This piece was on Matt Warner's blog Blogma for March 19, 2010 the Feast of St. Joseph. He has looked into this great saint and has insights into what his life teaches us. See the original here.
Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Saint Joseph – the foster father to Jesus Christ and husband of Mary. He must have been doing something right and given a lot of grace to end up with such responsibility.
He is the patron saint of Fathers precisely because he serves as such a great example of one. There’s a lot we can learn from him.
Here’s a nice little video from Fr. James Martin about St. Joseph:
I also pulled these 5 things we can learn from St. Joseph from a good Fr. John A. Hardon article:
1. Humility
“Humility is the moral virtue that keeps a person from reaching beyond himself. It is the virtue that restrains the unruly desire for personal greatness and leads people to an orderly love of themselves based on a true appreciation of their position with respect to God and their neighbors. Religious humility recognizes one’s total dependence on God. Moral humility recognizes one’s creaturely equality with other human beings. Yet humility is not only opposed to pride. It is also opposed to immoderate self-abjection, which would fail to recognize God’s gifts and use them according to the will of God.”
2. Chastity
“Chastity is the virtue that moderates the desire for sexual pleasure according to the principles of faith. For married people, chastity moderates the desire in conformity with their life. For the unmarried people who wish to marry, the desire is moderated by abstention until (or unless) they get married. For those who resolve not to marry, the desire is totally sacrificed.”
3. Obedience
“Obedience is the test of our love of God. His laws are God’s way of enabling us to prove our love for Him; there is no obedience where there is no love, there is much obedience where there is much love.”
4. Prudence
“We are to be silent when it is clearly necessary to do something and not talk about it. For some people talk and more talk is an excuse for doing God’s will, but speech is no substitute for actions.”
“As an act of virtue, prudence involves three stages of mental cooperation: to take counsel carefully with oneself and from others; to judge correctly on the basis of the evidence at hand; and to direct the rest of one’s activity according to the norms determined after a prudent judgment has been made.”
5. Love for his family – Jesus and Mary
“Saint Joseph deserves our admiration for his other virtues, but he is to be especially imitated in his love for Jesus and Mary.”
“Joseph put his love to work. He did not merely tell Jesus and Mary that he loved them. He acted out his love. He lived it.”
Those are just a few little snippets from it. Read the whole thing here for many more insights from the life of St. Joseph.
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