Finding St. Joseph by Sandra Miesel - Out of Obscurity

Out Of Obscurity

While fashion was rearranging the Holy Kindred, illuminated manuscripts began giving St. Joseph slightly greater prominence. He now escorts Mary to St. Elizabeth's home for the Visitation and holds the Infant for the Presentation in the Temple, a role previously reserved for the Blessed Mother.

Medieval parents, however, continued to avoid the name Joseph. Only one Giuseppe appears on a list of 53,000 Tuscan householders collected before 1530, whereas that name is now one of the most popular Italian names. The first Catholic saints named for St. Joseph came along later still: Canary Islander Blessed Joseph de Ancheita (b. 1534) and Spaniard St. Joseph Calasanctius (b. 1556).
Nevertheless, small changes were accumulating in the script — changes that would drastically revise St. Joseph's part in the play.

One finds early evidence of positive attention being paid him in another piece of apocrypha, The History of Joseph the Carpenter, written in Egypt between the fourth and fifth centuries. Although it makes the saint a widowed father of six who is 90 years old when he marries twelve-year-old Mary, this story describes him as still hale and healthy up to his death at 111. Jesus tenderly consoles His dying foster father, mourns him, and promises to bless those who honor his memory. Coptic Christians did just that; they had given him his own feast day (July 20) by the end of the first millennium.

The year 1000 found St. Joseph mentioned on two or three local saints' lists in Germany and Ireland. Latin-rite Catholics celebrated his feast for the first time in Winchester, England, around 1030. The first oratory dedicated to St. Joseph was opened in Parma in 1074. Later, a church was dedicated to the saint in Bologna (1129) and a chapel in Joinville, France (1254).

St. Joseph's union with the Blessed Virgin was declared a true marriage during twelfth-century theological debates on matrimony. The Church decided that consent, not consummation, was the sacrament's essential element.

But these were isolated exceptions to general indifference, although St. Joseph did manage to attract the private devotion of Saints Bernard of Clairvaux, Gertrude the Great, and Birgitta of Sweden, as well as the Spiritual Franciscan Peter Olivi. He had entered the special Breviaries used among Servites, Franciscans, and Carmelites by the end of the 14th century, with his feast day celebrated on March 19.