St Joseph: Our Spiritual Father FULL DOCUMENTARY

[Music] sometimes people have wondered why there isn't so many things written on saint joseph in the new testament and you could say that he was kind of like a veil that was hiding the the true presence of jesus and it needed to be hidden for a time think about herod who wanted to kill him and so saint joseph's role was to raise the son of god so that he could become in the fullness of his manhood who he was to be and save the world my favorite virtue of joseph is probably his humility he accepts this hiddenness and this humble existence and god then blesses him with the greatest office of any king of israel and that is to be the guardian of god's own son st joseph has always been that almost invisible person for a lot of people but for me he stands out as the epitome of action st joseph was that model of how to guide how to protect how to love how to sacrifice and how to be there for his family saint joseph is the savior of the savior he's the teacher of the teacher he's the master the master he's the king of the king of kings and so therefore if we go to saint joseph he will provide for all of our circumstances the spiritual father is forever interceding before god for your sake he cares for the good of your life he cares that god's plan within your life be fulfilled i believe that is what saint joseph does for us in scripture mystery means something that is deeply held in the heart of god which he gradually reveals to his people and one of the great mysteries of of joseph is his role as a father not only to jesus but to the church itself [Music] pope francis speaks of the creative courage of saint joseph and the courage that he had to overcome the very serious obstacles and difficulties that he faced our times demand creativity and boldness and imagination they demand creative courage and saint joseph shows us the way [Music] in december of 2020 pope francis took an unprecedented step for the universal church he declared a year for joseph the first in history in his apostolic letter patrice cordee with a father's heart pope francis called catholics to increase devotion to saint joseph and to imitate his virtues [Music] i'm delighted that pope francis declared a year of saint joseph the church has always understood that the virgin mary is our spiritual mother but the church hasn't always really understood that same significance for saint joseph that he's our spiritual father we see lots of churches named after him but we don't reflect very often on what we can learn from saint joseph i think that maybe one of the reasons why we're having a year of saint joseph is so that catholics will start to think more deeply about who this man was and what he is for us the saint joseph was always honored by the theologians but devotion is something that developed late and francis desales teresa of avila are two excellent examples of those prominent figures who recognized the great importance that joseph had in giving form to the life of jesus and if we think of the church as carrying on of the life of christ it makes a lot of sense to think of joseph as having a special custodial role what really got the ball rolling for a re-emphasis on saint joseph in the life of the church was in 1870 when blessed pope pius ix declared saint joseph the patron of the universal church so that's right to unpack and highlight all of these great mysteries of saint joseph [Music] i think it's just a timely event for us to acknowledge but also to celebrate if you have a devotion to saint joseph strengthen that devotion to saint joseph if you don't have one you should have one if you've never made a consecration of saint joseph make a consecration of saint joseph [Music] i think that it was by the grace of god that pope francis called this year the year of saint joseph to emphasize the importance of saint joseph we are supposed to be model men and there's no greater example than saint joseph he underwent so much suffering for the holy family to provide for jesus and that's what we need today we have been using a consecration book for st joseph written by father callaway so it goes through every day for a 33-day period in addition to that we also met as a group to discuss what we've learned from st joseph and where we see ourselves as being called to better model ourselves after st joseph i mean who was the perfect man right the perfect man jesus jesus yeah who helped form the perfect man yeah st joseph well jesus like he he lays down his life out of love and out of selflessness and out of obedience to the will of the father and joseph he's doing these same things right not on a cross but like every single day that's in a workshop yeah in on the road to egypt we're all called to sacrifice this evening we will be consecrating ourselves to saint joseph and together we're going to pray the litany to saint joseph and then those that are being consecrated are going to individually make an act of consecration having come to know and love you i consecrate myself entirely to you saint joseph we all have this end goal in mind together as a community and i think that by learning more about st joseph we are able to keep this goal in mind and so push ourselves more and more towards the eventual crown that we are all after one of the greatest promoters of devotion to saint joseph in recent church history is saint andre bessette born into a poor french-canadian family he becomes a brother of the congregation of the holy cross assigned as a doorkeeper at notre dame college in montreal brother andre greets visitors and encounters thousands of faithful who confide in him their sufferings and prayer intentions brother andre urges everyone to turn to saint joseph soon reports of miracles spread far and wide for brother andre st joseph was the great model of a man who was very humble in his service and in his life now brother andre had a lot of fame for his healing ministry and for his presence with others now we could see throughout the oratory we could see the walls of crutches for example we could see the plaques where people have given thanks for their healing so the fame surrounded around brother andre but it never went to his head he was always dedicated to that silent service that humble service and the motto of saint joseph is truly that for him beginning in 1904 with only a small sum he earned from cutting hair brother andre sets out to fulfill his dream of a pilgrimage spot to saint joseph on mount royal in montreal today his dream is a reality st joseph's oratory is canada's largest church in the preeminent international center of devotion to saint joseph we're so dedicated to promoting the life of saint joseph it also helps that st joseph is the patron saint of canada saint joseph's oratory it's his place for healing it's a place where people can feel at peace so we see that we have a very important role as the church worldwide celebrates the life of saint joseph [Music] throughout history saint joseph will earn many titles guardian of the holy family protector of the church [Music] joseph most just pillar of families and terror of demons are just a few but in salvation history perhaps no title is more significant than joseph son of david it's very important that saint joseph is known as a descendant of king david because of the prophecy which we we find in the book of samuel that one day the throne of king david will be reoccupied by one of his descendants and this descendant will reign over the nations of the world forever in other words for christ to be that person he needs to be in the lineage of king david saint joseph is of royal lineage so he comes from the davidic line and that's important because it says in the scriptures that the messiah will come from the line of david so legally as the father of jesus it shows that lineage continues through joseph's line the prophet daniel had foretold that in 490 years from his time the messiah would come so there was a great expectation 100 bc we start to see movement from babylon into the holy land the village of nazareth seems to have been created almost ex nihilo there was nothing really there there was no habitation there for hundreds of years before this time and then at 100 bc suddenly it's peopled by the descendants of king david well there must have been great expectation among the families in these villages right that the time is coming to fulfillment at a young age joseph prepared to wed mary a fellow nazarean however after their betrothal an angel appears to mary she is to conceive a child by the power of god and this child would be the promised messiah when we find joseph right away he's in the midst of a bit of a crisis you know he knows that mary his betrothed is pregnant and he knows he's not the father and so what does he do with that and he decides in his mercy and his kindness to divorce her quietly in other words he doesn't want to take her reputation and destroy it oftentimes we hear about the reaction of saint joseph that he wants to divorce her as many theologians and saints now have said he was not suspicious of mary oh no he was in awe of her pregnancy he knew that he was in the midst of a great mystery and he wanted to separate himself from out of reverence for the dignity of what was taking place joseph goes to prayer and in his dream which often happens with saint joseph god sends an angel to tell him not to be afraid to take your wife into your home [Music] when st joseph took our lady into his home he took a great risk it was a big risk and so you can imagine when this happened that some tongues started to wag and people started to talk and all sorts of different things he wanted to do the godly thing the righteous thing and that's one of the reasons it makes him such a righteous man [Music] my great hero saint john paul ii said god assigns as a task to every man the dignity of every woman i've always loved that quote and when i think of somebody that models that perfectly even though we only see his interactions with our lady saint joseph constantly in every circumstance modeled the upholding of her dignity [Music] it says when joseph was pondering on these things when he was thinking about mary's pregnancy what he did is he entered the silence he presents his passions to god and then he waits on god and that's why i love about saint joseph he subdues or submits all of his manliness to god and then he acts in a manly way promptly when god calls him to do it there's a long tradition in the church that saint joseph was also like the virgin mary a perpetual virgin and i think it gives a beautiful testimony to the vocation of mary and to the vocation of joseph they were set aside they were consecrated for a holy purpose to have one mission and that was to help jesus to save the world joseph he's got many virtues one is his chastity and you can't rule others if you don't have self-possession and so joseph's ability to discipline and have that self-possession makes him so royal not just in his bloodline but in his character one of the outstanding qualities of joseph was obedience he didn't know the full picture but the lord spoke to him and he obeyed joseph was also a man of action and i think those two things are very very closely tied together because when you are obedient the lord always gives you a mission and sends you into action and saint joseph is a perfect example of that for all of us my name is renzo ortega and i'm a husband and father my wife and i have been married since 2012 and we have five kids looking back now st joseph has been there since the beginning of the foundation for our marriage we actually went to the same elementary school together and then going into my senior year of high school we began dating and then after she graduated from college i proposed our devotion to saint joseph was always part of our relationship but i wouldn't say that we became intentional about our consecration saint joseph until after our second son was born a lot of things in our relationship came to a head i think the excitement of being newlyweds was starting to wear off and family life was really becoming a reality i was working in social work my work was incredibly stressful like my mind was at the office to the point that whenever i got home i was still absent emotionally i was absent mentally i was absent he was very stressed it was really difficult so things started to fester and things got harder and harder a lot of other things fell to the wayside a lot of the intentionality of being a wife and even like our home was just falling apart i wasn't sure what true masculinity true fatherhood how a husband should be and i didn't have that example growing up i didn't have that example from people around me which really kind of left me trying to make it up as i went i developed a hunger to to find out what was not working right in my marriage what was not working right as a father and then that hunger really brought me to start reading st john paul's writings ultimately led me to his apostolic exhortation guardian of the redeemer and then i suddenly realized that the model that i had been missing was st joseph it's really transformed our entire family there's twice in the gospels where joseph is you know talked to by an angel in a dream and immediately after that he acts and what i realized is that the action was what was missing in my relationship with monica i spoke a lot of things but the action was never there and then seeing saint joseph who was all action made me realize that i needed to start moving i needed to start showing her i loved her by more than just my words i think the fruits of our devotion to saint joseph and the period of struggle in our marriage and in our family life has now manifested itself in much more a mutual self-sacrifice and i think that's because we've started to model that through saint joseph st joseph became such a part of our family life that we wanted to formally give ourselves to joseph we just talked to the kids a little bit about st joseph so they understood who he was and then together as a family just prayed to saint joseph they know what saint joseph means to me they know what st joseph means to monica and we're hoping that as they get older they can understand how st joseph's model and life really can apply to them too what god showed me through st joseph is that the battle isn't out there somewhere but it's in the home it's within me it's within my family from there i realized you know i have to start implementing the way saint joseph loved jesus and mary into my life and it's really transformed our entire family the peaceful scene of the christ child born in a bethlehem manger obscures an ugly drama unfolding in this region ruled by the mad king herod the rumors of the birth the long-awaited savior enrage herod he rules judea for his roman overlords with an iron fist he is an edomite and therefore untrusted by his jewish subjects yet he aspires to be seen as their messiah herod has been empowered by the romans and if anybody says hey i have royal blood from the line of david i should be king their lifespan would be pretty short so herod had a certain degree of resentment toward his own people and gradually a growing paranoia about plots and schemes against him he murdered all the members of the jerusalem council when they decided that he was not the messiah he wants to be secure in the throne and the title of messiah would go a long way when it's rumored that someone's been born of the line of david herod the great takes that seriously he sends out the soldiers to slaughter the innocent children the angel was sent to saint joseph a second time with an urgent message that there was a ruler who was seeking to kill the christ child take your wife and the child and flee to egypt it actually says that he left at night he didn't even wait for the morning and so we're talking about a man who was extremely obedient and not even worried about the circumstances or what might happen he did it immediately saint joseph's courage i think is pretty extraordinary in some early christian documents joseph is portrayed as a very old man in some cases in his mid-90s at the time of his wedding but the thing that seems to be the the deal killer for me is the flight into egypt they're fleeing without their possessions without their comforts it's a journey of more than a thousand miles it seems unlikely that an old man would have undertaken such a journey taha concentration camp was used as a place to hold political prisoners heinrich himmler believed that the best way to conquer the polish nation would be to eliminate leadership positions and priests were one of them poland had around 10 000 priests before the second world war and almost 20 percent of all the priests from poland ended up in dahau starting april 1945 the priests who were in the camp they could hear the bombardment of munich there was this a sense that germany may lose the world but at the same time they had the sense that well germans will not let them live alive they thought what should we do so they said well who is the one who took care of the holly family who was the one who protected jesus it was saint joseph and they wanted to turn to him for help they chose saint joseph of college as the patron of the entrustment so they began the novena on april 14 1945 and what they found out about later is that on that very day heinrich himmler signed an order that no prisoner will be able to leave the camp alive the novena ends on april 22nd and on that day during two masses over 800 people priests and laypeople consecrate themselves to sing joseph saying that we succumb to you saint joseph be our defender from that evil [Music] i traveled to the shrine of saint joseph in college the first time in 2018 and that was occasion for me to learn about the story of the prisoners of the priests in dahau [Music] when i found out that my grandfather was in dahau it was such a revelation to me saint joseph in a way helped me discover the story of my grandfather he arrived in daha two days before these priests and lay people entrusted themselves to saint joseph so he was there and i only wonder if he made it if he was present during one of these two masses where they entrusted themselves to saint joseph [Music] after the consecration the priests waited fully trusted in saint joseph in the late afternoon of april 29th u.s troops liberated taha not only did they find the surviving polish priests but they also found henry himmler's orders of execution all the priests were to be killed and the entire camp raised to the ground that evening at 9 00 pm they were saved just hours before they faced a certain death all the priests credited saint joseph and their entrustment to him for the miraculous liberation [Music] i am certain that my grandfather was saved by saint joseph and if he had not survived and i wouldn't be here priests they made a promise that they will go to saint joseph in college on the pilgrimage of thanksgiving they were instrumental to increase the awareness of this amazing miraculous intervention of st joseph the story of my grandfather liberated from the camp really made me think what is it that god wants to say to my family saint joseph is the example for all of us how to be a husband a father in today's world he sacrificed his will saint joseph was willing to give up his plans he gave himself as a gift to mary he gave himself as a gift to jesus and that's something that is a model for me the sacrifice will lead me to a self-gift and that's how my vocation can be fully fulfilled upon the death of herod an angel appears again to joseph and informs him it is safe to depart egypt and return to israel the holy family settles in nazareth where joseph's mission from god is to practice the art of fatherhood other than a brief interlude when at the age of 12 jesus goes missing and is found in the temple by his parents the scriptures never again mention joseph's name saint joseph never spoke although we know he said one word and that word was jesus because he would have had to have given jesus his name at his circumcision that's the only word we can know he said he after all was the father of the word and he knew that the definitive word had come into the world so i believe that the reason we don't have record of his language and of what he might have said was because he gave to us the one word in jesus christ [Music] our culture today that's so saturated with social media there's almost nothing that's not immediately available across the globe and st joseph is such an excellent counter weight he's the epitome of the strong silent type when i think of joseph being the earthly shadow of the heavenly father over jesus i think back to john paul ii in his apostolic exhortation familia's consortium which dealt with the family in it he says that fathers image forth replicate on earth the fatherhood of god and i find this as one of the most powerful theological statements fatherhood is much larger than biological reality and we speak of animals begetting but not fathering it's human beings that we speak of as fathering because it's not just his dna it's going to be his mannerisms and his speech patterns and the habits that he learns and so fatherhood it has everything to do with investing oneself in your child so that they can know that love that unconditional love and grow and mature through that love i think the year of saint joseph is so urgently needed because fathers are so much more needed and so vital to human flourishing than i think our culture suggests it's not about providing for every last material thing but it's about being the constant love that is given to another to be a righteous man means to be a man of courage and to be a man of sacrifice that is to say sacrifice your own interests for the good of another this is an important aspect of saint joseph i think we're at a moment in society where men are afraid to stand up for what is right the example of saint joseph teaches us that we become free we really find ourselves when we have the courage to live for others [Music] a man's role really is to protect and to provide for his family but to protect and provide he needs to be strong both physically and psychologically and spiritually and joseph was all three he worked hard he was a strong man he walked his covenant with god faithfully day in and day out and so we see joseph as a real example of what just to be a man [Music] i think for me joseph being that example of emptying himself he was always putting himself on the back burner you know becoming a dad for me it was a very scary experience i doubted if i knew how to raise my child and it was through biblical references to saint joseph about trusting that god was going to provide god was going to give me the strength it put a lot of that anxiety to rest there are boys and then there are men and they're spiritual fathers the boy in a sense everybody's responsible for him so everybody takes care of him the man he takes care of himself so he gets a great job gets a great paycheck but it's all about him but a spiritual father recognizes that his rule and responsibility is for others he knows that he is going to fight if not bleed in order to save souls to lead them to heaven for me personally st joseph has been a game changer my vocation is a husband and a father it's so helpful to be able to look at somebody as the the standard and to try to emulate and live up to that every single day so i met my wife i was playing for the vikings she was still in college she drug me back to church and uh and now i want to be a great husband and i want to be a great father i want my kids to have the faith as well if he was a football player st joseph would have been an offensive heinemann like that's what he was put on this earth to do which was to protect as fathers we're supposed to be the physical and spiritual protectors of our family so many men are are hurting so many men are focused on the wrong things we have a crisis of manhood we have a crisis of leadership particularly in our families and when i think about leadership i think about virtue and our society is not holding up virtue as something to aspire to right it's holding up money or status but virtue like the catechism says the goal of a virtuous life is to become like god to get closer to god for us men to have a devotion to st joseph helps us to strive for that every single day my wife and i are blessed enough to have six biological children and then one day my wife said well what about adoption and the first day that our profile was out there we were blessed for two birth moms to choose us i sort of look in marvel at my two adopted sons you know i'm not their biological father but god created them knowing that i was gonna be their father like saint joseph as the foster father of jesus i was gonna have the awesome responsibility of raising them fatherhood is a daily commitment to lead to nurture to raise to discipline and a lot of times it's not very glamorous you know my my golf game is not very good i don't get to go fishing a lot with my buddies but that's okay because self-emptying is love you cannot have love without self-emptying without sacrifice and we don't know of anything that saint joseph ever did for himself but saying yes to god being mary's husband being jesus's foster father that was it this is my vocation to be like saint joseph [Music] hi i'm father richard collin i was ordained a priest on december 11 2020 during the year of saint joseph and so saint joseph is constantly an inspiration for me to want to live out my vocation to the full in all that i do as a priest when i was nine i fell in love with golf i wanted to be a professional golfer and for me i was certain that golf was going to be the thing that brought me happiness and so when i was in high school i got to a very competitive level i was on team canada i went to university in the states on a golf scholarship golf was my god in a sense even though i grew up catholic i've lived this total college party lifestyle it was only in my last year of university where everything kind of changed my mom had sent me an email and this was a very unique email he said for my upcoming birthday i want you not to give me anything i want you to do something for me and she asked me to go to the sacrament of confession and so i decided to respect my mom's wish i didn't know how to give a proper confession and i just kind of unloaded five years of a college party lifestyle upon this priest but i remember so clearly the priest forgave my sins in the name of jesus i just felt this unbelievable sense of freedom and joy and peace that it somewhat set my heart on a whole new path no longer was golf the thing that i wanted to pursue for the rest of my life but it was like i wanted to be able to give other people that experience and that was what sparked my vocation i had no real deep personal connection with saint joseph until i was in seminary i made this prayer i said okay st joseph if you want to enter into my life i need some real concrete signing and i was walking to the church that morning across the plaza and on the ground in front of me was a holy card of saint joseph and i turned it around and there's a prayer the memorary of saint joseph so this has been a prayer that i've said almost every single day and it's been one in just the little ways that saint joseph has entered into my life i was ordained during coven at holy rosary cathedral and i remember so clearly archbishop miller called me father for the first time thank you for offering your son now as father richard and that word just struck me and immediately as i said the word father during my ordination thank you speech all of a sudden the person of saint joseph came to mind it's like saint joseph probably knew what it was like to feel like an adequate father like he was called father by jesus by the son of god and so he started praying like okay saint joseph i feel inadequate at being called father richard now i'm gonna need your help i'm gonna need you to follow me you to teach me how to become a father joseph's not the biological father of jesus but he is still a true and real father in so many ways and so i can look to saint joseph as both a spiritual father for myself and then also a model for how to be a spiritual father i grew up as a ward of the state of connecticut through three foster homes two institutions i never had any kind of religious formation i didn't really have parents that nurtured me you know some of the foster homes they would focus on their own kids but not not me i converted to catholicism back in 1990 based on a need that i had to basically become a child of god you know even though i didn't know it before but that was what i was missing i'm a consecrated layman i'm not married knowing that you know we're called to be children of god is a great thing for us it's a great support it was march of 1995. i discerned religious life for about six months and then i came home and i was praying and i felt the presence of saint joseph didn't hear any voices didn't see anything you out of the ordinary but i felt him ask me if i would be willing to learn about him which of course you know you say yes and then i felt the presence of our lady and i felt her ask me if i would be willing to love her as st joseph did in the spirit of saint joseph and i didn't know what that meant but of course you know if you feel our lady asking you something you're going to say yes so i said yes and that's where it started the apostle that came about the following year but saint joseph our patron is a lay apostle that founded to promote saint joseph's universal patronage it's the idea of understanding that patrons are models and intercessors a lot of people when they look at devotion to any patron they look at just their intercessory power but this emphasizes the example of saint joseph and how he had the most intimate relationship with jesus through mary and that by loving saint joseph as a father and mary as our queen mother we imitate jesus when we have parents we learn from them and and we grow to become like them at least that's what we should aspire to do and that's where i look at devotion to joseph and mary because it's tied together i've always had an interest in photography i just think it's a great medium to you know to tell stories i started doing that and i want to use whatever interests and gifts that i have to help promote the faith [Music] when i photograph something like the liturgies especially the mass i try to truly capture the devotion that's being expressed st joseph was a man of manual labor and did it very meditatively and that's one of the ways i look at saint joseph as a model [Music] i think any time we act with the purpose of being a child of god i believe that gives god glory so that when he looks at us he sees the image of his son incarnated in us which is really i think that's the goal of all of us [Music] tradition tells us that joseph was a carpenter it's likely that he grew up in the trade it's likely that he learned it from his father who learned it from his father this is the way trades were passed on [Music] he used these gifts as a carpenter to give glory to god i think that's important for all of us to see in our daily work that by using the gifts that god has given us we can give glory to him and saint joseph shows us that his life and we're called to make an offering of all the work of our hands and this is symbolized in the liturgy by the offering of the gifts which we call fruit of the earth work of human hands what i'm doing when i work is i'm exercising a kind of priesthood that god has intended from the dawn of creation saint joseph lived that priesthood jesus lived that priesthood it's very interesting to know that the greek word that's used to describe joseph's work is not exactly carpentry the word is techtone it's connected to the greek word for skill or art any craftsmanship we know jesus is the rabbi but jesus is also a builder like joseph and he's going to learn from joseph on how to be a great craftsman he names simon peter which means rock and on this rock i will build my church jesus is going to be a builder in a whole different way and he's going to build his great edifice his great work which will be the church since the 19th century the question of work has become an increasingly urgent question and if we are to recover a sense of the meaning of work and the value of work and the dignity of work st joseph is really an excellent figure to look to for that in the 20th century the emergence of communism threatened to undermine the christian understanding of work by the 1950s soviet troops would parade through moscow's red square on may 1st international workers day there had been a day actually dedicated to just celebrating human work and it was may 1st well communism really wanted to transform that day to make it communist workers day and really make a shift in the understanding of work being the ultimate end of man and so venerable pius xii in 1955 actually declared may 1st to be the feast of saint joseph the worker and that really transformed i think for a lot of people a lot of cultures the importance of god is our ultimate end and work is good but we have to put it in its proper context john paul the great who lived and suffered under communist rule in poland brought a renewed dedication to upholding the dignity of workers he traveled the world witnessing through both his words and his actions that workers are not merely a unit of labor engaged in a perpetual class struggle but a creature made in the image of god with a soul and an eternal destiny john paul ii was the first pope who had and said worked for a living carol voiter spent four and a half very difficult years as a manual laborer a nazi occupied poland and being the reflective person that he was he drew out of that very profound sense for the difficulties the hardness of manual labor but how even that can be transformed into an expression of human dignity [Music] [Music] my foreign [Music] we are standing in loretto chapel museum which is in santa fe new mexico our miraculous staircase here was built in late 1879 by a mysterious carpenter that the sisters thought was saint joseph from heaven our staircase captures the eyes of engineers and staircase builders and even physicists from all over the world and to this day it's still a mystery who built it when the sisters realized that no one in santa fe were able to build a circular staircase and they sent a nine-day novena to saint joseph asking him to intercede with jesus to help them with their problem and on the last day of their novena a knock came at the chapel doors and this man with a gray beard told the sister that he had come to build their staircase so they hired him on the spot as time went on it was built but after three months passed they noticed he was gone and they looked for him all over santa fe and no one could find him so the sisters were convinced it was saint joseph most circular staircases either have a pole or they're built into a wall or there's a floor between each turn and ours is the double helix two full turns freestanding without any connection and that's why engineers are totally amazed at why this staircase stands i'd like to tell all our guests why does it stand nobody knows who built it nobody knows where does it would come from nobody knows and that's why it's still known to this day as the miraculous staircase myself as a devout catholic i'm also a member of the knights of columbus really believe that divine providence and saint joseph were deeply involved in this and i will find out the details god willing on the other side [Music] for centuries saint joseph has been known as the patron of a happy death he died a blessed and happy death because jesus and mary were at his side over the centuries many have turned to saint joseph as they prepared to journey from this life to the next paul and i met in may of 2007 by july of 2007 we knew that we were called to get married i knew that paul was the right person for me because of the fact that when i met him i had such a strong spiritual connection with him and from the time i was a little girl my mom had given me a prayer to pray every day the prayer that i prayed was to the blessed mother and asking her to basically send me a st joseph and he had so many of those characteristics he was just a strong and holy spiritual man i just knew right away that there was no doubt that he was the man that i was called to marry one of the things that paul and i were very excited about as we prepared for marriage and talked about marriage was be able to build up our own little domestic church paul and i both came from large families and we wanted to be able to share those things with our own children and so we started praying to saint joseph for his intercession that we would be able to find a job that would allow us to start a family and be able to provide and so we started doing the novena to st joseph the worker and we had already miscarried two babies and so here we were praying right as we're praying to saint joseph who obviously was the best foster parent there ever could be when we got the phone call i remember crying we were going to be able to take this little boy into our home and we didn't know how long that would last how long we would be able to foster him but here it is that little boy was not even two years old and he's 12 years old now and he's such a gift to my life and i know that that was a lot of st joseph's intercession paul worked hard really really hard he was doing anything that he could to make ends meet so that he could do the job that he was called to which was ministry work to share christ with others just like saint joseph shared his son with the world i think paul definitely wanted to prepare our children so that they could go out into the world to deal with whatever challenges came along in their lives and to be able to bring others to know christ of 2014 paul had had some pain in his chest by october he had noticed a lump two days before christmas he was coughing up blood and so we made an appointment and got him into the doctors and they took an x-ray and they said that his lungs were filled with innumerable tumors that they couldn't even count them it did awesome metastasized to his brain and then he ended up having two strokes in the second stroke he ended up going into the hospital and was in the hospital for two weeks [Music] to see someone who is the strongest person that you know someone that you've always depended on to physically protect you and your children to see them suffering like that is really hard it really hurts at one point his little sister was sitting next to me and she said have you seen what's going on online and she pulled up the stuff that people had started posting saying pray for paul and i couldn't believe it there were hundreds and hundreds of pictures and i just felt just this overwhelming strength come upon me and i knew that it wasn't from me that it was completely from god and that it was a gift from all the prayers of so many people [Music] we hoped for a miracle we prayed for a miracle but we also knew how bad his diagnosis was and we knew that there was very little chance that he would be able to survive all the tumors that he had in his body while we were in the hospital i walked into the room he had been laying in bed completely out of it when i left when i came back in the room he was sitting upright on the bed completely unrestrained except for the intubation and he was just smiling his eyes were just glowing he was just radiant he was so joyful and i went over to him and i was holding his hand and i said this is our miracle isn't it and he nodded and he i could see the smile in his eyes i was like this is our miracle and then the day that he died i had my arm around him i could feel his body lifting up i could feel his arms raising up and then he fell back on the bed and it just it really did feel like he was just running to our lord running to bless a mother running to our children [Music] i just knew that that he had had the opportunity to have the death that saint joseph had a good holy happy death surrounded by the ones that he loved so surrounded by the angels and the saints and all of the church after paul passed the hashtag pray for paul transitioned and to live like paul and people really were able to want to live like paul did it's just a really beautiful thing to see all these people from all the world praying and then being inspired to live like him to live like paul means to live in a way that brings you closer to christ [Music] i like saint joseph very much [Music] there's a strong man of silence [Music] he looks after the church [Music] so i first learned about the devotion to the sleeping saint joseph from pope francis who's spoken about this my wife gave me a statue of sleeping saint joseph for father's day and so we write petitions things that we're concerned about asking for saint joseph's intercession and we put them under the sleeping figure of saint joseph this is a devotion that pope francis has had to saint joseph and he says this prayer every morning for 40 years and i say it every morning [Music] glorious patriarch saint joseph whose power makes the impossible possible come to my aid in these times of anguish and difficulty take under your protection the serious and troubling situations that i commend to you that they may have a happy outcome my beloved father all my trust is in you let it not be said that i invoked you in vain and since you can do everything with jesus and mary show me that your goodness is as great as your power amen [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Knights of Columbus Supreme Council

Views: 266,871

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Id: AC-_o2S7JJA

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021