St. Joseph

Who they were

Joseph appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and never says a word. Everything recorded about him is action. He is described as a just man who, on finding Mary pregnant, resolved to divorce her quietly rather than expose her, which in that setting was an act of mercy at real cost to himself. He is told in a dream to take her as his wife, and he does. He is told to take the child and flee to Egypt, and he does that too, at night, as a refugee.

He is called a tekton, a Greek word usually translated as carpenter but covering a broader trade of building and working with wood and stone. Jesus is identified in Mark as the carpenter and in Matthew as the carpenter's son, which tells you the work was his as well.

Joseph disappears from the account before the public ministry begins, and nothing in the gospels describes his death. The tradition that he died with Mary and Jesus present, and the patronage of a happy death that follows from it, is inference from that silence rather than a recorded scene.

Devotion to him developed slowly and then became substantial. Pius IX declared him patron of the universal Church in 1870. The second feast, St. Joseph the Worker on 1 May, was established by Pius XII in 1955, deliberately placed on a day already given over to labour movements.

Why people turn to St. Joseph

The patronages all come from the same place, which is that he did ordinary things well under difficult circumstances. He is patron of workers because he worked with his hands. He is patron of fathers because he raised a son who was not his by birth and is never once recorded complaining about it. He is patron of the home because he kept one together through a pregnancy he did not expect, a journey he did not choose, and an exile he did not deserve. The patronage of a happy death comes from the tradition that he died in the presence of Jesus and Mary, which is what people are asking for when they ask to die well.

How to ask their intercession

Ask him for the thing he actually did: to keep going steadily, to provide, to protect the people in your house. Many people pray to him for work, for a home, and for their own father or for their fathering. The custom of burying a statue of him to sell a house is folk practice and nothing in Church teaching supports treating it as a mechanism.