The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts message to supporters…
March 19th is the Feast of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Head of the Holy Family, Confessor, and Patron of the Universal Church.
The Gospel of Saint Matthew tells us that Saint Joseph was “a just man.” The New Testament records no words of Saint Joseph. The Foster Father of Our Savior instructs us and edifies us however, by his example — of profound Faith, humility and resignation, and of perfect obedience to the will of God.
In Quamquam Prulies, his 1889 Encyclical On Devotion To Saint Joseph, Pope Leo XIII reminds us that “…Joseph was the spouse of Mary and that he was reputed the Father of Jesus Christ. From these sources have sprung his dignity, his holiness, his glory.” The Holy Father emphasizes again that “…Joseph shines among all mankind by the most august dignity, since by divine will, he was the guardian of the Son of God and reputed as His father among men.”
According to Pope Leo “Fathers of families find in Joseph the best personification of paternal solicitude and vigilance; spouses a perfect example of love, of peace, and of conjugal fidelity; virgins at the same time find in him the model and protector of virginal integrity.”
Devotion to Saint Joseph bears a special significance to the contemporary struggle to protect the sanctity of innocent human life.
In 1997, Pope Saint John Paul II commended the life of children not yet born to the protection of Saint Joseph.
Just as Saint Joseph, upon the instruction of an angel, carried the Christ Child, Innocence Himself, to Egypt to escape the murderous wrath of Herod, let us invoke the intercession of Saint Joseph, Patron of the Unborn, to deliver the innocent children of today from the modern day successors of Herod who pursue, with fiendish zeal, the Luciferian obseession to destroy human life in the womb.
Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of Canada. Here in New England, the Virgin Spouse of the Virgin Mother of God is the Patron Saint of the Archdiocese of Hartford and the Diocese of Manchester.
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The Feast of Saint Joseph is, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law, one of ten holydays of obligation in the Universal Church. It is not however, one of the only six days in the United States when attendance at Mass is required under pain of serious sin. This is not because of any lack of esteem for the role of Saint Joseph in the economy of the Incarnation.
Rather, it relates to particular historical circumstances, specifically, the economic and cultural conditions faced by Catholic immigrants to this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America then was a laissez faire capitalist society where 72 hour work weeks—12 hour days—were common.
Protestant employers moreover, were usually unsympathetic to Catholic religious practices, and would often dock or fire Catholic workers who showed up late for work on holydays. As a consequence, Catholic workingmen, like this writer’s grandfather, who emigrated from Galway to Boston in 1906, would, on holydays of obligation, have to rise before 4am so they could attend Mass at 5am, thus ensuring that they would arrive at work on time at 6am.
As a concession, taking into account this hardship, the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore decreed in 1884 that there would be only six holydays of obligation in the United States.
