Saint Joseph

Joseph appears only in a few passages of the Gospels, chiefly the infancy stories in Matthew and Luke, and the Gospels record no word that he ever spoke. He was a Jewish man of Nazareth, engaged to Mary, and a descendant of King David. Matthew and Luke each give a genealogy that traces Jesus through Joseph back to David, although the two lists name different men between David and Joseph. Matthew calls him a righteous man, and tradition has pictured him as a carpenter.

In Matthew's account, when Joseph learned that Mary was with child, he did not want to expose her to shame. An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him to take Mary as his wife, and he did. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, another dream warned him that Herod planned to kill the children of Bethlehem, and Joseph took Mary and the child to Egypt. When Herod died, a further dream told him to return and to avoid the territory of Herod's son, and the family settled in Nazareth. Readers have long noticed that Joseph receives God's guidance through dreams, as the patriarch Joseph did, and that the journey to Egypt and back follows the path of the Exodus.

After the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, Joseph disappears from the Gospels. A later tradition says that he died before Jesus began his public ministry, with Jesus and Mary at his side. That belief is why Joseph is invoked as patron of the dying and for a good death.

Devotion to Joseph grew over the centuries. In 1870 Pope Pius IX declared him patron and protector of the whole Catholic Church, and Pope John XXIII added his name to the Roman Canon of the Mass. The Church keeps his solemnity on 19 March and the memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker on 1 May, and it has made him patron of workers, carpenters, and fathers. Artists show him with a carpenter's square, a staff with lilies, or the child Jesus in his arms.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.