Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father

by Donald H. Calloway

First, we need the spiritual fatherhood of St. Joseph to help us protect marriage and the family.

Second, the entire world needs to be re-evangelized, including the vast majority of baptized Christians.

Only Jesus has the power to take you to the Father. Yet, in God’s merciful love, St. Joseph plays a very important role in your spiritual growth and journey to the Father.

Saint Joseph never points to himself. His role is to lead everyone to Jesus, just as Mary does. Mary was predestined to be the Immaculate Mother of the Savior; St. Joseph was predestined to be the earthly father of the Savior and your spiritual father.

Jesus is not offended when people entrust themselves to Mary and Joseph. How could he be? He is the first one to have entrusted himself to them! He, more than anyone else, wants you to love Mary and St. Joseph. He wants you to love them and resemble them.

Jesus is God; he alone regenerates humanity. Nonetheless, as Head of the Holy Family, St. Joseph was the head of our Head.

Matthew and Luke present the lineage of Joseph because the Davidic ancestry of the Messiah needed to be shown through the father’s line.

Or is one of those Mary? It would make more sense since Jesus is biologically the son of Mary.

Satan fears your spiritual father because St. Joseph is a humble creature of flesh and blood, the perfect reflection of the Father of Lights.

Men like St. Joseph are willing to fight for what they love, what is good, true, and beautiful. May the Church and families once again be filled with such men!

Spiritual fatherhood, like spiritual motherhood, endures forever. Were this not the case, the Church would need to cease invoking Jesus as the “Son of Joseph.” The Church would also be required to cease invoking Mary, who is in heaven, as our spiritual mother.

As a child of St. Joseph, you can have great confidence knowing that your spiritual father also desires to zealously defend you.

Yet the crisis in manhood can be corrected if men begin to imitate St. Joseph. His fatherly example shows that strength, authority, and headship are meant to be at the service of others.

you are an employer, do you offer a just wage?

Saint Joseph has three treasures: Jesus, Mary, and you. Nothing consumes the heart of St. Joseph other than these three treasures. The heart of St. Joseph is the heart of a loving father, and you have access to his heart.

If temptations against purity batter your mind, heart, and soul, run to your spiritual father. Cling to St. Joseph! Your spiritual father is capable of increasing the virtue of chastity in your heart and leading you to true, virtuous love of God and neighbor.

Saint Joseph teaches us that prudence is correct knowledge about things to be done or, more broadly, the knowledge of things that ought to be done and of things that should be avoided.4 — Servant of God John A. Hardon

Many people are of the opinion that obedience to authority limits their freedom, requiring them to hand over their rights to others. This is not the case. In fact, obedience to laws is a part of everyday human life.

Saint Joseph held fast to Jesus’ words even when his mind and senses were unable to completely understand what Jesus meant. Saint Joseph exercised an active, trusting, and zealous faith.

When he became flesh, Jesus sanctified human work and elevated it to a level of greatness that did not exist prior to his Incarnation. Though divine, God humbled himself, became a man, and worked like a man. In his humanity, he learned how to work as a man by imitating the example of his earthly father, St. Joseph.

He [St. Joseph] belongs to the working-class, and he bore the burdens of poverty for himself and the Holy Family, whose tender and vigilant head he was.2 — Pope Pius XI

On rare occasions, God gives extraordinary graces for a person to perform heroic penances, fasts, and mortifications. However, God never desires for his workers to burn out from sheer exhaustion. He wants them to take delight in mountain streams, forests, and sunsets. He wants priests and nuns who are like St. Joseph: loving, prayerful, hard-working, and not afraid to rest.

Saint Joseph is your spiritual father, not a trinket. There’s no need to bury a statue of him. Talk to him; he hears you.

Teach the Ignorant

I guess that one is mine.

A father’s wisdom and presence are reassuring and life-giving. Knowing you can always go to your father in difficult times reassures you that everything will be okay, even when your world seems to be falling apart. Regrettably, many people have never experienced this kind of love from a father.

If you or someone you know is sick, go to St. Joseph. Jesus wants you to go to your spiritual father and ask him for help and healing. It’s up to God whether or not a physical healing will be given, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, as St. Zélie did for her little Thérèse.

When you invoke St. Joseph, you don’t have to speak much. You know your Father in heaven knows what you need; well, so does his friend St. Joseph. Tell him, “If you were in my place, St. Joseph, what would you do?”2 — St. André Bessette

In the Kingdom of God, Mary is the most elevated of all creatures, but St. Joseph outranks all the other saints.

Rejoice, devout servants of St. Joseph, for you are close to paradise; the ladder leading up to it has but three rungs, Jesus, Mary, Joseph.6 — St. Leonard of Port Maurice Who is not aware that, after the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph is, of all the saints, the one who is the dearest to God?7

— St. Alphonsus Liguori

But my experience is that St. Joseph helps us in them all; also that the Lord wishes to teach us that, as he was himself subject on earth to St. Joseph, so in heaven he now does all that Joseph asks.

Saint Joseph, after Mary, is the greatest saint and the most dear to Jesus.15 — Blessed Bartolo Longo

After much prayer, theological research, and inquiry, Blessed Pope Pius IX realized that such a dogma was both true and pleasing to God, and he agreed to their request.

In one of his sermons, St. Augustine states that St. Joseph, though not the biological father of Jesus, is nonetheless a real father to Jesus because he exercised a fatherhood toward Jesus that was authoritative, affectionate, and faithful. After

St. Augustine cleared up the matter of St. Joseph’s fatherhood of Jesus, it was never questioned again.

There is something I do not quite like in that title of foster father which is sometimes given to Joseph, because it might make us think of the relationship between Joseph and Jesus as something cold and external.

But many foster fathers should emphasize the father part!

Jesus, the Incarnate Word, is not a pure spiritual being. He is the God-Man. He has a divine nature and a human nature.

Jesus needed the fatherhood of St. Joseph as a model of masculinity for him to imitate.

Saint Joseph is the greatest, most loving, and holiest of all fathers. He is the father of Christians and the perfect model of paternal love.

Jesus wants his disciples to know about the virtues, wonders, and spiritual fatherhood of St. Joseph, but for the sake of his mission, he had to leave the revealing of this mystery to the Holy Spirit and the Church.

For love of Jesus, St. Joseph was more than willing to step out of the picture and appear to be of no importance. Saint Joseph desires only one thing: that Jesus accomplish the mission that he was sent to do by his Heavenly Father. It doesn’t matter to St. Joseph if he isn’t center stage.

Or as MC suggests, "He didn't want to let anything slip that might end up in the Bible someday!"

The Church will not ordain a man to his priesthood who has not his vital powers. She wants men who have something to tame, rather than those who are tame because they have no energy to be wild.

This statement, sadly, did not age well.

I thank you, O holy patriarch Joseph, because we who are incapable of even knowing how to love Jesus and our Immaculate Mother, know and rejoice that you at least loved her as she deserved to be loved, the worthy and true Mother of Jesus.9 — Blessed Gabriele Allegra

The Church has always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the Virgin Mary. In fact, James and Joseph, “brothers of Jesus,” are the sons of another Mary, a disciple of Christ, whom St. Matthew significantly calls “the other Mary.” They are close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression.3

defending a fundamental truth

I don't know this is a fundamental truth!

David.

That seems highly unlikely.

Why does the Church allow for three theories on this important topic?

1 or 2 makes more sense to me.

Mary was innocent and had done nothing wrong.

Yes, but his justice might consist in seeking to protect Mary even if unsure of her innocence and when convinced of her innocence, he allowed people to think he impregnated her.

The Gift of Counsel endows the soul with supernatural prudence, enabling it to judge promptly and rightly what must be done, especially in difficult circumstances. Counsel applies the principles furnished by knowledge and understanding to the innumerable concrete cases that confront us in the course of our daily duty as parents, teachers, public servants, and Christian citizens. Counsel is supernatural common sense, a priceless treasure in the quest of salvation.

I wish I had this gift!

It is a fear that arises, not from the thought of hell, but from sentiments of reverence and filial submission to our heavenly Father. It

Ultimately, St. Joseph saved Jesus’ life so that Jesus could save us.