Solemnity of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Readings: 2 Sm 7:4-5a.12-14a.16; Ps 89:2-5.27.29; Rm 4:13.16-18.22; Matt 1:16.18-21.24a

It’s fairly obvious from the Infancy Narratives found in both Saint Matthew’s and Saint Luke’s Gospels that Jesus’ Davidic lineage comes through Saint Joseph. Nonetheless, Joseph, the very end of whose genealogy marks the start of our Gospel reading for this Solemnity, remains an intriguing figure.

It was only in the nineteenth century that popular devotion to Saint Joseph really took off. If Saint Patrick’s Day is the “Irish” day, then Saint Joseph’s Day is the Italian day. But since 1870, Joseph has been Patron of the Universal Church. Being a Solemnity, today is a holy day of obligation in traditionally Catholic countries.

In the words of Saint Paul from our second reading, Saint Joseph is certainly to be numbered among “those who follow the faith of Abraham.”¹ Like Abraham, Joseph led his family from their home to a foreign land. Unlike Abraham, when the danger they were fleeing subsided, Joseph led his family back to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants.

If we adhere to Matthew’s narrative, God communicated to Saint Joseph by means of angels who appeared in his dreams. Joseph was meticulously faithful to the divine direction he was given. We learn of his first dream in our Gospel reading today.

It isn’t hard to imagine the consternation Joseph must've felt upon learning that Mary, his betrothed, was pregnant. It’s clear Joseph knew that the child was not his. He understood how pregnancies normally occur.

Do you think that if Joseph had been angry, resentful, and bitter upon learning the woman to whom was betrothed was pregnant that he would’ve been receptive to the revelation he was given concerning the child’s conception? Do you think that he might not have received it in the first place?

Even though Joseph “was a righteous man” and, like the Blessed Virgin, no doubt chosen by God for this very important vocation, like her, he was free to decide how to respond to circumstances.² You miss a lot if you fail to see that God is a big risk taker! What’s riskier than love in any of its forms?

A statue of Saint Joseph in Rome, by Paul Haring for CNS

Rather than seethe with anger and resentment, upon learning that Mary was pregnant, Joseph was concerned about protecting both her dignity and her safety. You see, genuine love is selfless. It is about desiring the good of the other, even above your own good. Joseph gives us an example of how to move this from a nice sentiment to a living reality. It is no small matter that he is forced to confront.

To mark the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Pope Pius IX declaring Saint Joseph Patron of the Church Universal, on 8 December 2020, which is also the Solemnity of the Immaculate Concepion, Pope Francis promulgated his Apostolic Letter on Saint Joseph, Patris Corde- “With a Father’s Heart.” I recommend Patris Corde to you. It is an exquisite reflection on Saint Joseph by someone with a deep devotion to this righteous man.

After noting that every Catholic prayerbook contains prayers to Saint Joseph and that each Wednesday as well as the entire month of March are to dedicated to him, just as Saturdays and the month of May are dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Pope Francis revealed in a footnote to Patris Corde that each day for more than forty years, at the end of Morning Prayer, he “recited a prayer to Saint Joseph” from a nineteenth century prayerbook published by a Congregation of French sisters.

Pope Francis noted that this prayer, “expresses devotion and trust, and even poses a certain challenge to Saint Joseph”:

Glorious Patriarch Saint Joseph, whose power makes the impossible possible, come to my aid in these times of anguish and difficulty. Take under your protection the serious and troubling situations that I commend to you, that they may have a happy outcome. My beloved father, all my trust is in you. Let it not be said that I invoked you in vain, and since you can do everything with Jesus and Mary, show me that your goodness is as great as your power. Amen³

In addition to being Patron of the Universal Church, Saint Joseph is the patron of a happy death, the patron of workers (the Church observes the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker on 1 May), Guardian of the Redeemer. And last but not least, Saint Joseph is the Terror of demons.

So, don’t hesitate to entrust cares and concerns to Saint Joseph’s intercession. As Sacred Scripture teaches, “The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.”⁴

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1 Romans 4:16.^↩
2 Matthew 1:19.^↩
3 Pope Francis. Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde, footnote 10. Promulgated 8 December 2020.^↩
4 James 5:16.^↩

"Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord"

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b.6-7.10-13a; Psalm 23:1-6; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

"Not as man sees does God see," the prophet Samuel is told as he tries to determine which of Jesse's seven sons to anoint, making him king of Israel to replace Saul (who was not yet dead). What man sees is the outward appearance, he is told, "but the LORD looks into the heart."

To see things clearly requires light. Christ is the Light of World, the One who illuminates this present darkness. His Light is what allows you to see things how they really are and for what they really are. One of the best "takes" on Jesus' Transfiguration, which we hear each year on the Second Sunday of Lent, is that Peter, James, and John get a glimpse of reality. For a brief, nearly unbearable moment, reality absorbs them.

To truly see requires being given the gift of true sight. This allows you to see through/beyond appearances. Appearances can be deceptive. If you've ever been taken in by a phony, you know what this means. Phoniness fades, authenticity remains. To judge by appearances, the authentic person is usually not the most outwardly expressive or ardent. The most ardent are usually the phonies. Being inauthentic often consists not only of trying fool others but fooling oneself.

In today's Gospel, it is the man born blind who, having been enlightened by Christ, who truly sees. Those who insist they can see are blind to the reality of who Jesus really is. So, despite insisting they can see, they remain blind, engulfed by the darkness.

After being baptized during the Easter Vigil, the Elect will be presented with a candle, lit directly from the Paschal Candle. The Candle is presented to the godparent of the newly baptized person, with the words, "Receive the Light of Christ." Once all the newly baptized are holding their lit candles, lit from the same Source, the presider prays:

You have been enlightened by Christ.
Walk always as children of the light...

After this, the candles that the already baptized have are relit, also from the Paschal candle (though not directly). We then renew our baptismal promises. This is that for which Lent serves as preparation.

So, once again, you find yourself at a moment of decision. The real questions are direct, requiring a simple "I do." What these boil down to are- Do I really want to be like Christ? Am I committed to walking and living in the Light of Christ? This is your summons to awake, to rise from the dead, to be illumined by Christ, who is the Light of the world.

The twenty-third psalm, which is one of the best known and best loved of all the psalms, one that bears memorizing and meditating on over and over, provides a poetic excursus on what living this way looks like.

"But for now we live on these streets"

Friday the thirteenth!!! As noted in my last post, I am not supertitious. Superstition is really quite a pagan disposition toward reality, not a Christian one.

Is thirteen considered unlucky because that is how many steps to the gallows or are there thirteen steps to the gallows because that number is unlucky?

As I have noted a few times over this Lenten season, mortality is a reality of which one must remain mindful. This is the point of the "Remember you are dust..." exhortation on Ash Wednesday. After a certain age, however, one is frequently reminded. Viewed strictly in the horizontal plane, we're all making our way to the gallows.

Even for someone who believes in and has hope for eternal life, death remains the horizon over which it is impossible to see. Let's be honest, even as people of faith, apart from resurrection, we don't really know what happens after we die. We especially don't know what we will experience between death and resurrection. Since we don't believe that we are souls trapped in bodies, a thoroughly Gnostic notion, what might it be like to be a disembodied soul?

I am not going to attempt to answer that question.

Momento mori- Remember death. Not only will your mortal life not last forever, it is very short. This is true even if you live to be 100!

Life's shortness should cause everyone to ponder life's meaning. This begins with the uncomfortable question, Does life have meaning? Having a meaning is what gives life purpose. Purpose gives direction. Being Christian is not just a way of life but a mode of being. Our direction is following Christ.

Just as practicing Christians tend to recoil at "I'm spiritual but not religious," Catholics are equally dismissive of the dichotomy between religion and relationship made by Evangelicals. But for a Christian, religion (i.e., right worship) requires relationship. Hence, it is the Catholic both/and. If it's just religious observance, then you are only going through the motions. One shouldn't hold onto either horn of a false dilemma. And, believe it or not, it isn't always better to go through the motions.

There are no small number of people who were raised Catholic, became Evangelicals, and returned to the Church. Most will tell you that detour was an important part of following Christ. I think this observation is important because Lent isn't about being more religious for a concentrated period of time. It's about opening yourself up to God's grace, seeking a deeper relationship with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

While I would never dissuade someone from adhering to the five precepts of the Church and, in fact always urge them to do so, I would say that sometimes, maybe especially during Lent, religious observance can be a dam rather than a channel of divine grace. I don't mind repeating this Friday that what the Lord is helping me with during this holy season is being more gentle with myself and extending that gentleness to others.

Our traditio for this Friday of the Third Week of Lent is Rick Elias' "A Man of No Reputation," which was recorded on The Jesus Record. It was a song slated to come out an album Rich Mullins was working on at the time of his death. Instead, it came out on a posthumous record.

The lyrics from this song I used as the title for this post reminded me of Madeleine Delbrêl's "We, the Ordinary People of the Streets." In this piece she insisted:

We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness

Year 2: Monday of the Third Week of Lent

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15ab; Psalm 42:2-3; 43:3-4; Luke 4:24-30

Rather than to Israel, Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel could easily refer to the Church. This is an unpleasant possibility, is it not? It was certainly unpleasant for those in the synagogue of Jesus’ hometown.

Too often it is lost on us how unassuming Jesus seemed to most people. Our Gospel yesterday clearly showed that apart from being a Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman, He did not seem particularly noteworthy as He sat by Jacob's well.

It would be difficult to think of how unassuming the Lord would’ve seemed to the people of His native place, many of whom were no doubt His relatives. Knowing someone, encountering them often, speaking with them, observing them closely tends to remove their mystique. There is a lot of truth in the saying, familiarity breeds contempt. At the very least, it often breeds indifference.

This observation, of course, serves the theological point that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. Yes, He is consubstantial with the Father, true God from true God, but, through the womb of the Blessed Virgin, He is also consubstantial with us, truly human.

What tended to set Jesus apart are the seemingly outrageous things He said. To the Samaritan woman at the well, He said directly that He is the Christos, the Christ, the Messiah, the One for whom she was waiting to tell her everything.¹

What caused the kerfuffle in today’s Gospel is Jesus proclaiming to His fellow townspeople the same thing, namely that He is the Messiah. He did this by reading a passage from Isaiah about the Messianic age and then giving a very short homily: “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”² This prompted someone to say, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”³

Over two millennia, the Church has had many unassuming prophets: the deacon, Francis of Assisi, to name perhaps the most popular and radical one. Closer to our own day, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Madeline Delbrêl. In the mode of Pope John Paul II, we might even recognize the Protestant, Dietrich Bohoeffer and Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, who perished, as did so many European Jews, in Auschwiz.

In his Angelus address yesterday, Pope Leo quoted Hillesum. Talking about the thirst, the desire, that constitutes our humanity at its deepest level, the Holy Father, cited her diary, where she wrote about sometimes drawing near to God before admitting “more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again.”⁴

Our Lenten project each year is dig God out again. It is to prepare ourselves to renew our baptismal promises at Easter. When taken rightly, this is no sentimental journey. The question before us, especially now when so many terrible things are happening with some trying to be covered with a Christian veneer, is Do I really want to be like Christ? Have I decided to really be like Him?

One’s answer is revealed by whether one takes stock of oneself to identify those things that need to change for such a transformation to occur. Do I practice the disciplines of Christ as an apprentice would to master anything else? Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving aren’t just for Lent.

A Christian is one who, far from being put off by them, believes Jesus’ outrageous claims. A Christian believes He is the Lord, not a liar or a lunatic. But what is the point of believing Jesus is Lord if you don’t commit yourself to living, even now, in God’s kingdom, seeking to make it a present reality?

Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino insisted, “Forgetting the poor has gone hand in hand with forgetting the Kingdom of God.” Referring to the Church’s early conciliar history, which coincided with the Church being accommodated (some insist co-opted) by the empire, Sobrino asserted: “By the time of the fourth-century conciliar debates it is clear that the Kingdom of God plays no role whatsoever in Christology.”⁵

This is why being a disciple is so very important in every age. Following Christ shows that His humanity matters as much as His divinity, not more and not less. Being truly human means being like Jesus.⁶ Being His disciple means endeavoring, as scripture enjoins, “to live [just] as he lived.”⁷

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1 See John 4:25-26.^↩
2 See Luke 4:16-19.21.^↩
3 See Luke 4:22.^↩
4 Pope Leo XIV. Angelus Address, 8 March 2026^↩
6 Jon Sobrino. “The Kingdom of God and the Theological Dimension of the Poor,” in Who Do You Say That I Am?: Confessing the Mystery of Christ, Ed. John C. Cavadini and Laura Holt, 109-145.^↩
6 Second Vatican Council. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et spes], sec. 22. 1 John 2:5-6.^↩
7 1 John 2:5-6.^↩

Quenching Christ's thirst

Gospel: John 4:5-42

The major theme of today's readings is thirst. Almost without fail, our focus tends to be on how much or how little we thirst for God. If you're not as thirsty as the world's most interesting man says you should be, then something is wrong. This is, of course is true. Who doesn't long for more? But it's also something you can't fix on your own.

If one takes the lovely Preface for the Eucharistic Prayer specfic to this passage from Saint John's Gospel, which is geared toward Christian initiation, what it tells you is that Christ thirsts for you. Not only is the liturgy the primary place for encountering Sacred Scripture, it is also prima theologia.

Let's step back, or rather, step forward, moving from the fourth chapter of Saint John's Gospel to the nineteenth. It is here that Jesus says, as He hangs dying on the cross, "I thirst" (John 19:28). This phrase was adopted by Saint Teresa of Calcutta as much more than a motto. These words constitute the foundation for the mission of the Missionaries of Charity. "I thirst" is also the Fifth of the Lord's Seven Last Words.

You can't "get" faith. No one can give you faith. You can't give faith to anyone. As a theological virtue, faith is a gift from God.

This Preface notes that prior to His encounter with this woman at Jacob's well, Jesus "had already created the gift of faith within her." Continuing, we hear that "so ardently did he thirst for her faith, that he kindled in her the fire of divine of love." To ardently thirst for her faith, which created in her, is a way of saying He ardently thirsted for her.

How the Lord kindled the fire of divine love in this Samaritan woman unfolds over the thirty-eight verses from the fourth chapter of the Gospel According to Saint John that comprise our Gospel for today. He lit this flame by gently pointing out how unsuccessful she had been at finding love. The fact she was then with someone, even if in an illicit arrangement, shows she still hadn't given up.

There is no shame in wanting to be loved and to love. This desire constitutes our humanity. This is why, at some point or another, love makes fools of nearly all of us.

At its deepest level, the Good News is that you are always already loved with an unquenchable, unfathomable love. "God," after all, "is love" (1 John 4:8.16). "In this is love," we read elsewhere in the Johannine corpus, "not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). God loves you and there's nothing you can do about it!

So, before you ever thirst for Him, the Lord thirsts for you. Without His thirst for you, you couldn't thirst for Him. And He can't help but thirst for you.

To quote the usually neglected first part of the sentence that contains Saint Augustine's massively overused phrase, found near the beginning his Confessions: "You have stirred in us the desire to praise you, for you have made us for yourself. . ." (Book I, Chapter 1).

Year A Third Sunday of Lent: Thristy

I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ.

      And hope does not disappoint. . .

I am he. . .

Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, Gustave Doré, ca. 1880 (Public Domain)

     But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves. . .

Saint Saturus

Even though it is an optional memorial on the Roman calendar, each year I personally observe the Memorial of Saints Perpetua & Felicity during my celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours. I do so especially by praying the Office of Readings. While none of these are the second reading for the Office of Readings for this liturgical memorial, every year I read one of Saint Augustine's sermons for this observance of the martrydom of his fellow North African Christians (Sermons 280-282).

As to the second reading for the Office of readings for today's memorial, I was struck today by an aspect of this passage "From the story of the death of the holy martyrs of Carthage" that had never really hit me before, focused as I was on the heroic virtue shown by Perpetua. It has to do with the martyr Saturus, who is certainly Saint Saturus.

Entering the arena, by Fyodor Bronnikov, 1869

Serving at the colisieum on the day of this gruesome spectacle, was the Roman soldier Pudens. Apparently, Pudens, too, was a Christian. After being savaged by the hungry leopard who was set upon them, Saturus told Pudens not be frightened by what he was witnessing but to let his faith be strengthened by these things.

Saturus then asked Pudens to hand him "the little ring" Pudens was wearing on one of his fingers. Pudens did so, "After soaking [the ring] in his wound," Saturus returned it to the soldier "as a keepsake." The soldier was gifted a relic.

Saturus, who this account tells us was the first to die, is last seen helping a badly wounded Perpetua. While I admit to being more than a little biased in this regard, Saturus' words and actions strike me as more than a little diaconal.

What follows is an addendum to my original post:

Thinking about Pudens watching his sisters and brothers being devoured by a feral, hungry leopard while serving the power subjecting them to this horrific death, kind of epitomizes cognitive dissonance. Many Christians today find themselves in a predicament similar to that this soldier serving the empire.

What unfolds before this Christian Roman soldier's eyes is nothing less than the kingdom of God, as the Lord Himself taught and lived it, versus the kingdoms of this world. In worldly, existential, terms, winning for Christians often looks like losing- "if you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!"

But, Saturus speaks words of hope to his brother who is working on behalf of the power putting him to such a gruesome death while giving him a bloody keepsake to strengthen him. One wonders, strengthen him for what?