SAINT JOSEPH Patron of the Universal Church

Saint Josesph - 19 March 

From the Treatise on the Love of God by Saint Francis of Sales (Oeuvres, d’Edition d'Annecy, t.2, 49-50)  

El Greco - St Joseph
and the Christ Child 1597-99     

• That Saint Joseph died before the Savior's passion and death can hardly be questioned; otherwise he would not have commended his mother to the care of Saint John. Surely then it is inconceivable that his beloved foster-Son, so dear to his heart, was not present to assist him at his passing. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Think of the tenderness, the love, the pity which his foster-father showed toward the Savior when he was born into the world as a tiny babe. Who then can doubt that at his hour of death that divine Son repaid him a hundredfold with similar courtesies?
• Storks provide a good example of mutual affection between parents and child ren. These birds of passage carry their aged fathers and mothers on their journeys just as, when they were still small, those fathers and mothers had carried them. When the Savior was a little child, his foster-father, the great Saint Joseph, and his mother the glorious Virgin, had carried him many a time. They carried him, for example, on their journey from Judea to Egypt and back again. Who then can doubt that, when he reached the end of his life, his divine foster child in his turn carried that saintly father from this world to the next, to Abraham's bosom, to be taken to himself in glory on the day of his ascension?
• A saint who had loved so deeply during his life could not but die of love. Unable to love his dear Jesus as he wished amid the distractions of this life, and having completed the service required by our Lord's tender years, it only remained for him to say to the Father: I have finished the work which you gave me to do; and to the Son: "My child, to my hands your heavenly Father entrusted your body on the day when you came into this world; now to your hands I entrust my spirit on the day I leave this world."
• Such, I believe, was the death of this great patriarch, the man chosen to perform for the Son of God the tenderest and most loving offices possible, apart from those fulfilled by his heaven-sent wife, the true mother of that same Son.