Today is St. Joseph’s feast day and so a special day to the Joseph who writes this.  I’m also glad that Pius XII added the feast day of Joseh the Worker, though a Jesuit friend asked me,  “Why would you be interested in “worker”? Good friend, too. Jesuit, though …..

Anyhow, the Church is still playing catch-up with St. Joseph. Theologians  and other Christians gave him very little attention until about fifteen centuries after he’d gone to heaven.

 Then Pius the IX declared him the protector of the Church, and towards the end of the 1800s, Leo XIII wrote an encyclical urging Catholics to  venerate and pray for St. Joseph’s intercession. 

       It became something of a papal preoccupation about a century after Pius XI started it.  So, John XIXIII added Joseph to the canon of the old mass text.

After Vatican II, when the four alternative texts came into use, popes gave St. Joseph more attention and have  led the Church to do the same. So, for instance, Pope Francis has added St. Joseph’s name to the other three canons.

Now “Josephology”  is a theological discipline—it is said that theologians can’t wait to create a new  abstract term, and that’s not much of an exaggeration—anyhow, that  is probably the work of John Paul II,  who wrote encyclicals on St. Joseph.