with the mystery “hidden from ages past,” and which “dwelt” under his roof. This explains, for example, why St. Teresa of Jesus, the great reformer of the Carmelites, promoted the renewal of veneration to St. Joseph in Western Christianity.

St. Joseph, pray for us!