Saint Joseph

Joseph was a descendant of King David and a carpenter, or craftsman, of Nazareth. The Gospels never record a word he spoke. They show him instead through what he did.

When he found that Mary, to whom he was betrothed, was with child, Matthew says that “being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, [he] was minded to put her away privately.” An angel told him in a dream that the child was conceived of the Holy Spirit, and “Joseph rising up from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, and took unto him his wife” (Matthew 1). Three more times he was warned in dreams, and each time he obeyed at once. He took the mother and child by night into Egypt, away from Herod, and brought them home again to Nazareth (Matthew 2).

He named the child Jesus, presented him in the Temple, and with Mary searched anxiously for him when he was twelve (Luke 2). After that he disappears from the Gospels. The Church has always believed that he died before Jesus began his public ministry, in the arms of Jesus and Mary, and so he is invoked as patron of a happy death.

Devotion to him grew slowly and then greatly. Saint Teresa of Ávila said that she had never asked anything of him without receiving it. Pius IX declared him Patron of the Universal Church in 1870. Pius XII added the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker on 1 May in 1955. His principal feast is 19 March.