Posted on June 14, 2015 View all news
Laudetur Jesus Christus!
Gelobt sei Jesus Christus!
Praised be Jesus Christ!
Today we celebrate the secular holiday of Father’s Day. We are all in a particular way thankful for what our fathers have offered to us. Fathers have all played an important part in all of our lives, helping to shape us into the people that we have become.
Even in the life of Christ, his own foster father played an important role. St. Joseph perfected the meaning of fatherhood. If there is ever a doubt as to how one should embrace the vocation of fatherhood, St. Joseph is the perfect model. St. Joseph was of such virtue and worth that he was chosen by God to be the spouse of the Mother of God and the foster father of the Son of God. May we entrust each of our fathers today to the care of St. Joseph. May he continue to watch over them, just as he watched over the Holy Family. To help celebrate this day, I leave us this week with a reflection by Pope Leo XIII on St. Joseph.
“Fathers of families find in Joseph the best personification of paternal solicitude and vigilance; spouses a perfect example of love, of peace, and of conjugal fidelity; virgins at the same time find in him the model and protector of virginal integrity. The noble of birth will earn of Joseph how to guard their dignity even in misfortune; the rich will understand, by his lessons, what are the goods most to be desired and won at the price of their labour. As to workmen, artisans, and persons of lesser degree, their recourse to Joseph is a special right, and his example is for their particular imitation. For Joseph, of royal blood, united by marriage to the greatest and holiest of women, reputed the father of the Son of God, passed his life in labour, and won by the toil of the artisan the needful support of his family. It is, then, true that the condition of the lowly has nothing shameful in it, and the work of the labourer is not only not dishonouring, but can, if virtue be joined to it, be singularly ennobled. Joseph, content with his slight possessions, bore the trials consequent on a fortune so slender, with greatness of soul, in imitation of his Son, who having put on the form of a slave, being the Lord of life, subjected himself of his own free-will to the spoliation and loss of everything.”
Have a blessed week ahead!
