St. Joseph and the NCBC
Alonso Cano, Death of St. Joseph 1601–1667 .
The staff of The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) recently renewed our consecration to St. Joseph as our protector and guardian, especially for our temporal needs. We have been given a precious opportunity to grow closer to this great saint with the Year of St. Joseph that began this past December.
St. Joseph is invoked as Patron of a Happy Death since he is thought to have passed into eternal life accompanied by Mary and Jesus at his bedside. Given the frequent use of our ethics services at the end of life, it is the clear that St. Joseph has a special spiritual connection to our work at the NCBC that focuses on defending the dignity of the human person in health care and the life sciences.
I strongly recommend to readers the book of Fr. Donald Calloway, “Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father.” He recommends that the “Time of St. Joseph” proposed by the Church be seen as a spiritual response to the contemporary attacks on life, marriage, and family.
Fr. Calloway brings together a wide array of information about and devotions to St. Joseph.
I was particularly struck by the affirmation that only St. Joseph can truly be called the savior of our Savior. He alone deserves this title for taking the Child Jesus and Our Lady into exile in Egypt to escape the murderous fury of King Herod. He can be a powerful protector for all who seek his aid as a spiritual father.
It is also true that St. Joseph was the man closest to Christ. After Our Lady, he was the human being who spent the most time with Jesus and had the privilege to hold him and even teach him as the Child Jesus grew up. Sustained closeness with Our Lord is transformative. This helps us to understand why he is raised above all other saints, except for Mary Mother of God, for our devotion.
It is remarkable how, after centuries of relative obscurity, the Church has increasingly brought St. Joseph to the forefront. In 1870, Blessed Pope Pius IX declared St. Joseph Patron of the Universal Church at a time of great distress for the papacy. Several religious congregations under the special patronage of St. Joseph were founded in the 19th century. The great saint was seen in 1879 as part of the Knock, Ireland, apparitions and in 1917 during the Fatima apparitions where he was holding the Child Jesus.
Pope Leo XIII promoted the Feast of the Holy Family to inspire families with the sublime model of a divinely constituted family, a perfect example of domestic unity, virtue, and holiness. Pope Benedict XV put this feast into the universal calendar of the Church in 1921. It became a common practice to piously invoke Jesus, Mary, and Joseph verbally or to write J.M.J. St. Joseph can be seen as the first rung on a ladder of three steps leading to heaven. We begin with his fatherly help, continue with Mary’s maternal assistance, and arrive through the graces of Our Lord Jesus Christ. All three, working powerfully together as the Holy Family, sustain us.
In 1921, Pope Benedict XV inserted “Blessed be St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse” into the Divine Praises after Benediction during Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and before the Holy Eucharist is returned to the tabernacle.
In 1955, Venerable Pope Pius XII established the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1st. This was a direct and holy response to the Communist May Day secular celebrations of proletarian workers.
In 1962, St. Pope John XXIII inserted St. Joseph’s name into the canon of the mass in Eucharistic Prayer #1. (Pope Francis added St. Joseph to all the other Eucharistic Prayers.)
In 1989, St. Pope John Paul II called for the faithful to invoke St. Joseph for the fundamental task of the great new evangelization he saw as necessary in our times.
In 2013, Pope Francis consecrated the Vatican City State to St. Joseph.
Finally, we have this Year of St. Joseph until December 8, 2021. St. Joseph is clearly being honored and proposed for our devotion more and more by the Church.
I feel blessed to have him as my personal patron saint. I turn to St. Joseph for inspiration. He was the Head of the Holy Family with the greatest humility, a true servant leader.
In my own family tradition confidence in St. Joseph’s intercession has a prominent place. One of my great aunts was the superior of a Benedictine monastery that consecrated its finances to St. Joseph and used an envelope with cash in it for expenses. Money was added to the envelope and spent from it. One nun decided to do the accounts and record the cashflow. Almost immediately the funds started drying up. My great aunt went back to trusting in Divine Providence and St. Joseph, and the envelope never emptied again despite heavy spending. I would not be allowed to take this approach with the NCBC’s finances, but Mother Angelica did something similar in the early days of EWTN with remarkable success.
We consecrated the NCBC to St. Joseph as our protector and guardian, especially for our temporal needs, in November 2019 and experienced what I believe to have been special protection through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and into 2021.
St. Joseph Pray for Us, especially at the Hour of our Deaths!
