Latin Devotion to St. Joseph

CWR: St. Joseph: Man and Worker—A Letter to Working Men by David Michael Phelps
Considering our own crises in light of St. Joseph’s example, we can learn to see, even here in our coronavirus exile, an opportunity to offer a more fundamental yes to the work of God in our lives.

Good luck to the Harmel Academy of the Trades. Hopefully it's not too little, too late.




As for the essay...

But when culture presents masculinity itself as toxic, it is difficult even to posit whether, if in throwing out the bathwater of historical injustices against women, we may have also thrown out the baby of masculine virtue. The controversy that such a statement will elicit is itself proof that it has become taboo to suggest that men, just like women, have a particular genius, and that this genius is part of the imago Dei.

Paying lip service to feminism? Was it really necessary for the purposes of the essay? Feminist affirm masculine virtue, they just think that it is women who should have that virtue and not men.

But what is needed is not simply curricula and conferences focused on the formation of men. What is needed is an integrated spirituality, a grounding of one’s manhood in the life and service of Christ. And to find a model of this, one need look no further than to St. Joseph, a man whose entire life was devoted to the (seemingly) mundane service to the divine invasion.

Why not have Christ be the foundation instead? Imitation of saints can take us only far, as we ourselves must learn how to live in Christ. After all, what do we really know of St. Joseph, other than some details in the Gospels and apocryphal literature, and a lot of guesswork, much of which is based on a priori assumptions that are not justified historically. Take for example, the novelty of depicting St. Joseph as a young man. There is no evidence of this but testimony, even if it is from apocryphal literature, that he was much older and a widower, a tradition that the Byzantine churches (and other non-Latin churches) maintain to this day, and which the Latins originally held.

Of course, Mary was also available to God, and so it isn’t availability per se that helps us recover the distinctly masculine spirituality shown to us by St. Joseph. While it could be said that Mary’s availability took the form of receptivity, the availability of Joseph took the form of responsibility. We know from scripture that Joseph was a just man. He rendered unto God what was due to God—which is to say, he did his duty. Joseph the Man willingly took up the responsibility and natural duties of a husband and father, and in doing so, he placed his responsibility in service of the mission of God. Dare we think that those seemingly mundane responsibilities were themselves therefore consecrated?

The simplistic collapse of sex differences into a simple metaphysical division between "receptivity" and "responsibility" or "receptivity" and "activity" isn't really helpful. (A division found among phenomenologists like Alice von Hildebrand, and some Thomists and Latin traditionalists.) After all, women have responsibilities and duties as a mother and wife. Activity/Receptivity is most apparent in the conjugal act and male leadership, but it is not all there is to explain intersexual dynamic and how husband and wife are to live together. What divisions in responsibility are there because of sex differences? This is what needs to be addressed.

Just as Joseph’s silence and obedience help us better understand the vocation to manhood and fatherhood, so too does his vocation as a craftsman help us calibrate our understanding of human work. We know from Scripture that Joseph was a tekton—a word translated as carpenter, builder, craftsman. His precise speciality is difficult to discern—some have suggested he may have been a mason. Whatever it was, we know that it involved the fashioning of raw material into things useful to others. This would certainly mean he was a man of calloused hands, bloody cuts, and sore muscles, but it would also mean he was a man of discernment, creativity, acute observation, and precise skill. In other words, it would mean his head and his body worked in concert to transform raw material into something better.

This is a lot of guesswork, and there are still disputes over what τέκτων means exactly as applied to Joseph. (See speculation about the Aramaic equivalent?)

What sets Joseph apart was his apprentice. In working with his apprentice, Joseph was graced to receive a flesh-and-blood experience of what is true for every worker in every place and time.

Joseph’s apprentice was, of course, Jesus himself. The ramification is mind-boggling. God himself—the fashioner of the very universe—humbled himself to take instruction from a human craftsman, humbled himself to bow to the creative will of Joseph, humbled himself to obey his father’s wish to take out the garbage. The lesson of Joseph’s workshop is that God collaborated. And he continues to collaborate. For either it is true or it is not that God, in every place and every way, is active in the sustenance of the world, in its continued creation. And if it is true, then it means that the working man—in his will, mind, and body—is a collaborator of God. Or, to formulate the idea with slightly more controversy, God is a collaborator of the worker.

First, a quibble. It may seem significant, but we do not call Joseph the "father" of Christ but his foster-father, as the Father of Christ is God Himself. And while our Lord humbled and subjected Himself to his mother and foster-father (Luke 2:15), we have very little information as to how he lived his quotidien life.

Here I think something like Opus Dei's explanation of how work can be sanctified is better. Christ has redeemed human labor, and in so far as we live in Him, our labor can be redeeming.  We don't need to rely on speculation that Christ learned to be a τέκτων or apprenticed under Joseph, even if that is the popular image of Christ's life before His public ministry. (Are there such images of Christ in non-Latin Apostolic Christianity?)

Or to put it in another way, we can labor through Christ as God's hands, etc. in His work of Re-Creation.

Much of the modern devotion to St. Joseph seems to be concurrent and perhaps even a result of the loss of understanding of the Christian vocation as living as other Christs and adopted sons of God. Latins no longer live as sons and servants of God, seeking to do the will of the Father; they instead look to the "Holy Family" of our Lord and His Blessed Mother and His foster-father, and this has been exacerbated by the social and political crises affecting the family. This is worsened by the recently-created devotion of  consecrating one's self to St. Joseph, which may take the form of having St. Joseph as one's [spiritual] father just as the Theotokos is one's mother.

(How one can have another man as a spiritual father while being a son of God is an issue I'll have to consider later.)