Month: April 2024

Dear Friends,

Next week we celebrate another feast day in honor of St. Joseph. This time around we commemorate him under the patronage of St. Joseph the Worker.

This feast was established by Pope Pius, Xii in 1955 to coincide with International Workers’ Day. It was an attempt to direct the minds of the faithful and the world to understand the proper place and dignity of work and workers within the scope of the Christian anthropology and salvation. It stood in contrast to a purely secular notion of work and workers as espoused by Communism.

Choosing Sr. Joseph to be the figure of veneration for workers was more than befitting as he was known to be a worker, a carpenter by trade. While the mystery of salvation was unfolding in his home, Joseph still had to make sure that he could provide for his family’s temporal needs. Joseph teaches us that work is not an end in and of itself. It allows workers to provide for themselves and their families. Moreover, Joseph teaches us that work is a means by which we glorify God.

Work allows us to be like the Creator. We are called to cultivate and create. We don’t create like God does. He created everything from nothing. But we imitate Him by taking what we are given and making something new: new tools, new technology, new art, new literature, new life.

This feast day, May 1st, allows us to remember the value and gift of work and gives us the opportunity to reorient our intentions and energies to offer up our work for God’s glory, earn a fair and just wage to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, and to recognize the dignity of the human person. Let us invoke the patron saint of workers, our dear St. Joseph, who shows us the way to salvation through dedication to work done with love.

Know of my prayers and kindly remember me in yours.

Fr. Arena