St. Joseph
Patron of the Universal Church, Terror of Demons
The silent guardian of the Holy Family — a working man who is never once recorded as having spoken, and who protected the Child entrusted to him without a word.
- Feast
- March 19 (Solemnity) · May 1 (St. Joseph the Worker)
- Lived
- First century
Invoked For
- The universal Church
- Fathers
- Workers and carpenters
- A happy death
- Home and family life
His Life
St. Joseph was a carpenter of Nazareth, of the house of David, and the husband of the Virgin Mary. The Gospels give him not one spoken word. Everything we know of him, we know from what he did.
Learning that Mary was with child, he resolved to put her away quietly rather than expose her — the act of a just man unwilling to do harm. Then an angel spoke to him in a dream, and he took her as his wife without hesitation. Three more times he is warned in dreams, and three more times he simply obeys: he flees into Egypt with the Child by night, waits, and returns.
He presented the Child in the Temple, searched three days for the boy who had stayed behind among the teachers, and taught Him a trade — so that Jesus was known to His neighbors as the carpenter's son.
Scripture does not record his death. Because it is not mentioned during the public ministry, tradition holds that he died at Nazareth before it began, in the presence of Jesus and Mary — which is why he is invoked as the patron of a happy death.
The Path to Sainthood
Like the other saints of the Gospels, St. Joseph was never formally canonized; his veneration is ancient and universal, and grew steadily through the Middle Ages under the preaching of saints such as Bernardine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila, who took him as the patron of her reform.
In 1870 Blessed Pius IX declared him Patron of the Universal Church. Pius XII added the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1 in 1955, and in 1962 St. John XXIII inserted his name into the Roman Canon of the Mass.
Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of St. Joseph in 2020 with the letter Patris Corde — "with a father's heart" — on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of that patronage.
Prayers to St. Joseph
Tap any prayer to open it large and clear — set for reading aloud. Close it to return here and choose another.