Joseph, you heard the secret of Mary with emotion …
Troubled, you dreamt and you heard :
“Do not fear to take Mary home as your wife!”

You lent an ear to the decree of Caesar Augustus
ordering the census of all the inhabited world …
and you parted for the city of David!
You experienced with pain their refusal to receive you at the inn
that had no place for you and Mary …
Did you hear the angels sing
“Glory to God?”
The Gospel does not say …

But you listened as the Angel said to you in a dream :
“Rise, flee to Egypt!”

After the death of Herod, your fine-tuned ear again made you hear in a dream :
“Go back to the land of Israel.”

 

With what gentleness you heard Jesus say to you

“Daddy – Daddy …”

And He watched you bless
the bread and cut it at each meal …
The noise of the plane smoothing the wood did not prevent you
from listening to the neighbours in Nazareth …
When Jesus was 12 years old, you listened to Mary when
she found him again in the Temple :

“Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously …”

Then the Gospel speaks no more of you …
As we express our prayer before you with faith, hear it with kindness!

Hail Joseph,

you whom the divine grace has filled.
The Lord rested in your arms

and grew before your eyes

You are blessed among men,

and Jesus, the Divine Child of your virginal spouse, is blessed.

O Saint Joseph, given as father to the son of God

protect us in all our worries about our families,

our relatives, our health, our work, our employment,

our voluntary work, our material and financial worries,

and deign to come to our aid at the hour of our death.
Amen.

 

(This statue of St Joseph watched over the community of Bagnac (founded in 1833) until its closure in 2002. Sr St Etienne then confided it to me as I often went there for the chaplaincy. During the Second World War, Sr st Etienne was held at gun-point during a whole night while German soldiers searched the house … in the dormitory 1 (or 2) Jewish children were hidden, frightened, under a bed … St Joseph was there!)