How to Treasure St. Joseph Through His Litany (Day One)

This is the first in a series of articles that will run for 30 consecutive days! Each day, The Lord will unveil the silent beauty of St. Joseph through one line of his Litany. The Litany of St. Joseph is a stunning, illuminating prayer. In fact, the Church grants us a partial indulgence (under the normal requirements) just for reciting it.

By The Consonancy of Our Youth

“The Immaculate Heart of Mary burns with love, radiates beauty, is tender and soft with feminine sensitivity, and aches and bleeds with compassion.”

Fr. Boniface Hicks, OSB

It is so right, so good, that we begin our love of St. Joseph by looking at Mary. That is why in the Litany of St. Joseph the first line (after the introductory prayers) reads “Hail Mary, Pray for Us.”

Why begin there? Why not begin with Joseph himself, or with Jesus?

Because, for Joseph, it all started with Mary.

Try not to think of Joseph as an old man. While the Church has no official teaching on his age, and you are free to think what you want on the matter, I invite you to enter the heart of St. Joseph as he probably was: young, strong, fervent, with all the vivacity and desires of a man his age.

His heart was on fire for God. He, like some of the Jews of his time, chose to dedicate his life to God as a virgin for life, for he remembered the prophecy of Isaiah:

"Behold,
 A virgin shall conceive
And bear a son,
And shall call his name Immanu-el."

Mary, being Immaculate and full of love of God above all creatures, did the exact same thing. She chose to remain a virgin all her life for God. This gift was not only sexual but also an interior gift of self. Her heart was a blaze of compassion, tenderness, and beauty. Both of them, before they knew or loved each other, gave themselves over completely to the Lord. That’s why she was the only one who could ever capture the heart of Joseph.

That’s why he fell in love with her.

Come What Sorrow Can

“O, what pure love the virgin spouses had for each other! More than Adam and Eve in the early days of their innocence, Joseph and Mary were the delight of the Lord, the ecstasy of angels in the humble home of Nazareth.”

Blessed Bartolo Longo

How amazing that God should confirm virginity in marriage. We must not be unbelieving, since this same God willed the Incarnation, thereby confirming divinity in humanity. God is full of surprises.

Joseph and Mary suffered and loved much in their life together, especially when Jesus came into their lives. One could recount the myriad of sorrows in both their lives and in His that would cause them grief and pain. Despite every pain and heartache, what Blessed Bartolo Longo says is true. The house of Nazareth was heaven on Earth.

Mary and Joseph were in perpetual adoration of Jesus, living with them and being obedient to them! For his part, Our Lord must have found a great comfort in his parents. Especially – this is not emphasized nearly enough – as they imaged the love of God by loving one another.

“For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”

Matthew 19:8

The Marriage of True Minds

Think of the heartache Christ felt at confronting the Pharisees’ question about divorce. He, better than anyone, knew why God made men and women, and why he gave the one to the other in marriage. In the beginning, Adam had rapturous affection for Eve. His words were those of man fully in love:

"At last! Bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh.
Her name shall be Woman,
For she was taken out of Man."

Joseph saw Mary that way. They loved each other like God yearned for men and women to love each other, from the beginning. Christ would have cherished the memory of his parents’ love all throughout his life.

The Fault in Us

“Mary and Joseph brought to their espousals not only their vows of virginity but also two hearts with greater torrents of love than had ever before coursed through human breasts.”

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

Most people today do not think of the Holy Family as romantic. They are not synonymous with passion or zeal. Rather, they are thought as pious and respectful. If I dare say it, dull. Many of us struggle to believe that the two people so devoted to God could also be so on fire for each other. But they were on fire. It is us, not they, who lack romance.

One stumbling block in understanding their fire of love is that we virtually always see them as parents. Look up images of Mary and Joseph – you will most often see them gazing upon or encircling Jesus. Their eyes are rarely, if ever, on one another. A modern person looks at that and sees either a clear sign that they cared about God to the exclusion of each other, or that, like many parents, they started neglecting each other out of infatuation for the child.

I can assure you, there is something more wondrous at play.

But Never Doubt I Love

To understand it, we have to reexamine the meaning of companionship. As Bishop Barron reminds us in This is My Body, “Aristotle remarked that friendship will never last so long as the friends are simply in love with each other. In time, such a relationship will devolve into mutual egotism.” We see this everywhere today, in the wreckage of modern relationships between men and women.

Bishop Barron goes on: “rather, a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall together in love with a transcendent third, with some great value or good that lies beyond the grasp of either of them.”

This, my beloved brothers and sisters, is the heart of the mystery of the greatest human love story ever told. Every time we see Joseph and Mary pictured surrounding Jesus, we must remember that he is not an obstacle to their romance. He is the fountain of all romance. Thanks to Him, this love story is not of a man and a woman crumble away, succumbing to mutual self-worship.

It is the story of a man and a woman falling so deeply in love with God that God falls in love through them, with them, and in them.

So, to begin treasuring St. Joseph in your heart, start by treasuring the woman he loved.