This weekend we’ll anticipate St Joseph’s Day (Monday, March 19) by celebrating his feast on Sunday. Rose Sunday seems a good day for keeping a feast. So we’ll be setting up St Joseph’s Table (after which this site is named), with tasty pasta dishes, antipastos, festive breads, Italian creams, gelatos and wine. This is the way to keep a feast during a fast!
The veneration of St Joseph dates from before 800 AD, when he was celebrated as the “guardian of the Lord.” Over the centuries he’s been seen as the ideal of masculine chastity, the protector of families and in 1870, Pope Pius XII declared him the Patron of the Universal Church (he also has become the upside-down-underground intercessor for those Americans anxious to sell their homes!—if you do’t know what I mean by this, don’t ask; some things it’s better not to know). Among the Eastern Orthodox churches, St Joseph is called on as “the righteous Joseph the Betrothed.” St Ephrem the Syrian depicts St Joseph as crying: “Who hath given me the Son of the Most High to be a Son to me?”
There’s much to ponder about St Joseph, much to emulate and much to inspire.
St Joseph embodies masculine chastity, a never-too-popular virtue. If you Google “masculinity,” you won’t find “chastity” linked to it. Chastity hints at anemic and unmanly connotations, with androgyny and latent homosexuality lurking just below its surface. The devil has done his work well.
For many, chastity and celibacy are the same thing. They’re not. It’s possible to be chaste but not celibate, and celibate, but not chaste. All Christians are called to chastity—including every Christian man—but not all Christians are called to celibacy.
Chastity comes from the Latin castus, meaning “pure.” Bearing that in mind, I can be celibate because I might not have the opportunity to be otherwise, but I am chaste by choice. There’s nothing manly about the indulgence of unchastity—nothing challenging nor disciplined—but anybody who follows St Joseph’s chastity soon discovers how easy wrassling alligators is by comparison. Chastity is limp-wristed only to those who’ve never wrassled with unchastity.
“Righteous Joseph the Betrothed” wrassled. He wrassled with doubts about St Mary (and her chastity!), with doubts about what God was doing to him, and with God’s unique call to him to be the “guardian of the Lord.” He was called to be the chaste and celibate spouse of the Virgin. No doubt he wrassled with that, too.
By grace he succeeded. St Joseph lived up to his calling and more. Because he followed where God led, because he took up the castus to which he was called, the Lord opened Joseph’s heart: “Who hath given me the Son of the Most High to be a Son to me?”
His calling to chastity was a high one. Ours is no less.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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