What Have the Popes Said About St. Joseph?
National Catholic Register, 19 March 2021
After Blessed Pius IX proclaimed St. Joseph the “Patron of the Universal Church” in 1870, his successors have turned their attention to St. Joseph in their own particular way.
The figure of St. Joseph is something of a blank canvas upon which preachers and theologians can paint a wide array of images. As sacred Scripture says so little about St. Joseph, it is left to the Catholic imagination to build up, generation after generation, a fuller picture of the saint granted the supreme mission of caring for Jesus and Mary.
In recent times the papal magisterium has raised up St. Joseph as popular devotion to St. Joseph has increased. And as expected, the various popes have employed St. Joseph as a kind of mirror for their own pastoral priorities.
After Blessed Pius IX proclaimed St. Joseph the “Patron of the Universal Church” on Dec. 8, 1870, his successors have turned their attention to St. Joseph in their own particular way.
Pope Leo XIII
“On the subject of this devotion, of which we speak publicly for the first time today,” began Leo XIII in his 1889 encyclical on Joseph, Quamquam Pluries, indicating that a “Josephite” magisterium was something in its early stages.
At the time, Leo was greatly preoccupied by the new conditions of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the working classes. Less than two years later would come Rerum Novarum, the charter of contemporary Catholic social teaching.
Thus Joseph was depicted as one who “passed his life in labor,” demonstrating that “the condition of the lowly has nothing shameful in it, and the work of the laborer is not only not dishonoring, but can, if virtue be joined to it, be singularly ennobled.”
Leo then included a warning about the dangers of communist revolution, which he would later call a remedy worse than the disease.
“Recourse to force and struggles by seditious paths to obtain such ends are madnesses which only aggravate the evil which they aim to suppress,” Leo wrote. “Let the poor, then, if they would be wise, trust not to the promises of seditious men, but rather to the example and patronage of the Blessed Joseph.”
Venerable Pope Pius XII
The link between labor and Joseph was further emphasized in 1955, when Pius XII instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, a second feast of Joseph in addition to his principal feast on March 19.
Pius XII chose May 1 for the new feast precisely to be a rival to the European labor day, or May Day. In the communist countries and for communist parties in Western Europe, May Day parades exalted Marxist ideology and communism.
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