Joseph's Dreams

Fear not Joseph- Take Mary as your wife Protector - Preventer of spilt child’s blood Heading the whisperings - Of Angel’s messages - Of flight into Egypt

The Holy Family

Our models - Shining examples - Our hope - For a way of living - As family - As community

Joseph and Jesus

Those adolescent eyes - Look on working hands - Lovingly fashioning objects of beauty - And necessary function - A strong bond of love building - With each stroke - Of artisan's hands

Finding Jesus

Joy - Finding their precious charge - In God's space - A burst of delight - Unspeakable happiness - To uncover a waiting Jesus - In our fragile mortality

The death of Joseph

Peaceful happy death - In the arms of the child - You washed at birth - Taught first steps - Protected nurtured and loved - Fortunate leavetaking - Only to find - Gratifying new life.

Joseph, Patron of the unversal church

Protector of the new Christ - The Mystical Body - Eternal patron of humankind - Loving intercessor - For even the most insignificant - Of us all.

During this Year of St. Joseph*, the Province web site, ERCBNA.org, is honoring the foster father of Jesus with a set of paintings commissioned by JoAnn (RIP) and Joseph Murphy and exhibited in the Major Seminary of the Archdiocese of New York, Diocese of Brooklyn, and Diocese of Rockville Centre, St. Joseph’s, Dunwoodie, Yonkers, NY, USA.

^* Pope Francis proclaimed the year from Dec. 8, 2020 to Dec. 8, 2021 the Year of St. Joseph. In an Apostolic Letter Patris corde (“With a Father’s Heart”) Pope Francis describes Joseph as a beloved father, a tender and loving father, an obedient father, an accepting father; a father who is creatively courageous, a working father, a father in the shadows.

He writes:

I would like to share some personal reflections on this extraordinary figure, so close to our own human experience. For, as Jesus says, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Mt 12:34).

My desire to do so increased during these months of pandemic, when we experienced, amid the crisis, how “our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people, people often overlooked. People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history.

Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone.

Pope Francis,
Patris Corde.

Read on Vatican website