Feast of the Holy Family 2020
At his installation in 2013, Pope Francis reflected on the role of St. Joseph as protector. As the Pope recounted, the one who acts as the father to Jesus, is the one that:
“From the time of his betrothal to Mary until the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem, . . . is there at every moment with loving care. As the spouse of Mary, he is at her side in good times and bad, on the journey to Bethlehem for the census and in the anxious and joyful hours when she gave birth; amid the drama of the flight into Egypt and during the frantic search for their child in the Temple; and later in the day-to-day life of the home of Nazareth, in the workshop where he taught his trade to Jesus.”[1]
Now, nearly 8 years after his installation, and on the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church, Pope Francis has announced that the coming year in the life of the Church will be a Year of St Joseph, from 8 December of this year to 8 December 2021, a year on which specially to enter the spirit of this man so much a part of the Christmas story we are celebrating these days.
The catalyst for this invitation lay in Pope Francis’ perspective during the COVID pandemic, when, as he writes,
“we experienced amid the crisis how our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people; people often overlooked. People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone . . . How many people daily exercise patience and offer hope, taking care not to spread panic, but shared responsibility. How many fathers, mothers, grandparents and teaches are showing our children, in small everyday ways, how to accept and deal with a crisis by adjusting their routines, looking ahead and encouraging the practice of prayer . . . Each of us [then] can discover in Joseph – the man who goes unnoticed, a daily, discreet and hidden presence – an intercessor, a support and guide in times of trouble. St Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden or in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation.”[2]
Pope Francis identifies a number of attributes of Joseph as beloved, tender and loving, obedient, accepting, working. However, one that stands out for me personally is the attribute that Francis identifies as ‘creatively courageous.’ Creative courage: this, Francis writes, “emerges especially in the way we deal with difficulties. In the face of difficulty, we can either give up and walk away, or somehow engage with it. At times, difficulties bring out resources we did not even think we had.” And it was precisely because of his creative courage that Joseph could exercise his fatherhood as the one who protects. We might, at first, think of protection as a certain kind of maintaining the status quo: we keep safe what we see before us. However, we also protect another by drawing out the true identity of another, and enabling that identity to flourish. In this way we are protecting not just the physical circumstance of another, but far more significantly we are protecting the very spirit of another.
And we can only protect the spirit of another by calling it forth, so to speak – by giving it the space that it requires to identify itself and to grow as itself. And, therefore, one of the primary ways we exercise our vocation to be protectors is to be people of encouragement. Encouragement is a word that in recent use loses its full import. To encourage is ‘to draw out the heart of the other.’ It is to bring people home to their heart. In this sense, it is to free people’s heart to become fully itself. Encouragement is the capacity to enable others to listen to their heart; to identify the nature of their heart; so as to be able to follow their heart.
We protect one another by truly encouraging each other. A father protects his children by genuinely encouraging them. There is no greater gift than a father can give his child than to encourage them to become truly who they are. As Pope Francis writes, “When fathers refuse to live the lives of their children for them, new and unexpected vistas open up. Every child is the bearer of a unique mystery that can only be brought to light with the help of a father who respects that child’s freedom.”[3] One of the most marvellous things is to discover that our father has become our mentor. Some years ago, I came across an article on this quality of mentoring by a Damon Young.[4] Young highlights that a mentor is not simply teacher, role model, or friend but something singular.
“The job of a teacher is chiefly to relay information; to teach skills, or pass on facts . . . but one can be a teacher to a class of students, and mentor to none.
Neither is a role model a mentor. Role models are exemplars – they represent, and they possess, the virtues we want to embody. But they can do this at a distance, and unknowingly . . . Mentoring requires proximity and intimacy. And a mentor is not necessarily a friend. Friends are crucial for a good life, for shared joys, caring advice and moral support. But even our closest, most trusted friends cannot always mentor us. They often lack that first vital trait of the mentor: experience.”
Young concludes: “Mentoring can be as simple as a slap on the back or wild mockery, or a punch in the face. A weekly coffee can do more than a corporate mentoring program. And we needn’t be gods.” And this last piece of advice is re-assuring. As Pope Francis wrote several weeks ago when declaring the Year of Joseph, “Fathers are not born, but made. A man does not become a father simply by bringing a child into the world, but by taking up the responsibility to care for that child. Whenever a man accepts responsibility for the life of another, in some way he becomes a father to that person.”[5] The relationship we have with our children and that which we have with our fathers is always complex. Indeed, it is mark of our own time that there exists a great wound in the relationship between fathers and their sons in particular. Sons do not know their fathers who are largely absent from their lives, and fathers are not as involved in the lives of their sons, and sons pay a great price as a result. However, Joseph, the one given to protect the life of Jesus, brings us back to reclaim that central vocation of fatherhood – both to protect and to encourage, to know the difference, and to learn how to protect by encouraging that which still awaits to be seen.
What we learn here is what we can take into the whole of our lives. Preaching at his Installation as Bishop of Rome, taking place on the Solemnity of St Joseph in 2013, Francis observed:
“The vocation of being a “protector is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world . . . It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness. In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!”
On this Feast of the Holy Family in the Octave of Christmas, and now in the Year of St Joseph, let us therefore pray with Pope Francis,
“Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer,
Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
To you God entrusted his only Son.
In you Mary placed her trust;
With you Christ became man.
Blessed Joseph, to us too,
Show yourself a father
And guide us in the path of life.
Obtain for us grace, mercy and courage,
And defend us from every evil. Amen.”
[1] Pope Francis, Homily at Mass at Beginning of Petrine Ministry as Bishop of Rome, 19 March 2013, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papa-francesco_20130319_omelia-inizio-pontificato.html
[2] Pope Francis, Patris Corde: “On the 150th Anniversary of the Proclamation of St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church,” Apostolic Letter, 8 December 2020.
[3] Patris Corde, n.7.
[4] See Damon Young, “In moments like these, we need mentors,” The Sydney Morning Herald (26 April 2010).
[5] Patris Corde, n.7.
