Day Thirty-Two
We have come to the last title of St. Joseph, “Protector of Holy Church.” Tomorrow we will put ourselves securely under St. Joseph’s protection. Today I read an email to our bishops from a Covid Unit nurse. She has been caring for these patients day after day, despite the media’s attempts “to scare the crap out of us.” Daily she put herself under the fatherly protection of St. Joseph. She emailed the bishops of California to plead that they restore public Masses. This courageous nurse is begging the bishops to fight the good fight with an aggressively secular government. Our bishops, as good fathers, must fight for our First Amendment rights. We must insist that Catholic churches be treated no differently from other “essential services” such as supermarkets, pet food stores, coffee shops, and liquor stores.

Many of our elites consider Christian faith no more than a cute fairy tale. We would be simply naive to deny that many harbor  an enduring hatred for the faith, and will not rest until the Catholic Church is shut down. Some of the clergy themselves have become criminal, and a significant number of priests have lost faith in Christ’s Church. We have enemies, and who can protect us from them? Fr. Calloway writes that “the smoke of Satan has infiltrated even the highest levels of the Church … Jesus never promised that everyone in the Church would be holy.” To the contrary, Christ said there would always be weeds in His wheat field.
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How did some of the clergy become weeds? How did ex-Cardinal McCarrick, and some of our still active prelates, become criminal? There are seeds of evil in every human soul, mine and yours included. We need a mighty Protector and Patron. Fourteen years after he declared Our Lady as the Immaculate Conception, Pope Pius IX named St. Joseph as “Patron [from the Latin Pater or “father”] of the Universal Church.” Mary is our all-pure Mother. Joseph is our mighty Father, protector and patron of all Christians. We cannot restore the Church’s luster and beauty, and we cannot protect the Church from her enemies, without St. Joseph’s help.

                                                                                   Day Thirty-One

Happy Feast of St. Catherine of Siena! I recently finished Sigrid Undset’s lovely biography of this wonderful advisor to popes and terror to demons. Which brings us to St. Joseph’s penultimate title, Terror of Demons. Fr. Calloway commissioned a painting from one of my own parishioners, Bernadette Carstensen Cody, which you can see on page 318 of the book. Bernadette has graciously allowed me to post her second painting (a close-up of Joseph and Jesus) on this blog, and also to make cards of her painting for distribution at Star of the Sea.

Demons, who are quite real (participation in one exorcism will cure you of any doubts on that score), fear St. Joseph more than any pope or any saint other than Our Lady. Why? Because, Fr. Calloway asserts, “the lily St. Joseph holds in his hand is a mighty spiritual weapon, a sword of purity.” Other than Bernadette’s painting, I’ve never seen St. Joseph’s lily depicted as a sword, but purity indeed is the vital defensive weapon against the isolating filth of our pornographic society. Impurity in a man, like impurity in a metal or impurity in a medicine, render men impotent, powerless, and useless. Fr. Calloway has written powerfully on the two qualities of St. Joseph that terrify demons, which are his fatherhood and his purity, on pages 219-226.

“Men who want to be pure, pray.” God will not deny them what they ask for.

                                                                                   Day Thirty

We are almost at the end of our 33-day pilgrimage. It brings to mind that, relatively speaking, we are almost at the end of our pilgrimage through life. Even if you are in the prime of your life, bursting with energy and future prospects, memento mori (“remember death”). In the perspective of eternity, our lives on earth are infinitesimally short. I’ve been a priest for 28 years, but it seems like yesterday that I was ordained. I will cover another 28 years in the blink of an eye. But in 28 years I will probably be dead.

“Today,” writes Fr. Calloway, “many people are not prepared for death.” Why should we be? Our health care systems, our food and shelter delivery systems, our political systems—they all guarantee security and a long, pain-free life full of exciting activity…. until they break down, like they did a month ago. The Coronavirus pandemic has terrorized us by destabilizing our security, but it has also lessened our fear of death. Sometimes I say to a full church on Sundays: “no one gets out of this room alive,” which draws some chortles but also some panicked looks.
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St. Joseph is the “Patron of a Happy Death,” or more accurately, the patron of those who are dying—which is every one of us. We begin to die the moment we are born, but with St. Joseph beside us, we have nothing to fear and everything for which to be thankful. His Son’s resurrection has transformed death into hope and joy. We all need to prepare for death, and one of the best ways is to develop a devotion to St. Joseph before it’s too late.

Day Twenty-Nine

St. Joseph is called “hope for the sick.” Now, you could say that about all saints, because they all bring God’s “salvation” (from the Latin salus, or “health”) to an infected world. The name “Jesus” means “God saves,” or “God makes whole,” “God makes healthy.” The saints provide Jesus to us, that is, they provide “health.” Our Lady is called “health of the sick,” and her husband is called “hope of the sick.” The mother brings health to her child (tenderly cleaning a skinned knee), while the father gives hope by reassuring his child that “Mamma will fix it all up for you.” We need both the steady support of our fathers and the skillful healing hands of our mothers.

Fr. Calloway relates the charming story of Zelie Martin, the mother of St. Therese of Lisieux. While still a nursing baby, Therese became deathly sick. Her mother knelt prayed to St. Joseph. “I do not often cry, but I was crying as I prayed,” she writes. The baby rallied a bit, but then stopped breathing. “She was so calm, so peaceful, that I thanked God for having her die so gently,” Zelie wrote. But after a quarter of an hour, “my little Therese opened her eyes and started to smile.” Therese, as we all know, smiled for the rest of her life, even during her final illness at age 24. She continues to smile from heaven, showering us with roses from God’s storehouses of grace. Smiling in the thick of physical illness is true health.
On page 203, Fr. Calloway describes half a dozen Catholic devotional traditions to St. Joseph for health, such as “St. Joseph’s table” and St. Joseph’s Mass on Wednesdays.

                                                                               Day Twenty-Eight

Today’s title for St. Joseph, “Comforter of the Afflicted,” is again a pretty poor translation from the Latin original. Solatium Miserorum means “solace for those in misery.” Let’s take both words in Latin.

1) “Solace” doesn’t just alleviate pain, as in “comfort.” Solace gives strength to bear the momentary affliction; solace helps us transform the misery into glory. Solace is something an encouraging father gives his children when they think they have run out of gas. A discouraged employee finds new strength in the reassuring words of a good supervisor; a disheartened athlete finds potency in the inspiring words of a good coach. St. Joseph is that good father to us, spurring us on rather than simply “comforting us.”

2) “Misery” is much more serious than mere “affliction.” We are all going to have miserable moments in the valley of tears. The secular world tells us that only losers suffer but Christians know that misery is inevitable this side of the grave. “Loved ones die, children rebel, and gravity will eventually take away your youthfulness, making you old and immobile,” Fr. Calloway writes. That last one (“hateful old age” in the words of Homer) is especially feared and hated by pagan cultures that expect nothing beyond death. Run to Joseph when you are in misery. He will not remove your misery, but he will give fatherly solace, helping you turn misery into glory and triumph, in Christ Jesus.

                                                                                Day Twenty-Seven

St. Joseph is the pillar of family life. He is the head, and Mary is the heart, of all families. God himself gave both of them this role in human history. Every Catholic church, which is a family of families, should have a statue of Mary on one side of Christ’s altar, and a statue of Joseph on the other side of that atlar. They are the pillars that support the great altar of family life, without which we perish.
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The other day I found a dusty and peeling statue of St. Joseph in our church basement. One of our wonderful parishioners, who is an artist, will restore it. In this statue, Joseph and Jesus have red hair and bright blue eyes (the Irish version of the Holy Family), but my artist friend (who is French), will make hair and eyes more appropriately Jewish. What I love about this statue how Joseph is holding the boy Jesus. He’s not just holding carpenter’s tools, but he is holding his son. St. Joseph, teach us how to hold our sons and daughters, so that we men too can become pillars of our families!

                                                                                Day Twenty-Six

St. Joseph is the “Guardian of Virgins,” having been assigned to guard the Virgin of Virgins. “From my childhood,” St. Therese says in today’s reading, "I prayed to St. Joseph to watch over me.... It seemed to me that I was well protected and completely sheltered from every danger.” Every little girl is a virgin, but consider the awful trauma caused to little boys and girls when they are exposed to sexual deviance at a vulnerable age. They cannot carry the burdens we learn to bear as adults, but public schools and library story hours and porn sites dump crushing weights onto their tender shoulders.

It is extremely difficult to recover from childhood exposure to pornography. But “if you walk with St. Joseph,” Fr. Calloway writes, “you will find less and less pleasure in filthy and perverse films,” in foul music, in repulsive books and jokes that degrade women and trivialize the human body. Devotion to St. Joseph will help you to regain your innocence.

St. Joseph, Guardian of Virgins, looks after the needs of consecrated women in particular. Fr. Calloway tells the charming and fascinating story of a mysterious staircase in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on page 189.

                                  Day Twenty-Five

In today’s reading on St. Joseph as “Glory of Domestic Life,” Fr. Calloway points to St. Teresa of Avila. She reformed the female Carmelites, who had become rather lazy in the 16th century. Spanish Carmelite monasteries had become something like upscale condos for wealthy women rather than simple domestic communities. To reform the Order, she called upon St. Joseph, and she named most of the sixteen communities she founded Convento de San Jose. “If you lovingly welcome St. Joseph into your home,” writes Fr. Calloway, “he will greatly bless your domestic life.”
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Six years ago I tried to establish a community of priests and brothers here in San Francisco, but I failed. There were many reasons that San Francisco still does not have supportive communities of diocesan priests. I thank God that the five of us currently at my rectory (four priests and one seminarian) pray twice a day together and take our meals in common, but how long will this last? What makes for stable domestic life, either of consecrated persons or of spouses and children? Certainly St. Joseph is a big part of stable family life. Perhaps what I did not do for the “San Francisco Oratory” was to put the whole effort under the patronage of St. Joseph. To welcome St. Joseph into our homes is to honor him daily in our devotions and to call upon his intercession. The Litany of St. Joseph, which we pray every day in these preparations, is a good daily or at least weekly prayer for families.

Day Twenty-Four

Three years ago I asked the men of my parish to establish a Knights of Columbus Council. There had been no men’s group in the parish for decades, and the men decided to name the Council “St. Joseph the Workman.” Over these 33 days, we are working towards May 1st, the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker (Opifex in Latin), which is gender neutral. But the Church translated that into English for many years as “workman,” which evokes images of powerful masculine hands, a carpenter’s apron over broad shoulders, the focused eyes, tightened lips, and set jaw of a manual laborer. St. Joseph was a man, as was Jesus, and it was their task to sanctify labor, which had become a curse for Adam’s sin (“by the sweat of your brow will you earn your bread….”).

In societies where technocrats and academics rule, manual labor is disdained or simply not acknowledged. Blue collar workers are patronized by our cultural elites as inferiors, people who have deplorably not succeeded in life. Athwart that stands St. Joseph the Workman. He is not a workaholic (that is, addicted to ceaseless activity simply to stave off meaninglessness or chasing vainly after “success”). Joseph’s work is not an end in itself, but a service to God’s glory and the sanctification of human life. Satan hates the fact, writes Fr. Calloway, that God made himself a man, capable of manual labor.

​One of my seminary teachers, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, told us one day that we had passed St. Joseph in the hallway this morning on the way to class. He was that workman we see every day but don’t notice—the janitor with the eastern European accent, the maintenance worker tightening steam pipes, the food service worker from Sicily. “Respect and love these men and women who serve you every day with their hands,” he told us. They are Joseph and Mary; they are Jesus.

                                                                                      Day Twenty-Three

Poverty is a lovely thing. I live a comfortable life, after almost thirty years as a priest, but when I was first ordained I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I can remember trying to fix my bike with a friend but couldn’t afford the part. “I don’t have any money!” I laughed. Just then the parish secretary handed me $50, the stipend for a funeral I did a few days before. “I have money!” I laughed again, and we knew it was a gift straight from the hand of God. Poverty is freedom and gratitude and trust. Poverty is a perpetual gift.
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Today we call upon St. Joseph as “lover of poverty.” The angel told him to leave Bethlehem, that night, for Egypt, for “Herod seeks to kill the child.” It was a good thing the Wise Men had just visited and left them some money! Notice, Fr. Calloway writes, that Joseph was so poor that the wealthy Wise Men did not even acknowledge his presence. But Joseph took the money, and his wife and son, and went to Egypt. He worked with wood and stone all his life, but “never saw the results of his hard work and sacrifice.” That too is poverty: not taking credit for, or even seeing, the fruits of one’s labors. “Joseph,” St. Bonaventure writes, “lived content in his poverty.”