Saint Saint Joseph the Worker

Feast day: May 1

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Work was the daily expression of love in the life of the Family of Nazareth.

Biography

According to the canonical Gospels, Joseph was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who was married to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was the legal father of Jesus. Joseph is venerated as Saint Joseph in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, Anglicanism and Lutheranism. In Catholic traditions, Joseph is regarded as the patron saint of workers and is associated with various feast days. The month of March is dedicated to Saint Joseph. Pope Pius IX declared him to be both the patron and the protector of the Catholic Church, in addition to his patronages of the sick and of a holy death, due to the belief that he died in the presence of Jesus and Mary. Joseph has become patron of various dioceses and places. Being a patron saint of virgins, he is venerated as "most chaste". The veneration of the pure and most Chaste Heart of Joseph has, in contrast to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, no liturgical cultus, but is a private devotion. Several venerated images of Saint Joseph have been granted a decree of canonical coronation by a pontiff. Religious iconography often depicts him with lilies or spikenard. With the present-day growth of Mariology, the theological field of Josephology has also grown and since the 1950s centers for studying it have been formed. The first appearance of Joseph is in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, often dated from around 80-90 AD. Each contains a genealogy of Jesus showing ancestry from King David, but through different sons; Matthew follows the major royal line from Solomon, while Luke traces another line back to Nathan, another son of David and Bathsheba. Consequently, all the names between David and Joseph are different. Like the two differing genealogies, the infancy narratives appear only in Matthew and Luke and take different approaches to reconciling the requirement that the Messiah be born in Bethlehem with the tradition that Jesus in fact came from Nazareth.

Patronages

Sources: Wikipedia (9). Wikipedia content used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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