St Joseph: the man whom Heaven
trusts
Pope Francis’s Letter “Patris corde” enriches Papal
magisterium on the person of St Joseph. From the end of the 1800s till today,
various Popes have gifted us with many a beautiful and profound page seeking to
plumb the depths of this “man in the shadows”.
By Alessandro De Carolis
Every day for 40 years, Pope Francis has challenged St
Joseph. After saying Morning Prayer, Pope Francis writes in Patris corde, he recites a nineteenth century prayer
from a French prayerbook.
Through this prayer, the Pope entrusts both “serious and
troubling situations” to St Joseph. The prayer ends thus: “Let it not be said
that I invoked you in vain”.
We find out about this daily custom in a footnote in Patris
corde, a text that brings the memory of the Church back to Pope Pius IX
who, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1870, proclaimed St Joseph
the Patron of the Universal Church.
A strong connection
The anecdote confirms and enriches Pope Francis’s
predilection for the figure of Mary’s husband. His familiarity with the Saint
already become known when he spoke in Manila about a habit he has of putting
his concerns under a statue of the “sleeping Joseph” which he keeps in his
study at Santa Marta.
Joseph is a man who goes “unnoticed”, who welcomes the
mystery and puts himself at its service, never putting himself at the center,
but who resolves things that are impossible. In Patris corde, the
Pope describes many of St Joseph’s qualities as a true husband and father, the
fiancé who “accepted Mary unconditionally” and the man in whom “Jesus saw the
tender love of God”.
Papal names
Pope Francis’s contribution is, so to speak, the last piece of
the mosaic the Church has created throughout the centuries to express its
admiration and to explain the merits of this great soul sculpted through
silence.
Various Popes have also contributed to this narrative with
heartfelt words and gestures. Beginning in the 15th century, Pope Sixtus V
fixed 19 March as the date on which his feast is celebrated. From Pius IX on,
and especially during the pontificates of the 20th century, the Church’s
magisterium cast new light on this man wrapped in shadow.
His name, however, has never been chosen by a Pope, even if
in the last decades, his name has recurred frequently in the baptismal names of
various popes: Popes Pius X (Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto), John XXIII (Angelo
Giuseppe Roncalli), John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyla), Benedict XVI (Joseph
Ratzinger). Pope Francis is not named Joseph, but he initiated his ministry by
celebrating Mass on 19 March: a different connection but the same proximity.
Adding a name
Confirming Pope Benedict XVI’s desire, Pope Francis decreed
on 1 May 2013 that the name of St Joseph, the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, be added in Eucharistic Prayers II, III and IV. Before that, on 13
November 1962, Pope John XXIII had established that his name be inserted into
the Roman Canon, alongside Mary’s name and before those of the Apostles.
Pope John XXIII himself, wishing to entrust the Second
Vatican Council to Jesus’s earthly “daddy”, wrote the Apostolic Letter Le
Voci in 1961. In it, he included a sort of summary of devotion to St
Joseph nurtured by his predecessors. These are not merely ambiguous aspects of
liturgical “bureaucracy”. Each new decree demonstrates an ever more deeply
rooted ecclesial sense and awareness, which with Pius XII even touched civil
life.
The workers’ saint
1 May 1955. It was a Sunday and a crowd of workers filled St
Peter’s Square. They were members of ACLI (Italian Association of Christians
Workers), and many of them remembered their meeting with Pius XII ten years
before on 13 March 1945, a month and a half before the end of the war that had
profoundly wounded Italy. Now the country was experiencing immense growth, the
“boom” was not far off.
But among the ranks of Italian Catholics, the Pope
recognized those who were “disheartened”, those who complained about the lack
of a Christian presence “in public life”, while socialist ideologies seemed to
be taking over. Pius XII’s energetically recalled ACLI to their original
identity so that they might be committed to “social peace”. In the end,
completely shifting gears, he gave them a “gift” which surprised and enthused
those present:
We are pleased to announce to you Our determination to
establish -- and we in fact establish -- the liturgical feast of St Joseph the
Worker, assigning to it the precise date of 1 May. Dear workers, are you happy
about Our gift? We are certain that you are because the humble artisan of
Nazareth not only personifies the dignity of the worker before God and the Holy
Church, but he is also always the provident guardian of you and your families.
There can never be a “Pope Joseph”
Four years later, the Church was guided by a man who would
have wanted to choose the name “Pope Joseph”. He decided against it, however,
saying that it was not a name used by the popes.
But his explanation betrays a nostalgia and reveals Pope
John XXIII’s strong attachment to St Joseph. The revelation came during an
audience on 19 March 1959 with a group of street cleaners. In a radio message
on 1 May the following year, “Good Pope John” concluded with a prayer to St
Joseph the Worker:
Grant that those you protect understand that they are not
alone in their work, but may they know how to find Jesus next to them, may they
welcome Him with grace, and faithfully protect Him as you did. Grant that in
every family, in every office, in every laboratory, wherever a Christian works,
that they may all be sanctified in charity, in patience, in justice, trying to
doing things well, so that the gifts of heavenly predilection might abundantly
descend upon them.
A risk-taker
Even though Pope Paul VI’s name was not Joseph, from 1963 to
1969 in particular, a year did not go by in which he did not celebrate Mass on
the Solemnity of 19 March. Every homily he delivered on that occasion was a
personal “portrait” of how fascinated he was by St Joseph’s “complete
submission and dedication” to his mission, of the man who was “timid perhaps”,
but gifted “by a superhuman greatness that enchants”. Even though having a
bride like Mary and a Son like Jesus made him a stranger among his peers, he
did not retreat. About this, Paul VI said in 1969:
St Joseph was, therefore, a man who was ‘committed’, as
they say now, to Mary, chosen from among all the women on earth and all of
history, always his virgin bride, not physically his wife, and to Jesus, by
virtue of legal, not natural, descendance, his offspring. His were the burdens,
the responsibilities, the risks, the little preoccupations of the small and
singular holy family. His were the service, the work, the sacrifice, the
penumbra of the evangelical scene in which we like to contemplate him. And
certainly, not wrongly so, now that we know everything, we call him happy,
blessed. This is the Gospel. In it, the values of human existence assume a
different value than that which we are accustomed to appreciate: here that
which is small becomes great.
The sublime spouse
In the 26 years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, there were
an infinite number of occasions on which he spoke of St Joseph to whom he said
he prayed intensely every day. He summarized this devotion in the Apostolic
Exhortation Redemptoris Custos, published on 15 August 1989,
written 100 years after Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Quamquam Pluries.
In that document, Pope John Paul explores every aspect of St Joseph’s life.
Sensitive as he was to the vocation of Christian marriage, he offered it as a
way of profoundly interpreting the relationship between the couple from
Nazareth – “the grace of living together the charism of virginity and the gift
of matrimony” – a theme he would pick up in a general audience in 1996,
deconstructing a false myth:
The difficulty of approaching the sublime mystery of
their spousal communion has led some, since the second century, to attribute an
advanced age to Joseph and to consider him as a guardian, instead of as Mary’s
husband. Rather, it is appropriate to suppose that he was not an elderly man,
but that his interior perfection, a consequence of grace, led him to live his
spousal relationship with Mary with virginal affection.
“Robust interiority”
There are no words left by the man for whom Matthew in his
Gospel uses the term “just”, the Patron of the Universal Church, of workers and
of an infinite number of cities, churches and places. All we have is silence.
His actions, therefore, must be understood as if they were
words and thoughts. From that apparent absence, even Pope Benedict XVI
extracted the wealth of a complete life, of a man in the background, whose
silent example affects the growth of Jesus, the God-man:
It is a silence thanks to which Joseph, in unison with
Mary, watches over the Word of God. (…) A silence woven of constant prayer, a
prayer of blessing of the Lord, of the adoration of his holy will and of
unreserved entrustment to his providence. It is no exaggeration to think that
it was precisely from his ‘father’ Joseph that Jesus learned - at the human
level - that steadfast interiority which is a presupposition of authentic
justice, the "superior justice" which he was one day to teach his
disciples.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét