FEAST OF SAINT JOSEPH, HUSBAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY: Instruction of St. Augustine

 

FEAST OF SAINT JOSEPH, HUSBAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY:

Instruction of St. Augustine

 

The Carmelite nun Sister Clare Mary was greatly 

responsible for Pope Clement X raising the rank of St. 

Joseph's feast 19 March to that of a double of the second 

class and providing a revised office for that feast.

It was not misleading of the angel to say to Joseph: Do not be afraid to take thy wife Mary to thyself. Although she had not known his bed and never would, Joseph could still call her his wife, because at her betrothal she had pledged herself to be his wife. The term had not become obsolete or deceptive, merely there had been no carnal union in the past and there would be none in the future. She was more of a joy to her husband as a virgin, and the relationship was a more sacred and wonderful thing. As her Fruit came to her without her husband's help, their partnership did not extend to the realm of childbearing, but they were partners all the same because they had pledged their word to each other.

 

Because this marriage resting on plighted troth was a true marriage, they were deservedly called Christ's parents. It was not simply that Mary was called his mother but that Joseph was called his father, just as he was called the husband of Christ's mother. He was both these things spiritually, not physically. But whether we envisage Joseph as Christ's father spiritually or Mary as his mother both spiritually and physically, we have to admit that both of them were the parents of the lowly element in him, not of the exalted: they were the parents of his weak human nature, not of his divinity and his strength. The gospel is not misrepresenting the situation when it says: His mother said to him, My Son, why hast thou treated us so? Think, what anguish of mind thy father and I have endured, searching for thee. As he wanted to make it clear that they were not his only parents, and that he also had a Father who had begotten him without his mother's aid, he answered: What reason had you to search for me? Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to my Father? Fearing that this question might give a false impression, and that people might think Christ meant that Mary and Joseph were not his parents at all, the evangelist goes on to say: These words which he spoke to them were beyond their understanding; but he went down with them on their journey to Nazareth, and lived there in subjection to them. l Thus, if we ask who he was subject to, the answer is: his parents. And if we ask who was subject to his parents, the answer is: that same Jesus Christ, who though his nature is, from the first, divine, yet did not see, in the rank of Godhead, a prize to be coveted. If, then, he lived in subjection to Mary and Joseph, who were far below the rank of Godhead, it must have been because he dispossessed himself, and took the nature of a slave, which was his parents' nature. But since when Mary bore him she was not reaping a harvest sown by Joseph, it is clear that they could not both have been the parents of his servile nature unless they actually were husband and wife, even though they had had no carnal knowledge of each other.

 

It was right, too, that when the lists of Christ's ancestors came to be drawn up, the series of generations should be made to center on Joseph, as in fact it was. Otherwise, an injustice would have been done to the male partner in the marriage, the more prominent of the two. This did not involve tampering with the truth. Joseph too, as well as Mary, belonged to the line which the prophets had said would produce the Christ—they were both of the line of David.