Daily Mass - feast day of Saint Joseph the Worker

Mass was offered this morning for the repose of the soul of Tony Yore (+), and yesterday's intention for Mass was the repose of the soul of Eileen O'Rourke (+). May they rest in the peace of Christ.

It was inevitable that our Mass today would honour the 'optional memorial' of our holy patron Saint Joseph, presented to us today as the Worker. It isn't an accident that this feast day coincides with the communist celebrations of May day. The modern popes had long tried to inspire devotion to Saint Joseph among Catholics, until 1955, when the Holy Father Pius XII instituted this feast with a new Mass and an addition to the divine Office of prayer. It's not hard to see the link between the modern working man or woman and the hard-working Carpenter and family-man, who quietly protected his family through the turbulence of the Holy Land under the rule of Herod the Great, his son Archelaus and the subsequent Roman governors ruling from Caesarea. The first reading today was from the book of Genesis, which speaks of God's own work, which resulted in Creation, and His period of rest, which was later honoured with the institution of the Hebrew Sabbath day of rest. 

Our blessed Lord Himself was a worker, taking up Saint Joseph's trade, so that He was called the Carpenter's Son by the people of Nazareth, who knew of His Mother and His extended family, who were spread out around them. This is the point of our gospel reading today:

"Afterwards, when He had finished these parables, Jesus journeyed on, and came to His own country-side, where He taught them in their synagogue; so that they said in astonishment, 'How did he come by this wisdom, and these strange powers? Is not this the Carpenter’s Son, whose mother is called Mary, and His brethren James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And do not His sisters, all of them, live near us? How is it that all this has come to Him?" - Gospel of S. Matthew, 13: 53-56

When the Church decided to make explicit here care for working people, it was an easy thing to play on this fact: that the Son of God Himself, in His act of humility (which led to His Incarnation, His Life, Death and Resurrection), decided to live the life of a poor labourer, thus dignifying one of the most ordinary of human professions. And that He was taught it by a man, by Saint Joseph.