We have a lot of different examples of holiness in the lives of the saints. Just this week, on Tuesday, we celebrated St Catherine of Siena, a Dominican lay woman who lived in the 14th century and who had an incredible influence on the Church and the Church leaders of that era, leading her to be named a Doctor of the Church in the late 20th century. Then, yesterday, we commemorated Pope Pius V, who was named pope in the era of the Protestant Reformation and who was entrusted to implement the reforms and renewal that came out of the Council of Trent. Today, we celebrate Joseph, the spouse of Mary, as St Joseph the worker. Pope Pius XII instituted this feast day in 1955 to foster devotion to St Joseph as a model of faith and holiness and to counter-balance the May Day celebrations of the communist countries of Europe. This feast day is inspired by Joseph’s life of holiness as the humble hard-working carpenter who has inspired the Catholic example of the worker for centuries, emphasizing the dignity and respect we have for human labor and the way it contributes to our families and our society. Beginning with the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, the dignity of human work has been celebrated as us participating in the creative work of God.
Just as St Joseph the carpenter and foster father of Jesus is a great example of the holiness of human labor for us in the modern world, we must remember that Jesus worked as a carpenter too. He learned carpentry from Joseph by working working with him. Jesus spent his early adult years working in Joseph’s carpentry shop before the start of his ministry. John Paul II stated in his encyclical On Human Work: “[Christ], while being God, became like us in all things devoted most of the years of his life on earth to manual work at the carpenter’s bench. This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent ‘Gospel of work’, showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” Later in the same document, John Paul II states: “the Church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work, to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated…”
In addition to this feast day of St Joseph the worker today and the feast day of Joseph the spouse of Mary on March 19, Pope Pius IX declared Saint Joseph the patron of the universal Church in 1870. Just as Paul and the other apostles and disciples in the Early Church are great examples of faith for us as heard in our readings from the Acts of the Apostles during the Easter season, we honor St Joseph today in his example of holiness and his example of the dignity of human work.
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