Like so many of the recent and more historically distant popes, St John Paul II reflects upon the centrality of St Joseph for the Christian faith.
In his apostolic exhortation Redemptoris Custos or The Guardian of the Redeemer (1989), John Paul II unfurls the many forms of guardianship undertaken by Joseph, despite the fact that his appearance in the Scriptures is brief and his own words are not recorded.
In the exhortation, the Pope reflects upon the shared and complementary mission of the Blessed Mother and St Joseph. He points out that Joseph is “a unique guardian of the mystery hidden from the ages in God” (Ephesians 3:9).
John Paul II explains that St Joseph offers a unique portrait of a Christian disciple for our times, and within the Church’s theology of work and her theology of the interior life and marriage.
He also points to St Joseph as the person who provides a direct “juridical” bridge between the infant Jesus and the royal line of King David, and thereby serves as a guardian of Hebrew righteousness and custom. We can read this for instance in St Joseph’s role as father of re-dedicating “the first fruits” of the covenant in the story of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which augurs in the “new covenant”.
John Paul II writes: “Here too, Jesus – who is the true ‘price’ of ransom (cf. 1 Cor 6:20; 7:23; 1 Pt l:19) – not only ‘fulfills’ the Old Testament rite, but at the same time transcends it, since he is not a subject to be redeemed, but the very author of redemption.”
When Pope Francis announced the “Year of St Joseph” in 2021, many Catholics around the world willingly embraced the scriptural, liturgical and devotional exploration of this important figure in the life of the Saviour.
In more recent decades, St Joseph as the “just man” serves as an effective and radical counterpoint to the undisciplined, incontinent, violent or ego-driven tendencies of “toxic masculinity” – the tragic fruit of the secularised individualism and the sexual revolution.
There is another aspect of St Joseph that can be glimpsed in the writing of John Paul II – this time, his important encyclical about the centrality of a proactive and anticipatory support of human life in law, culture and wider society.
In Evangelium Vitae or The Gospel of Life (1995), John Paul II describes in an evocative way the plight of the family of Jesus, the Holy Family, as they became entangled in the savage “search and destroy” project of the madly jealous King Herod.
He writes that it is not only individual crimes that contribute to “the culture of death”, but: “At the same time a new cultural climate is developing and taking hold, which gives crimes against life a new and – if possible – even more sinister character, giving rise to further grave concern: broad sectors of public opinion justify certain crimes against life in the name of the rights of individual freedom.” (n. 4)
Joseph was himself, as were so many heroes of the Scriptures before him, confronted with “the hostility of the powers of evil [which] is, in fact, an insidious opposition which, before affecting the disciples of Jesus, is directed against his mother … Mary has to flee with Joseph and the Child into Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-15)”.
It was the “just man” Joseph’s mission to defend the honour, safety and the well-being of the infant Messiah and his mother.
It might be said that her Joseph becomes a guardian of goodness against the anti-life political ambitions in his times, which are themselves part of a larger cosmic battle of resentment against all the frailty of the infant and the newborn.
St Joseph has long been honoured in Western Catholicism as the patron of a “good death” or, perhaps better, a “blessed death”. Prayers to St Joseph served as prayers for a timely preparation for “the hour of our death” and also as a memento mori – a reminder that we are made for eternity for which this life is but a preparation.
Joseph, who is so present in the text and iconography of the infancy narratives of the Bible, is not present during the texts of Christ’s public ministry. The tradition then holds that St Joseph died in the blessed presence and the arms of his adopted son Jesus and the Blessed Mother, and is therefore both an exemplar and intercessor for prayerful, trusting, peaceful and loving experience of death.
It is precisely those forces that aim to renounce Christian faith and secularise all aspects of life that have been working so relentlessly over so many decades to replace this thoroughly Christian notion of each life “belonging to the Creator”, and to replace a Josephite “good death” with its parody in the euphemisms of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
It is also telling that the campaign for “medically assisted dying” has been so strong and often so effective, most notoriously in the Netherlands and then in the formerly devoutly Catholic regions of Canada, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg. A strong euthanasia campaign in the Republic of Ireland has stalled, but last month the very first regional legislature in Italy, Tuscany, has legalised medically assisted suicide.
In Holland, the “Dutch way of death” has inevitably expanded to include the medical killing of children, the demented, the depressed, the doubtful and now the “cute” “duo-death” where elderly couples arrange a lethal dose to “go out together”.
As Pope St John Paul II warned in Evangelium Vitae that civil society, without the foundations in a sound metaphysics and reality, will quickly fall into a “culture of death” and irrationality:
“Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a ‘system’ and as such is a means and not an end. Its ‘moral’ value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject.” (n. 68)
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
Featured image: St Joseph with the Infant Jesus by Guido Reni, c. 1635 from Wikipedia
