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Joe Heschmeyer — author of A Man Called Joseph: Guardian for Our Times — joins us to wrap up the year of St. Joseph. We dig into the fascinating history of his veneration, and ask why he seems such a perfect father-figure for modern people.
Cy Kellett:
Turns out St. Joseph has a lot to teach modern people, Joe Heschmeyer is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host. And please raise your hand if the following applies to you. You didn’t really do much to observe the year of St. Joseph raise your hand. I knew it. I knew there were a lot of you out there. Yeah. There was a wonderful year of St. Joseph given to us by Pope Francis. And boy, do we need some fatherly and motherly help in the world today? If we can get that from the heavenly realms, that is just what we need.
Cy Kellett:
And yet many of us didn’t do much for the year of St. Joseph didn’t pay that much attention to St. Joseph. Maybe you did, if you did. Congratulations. I kind of feel like we didn’t do enough here at Catholic answers to honor St. Joseph, to remember him and to ask for his help and blessing. So today the day that this podcast comes out, December 8th, 2021 is the last day of the year of St. Joseph. So we’re going to make up for lost time. Talk with Joseph Heschmeyer about a man named Joseph. Guardian for our times. Here’s what Joe, he Meyer had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer apologist extraordinaire, and the author of the brand new book The Early Church Was The Catholic Church. Thanks for being with us for this conversation about St. Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
My pleasure. Another book, I wrote A Man Named Joseph about St. Joseph.
Cy Kellett:
Guardian for our times.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I was going to mention it, Joe, have you lost complete trust in me as a host? Like you, I better just say some stuff, because he’s not going to think of any of this.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
I trust anyone who’s a regular listener to this show and Catholic Answers Live knows what an appropriate answer to that question is.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, you have lost trust in me. Oh, that hurts my feeling. All right, Joe, we’ll talk about St. Joseph. But before we do, one thing we should say is this goes to air on December 8th, December 8th is the feast of the immaculate conception, which is a Marian feast. So I don’t want to not wish everyone a blessed feast of the immaculate conception. And remember our mother in heaven, our heavenly mother, the mother of God, the Queen of Heaven. Do you know her name, Joe?
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Mary.
Cy Kellett:
Mary. You got it. I’m so glad if you had gotten that one wrong that would’ve really brought the rest of the show down.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
I was curious for a second. I wrote this book about Joseph. I-
Cy Kellett:
So spouse of the blessed Virgin, Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
And part of the reason we chose to do this on a Marian feast is that actually Pope Francis gave us a year of St. Joseph, which ends today on December 8th, the feast of the immaculate conception.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. This episode could just be like, why you missed the year of St. Joseph or what you missed during the year of St. Joseph. For anyone who’s tuning in the very last day.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Or potentially too late. Here’s here’s what you could have experienced all year long.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. But you know, there’s a great Catholic tradition of showing up late and still every… As a matter of fact, I believe Jesus has a thing about you can get paid for the whole day if you just worked the last hour, so.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Well, and in keeping with the nativity theme, it’s worth remembering that by the time the wise men get there, we’re not told how old Jesus is, but we know Herod is looking for children age two and under. Which suggests they may not have been extremely timely to his birthday party.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that’s right. Well, so now you’re comparing us to the Magi. Okay. Fair enough. I’ll accept that comparison.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
We’re offering our gifts to the Lord.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Before we continue, then if you would please sing several verses of the little drummer boy. No?
Joseph Heschmeyer:
I afraid I have to pass on that one. Perhaps we can splice in someone much better than me singing that.
Cy Kellett:
Here’s a weird thing about your book Guardian For Our Times, that’s how you describe Joseph. What does St. Joseph have to do with our times?
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So can I put that in like a very brief 2000 year kind of span and to say like most of the church’s history Joseph was basically ignored.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, really, he’s kind of a Catholic Reformation discovery, huh?
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Well, it’s a little older than that, but not a lot older than that. Really, around 1300.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
There’s a renewed interest in him. He’s added to the universal liturgical calendar in 1479. But until about 1300, there are zero churches in the world.
Cy Kellett:
Named Saint Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Named after him.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Which is remarkable.
Cy Kellett:
The great saints of the early church were John, the Baptist, the Virgin Mary and the apostles.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And then the martyrs.
Cy Kellett:
And then the martyrs, yes.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
So especially at a time when you have people getting martyred in the community. I mean, one of the things we, we don’t think about, because for us, the saints are always really long ago. But if you think about the saints in the Roman cannon, when you got Linus, Cletus, Clement, Xysti, Cornelius, Cyprian, Laurent, Algens, Chrysogonus, John Paul, Cosmos, Damian. These are either going to be early popes or martyrs from the community in Rome or both.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And so these were people who had led either by office or by example, the community. And so someone like St. Joseph, as amazing as he is, he is dead long before you start keeping track of the local Christian heroes. He’s out of the picture by the time Jesus’ public ministry begins. And so I think there’s some sense in which he’s almost overlooked for that reason, but then you also have really, especially in the east with what’s called the Protoevangelium of James, you have this extra canonical literature that tries to fill in this 30 year gap and tries to recount stories from Jesus’ childhood or tries to out stories from Mary’s childhood or the marriage of Mary and Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
These kind of stories are very popular among Christians. Now, they’re folk stories and you take them with a heavy grain of salt, but Joseph often doesn’t come out looking particularly good in that because to add a little bit of conflict, they think they kind to spice up the gospel accounts where Joseph is a little cynical about the marriage and he’s a little cynical about the Virgin birth. And he just doesn’t come off in a particularly saintly way. He comes off as a little embittered.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And you can find this, unfortunately, even throughout a lot of the churches art, especially going back to the Middle Ages, you’ll often find these to depictions of the nativity where you have Mary looking very happy and pious and then Joseph looks like this grumpy old man in the corner who’s kind of frowning about the whole thing. Now, part of what’s going on there is that they were trying to show the Virgin birth without words. As an artist, how do you depict that? Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus. Well, one way I would argue not a good way is to show him unhappy with the birth.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Oh yeah. Right? Yeah. So you disconnect him from the family picture that gives it a kind of visual clue of what you’re trying to convey, which is he’s not the biological dad.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Exactly. So they’re trying to express this, and I think they’re expressing it in a way that’s poor. I think they’re expressing it in a way that, for lack of a better way to describe it, they make it look like he’s been cuckolded by God, which is not at all. Like that’s not a good understanding of the Virgin birth of Christ at all.
Cy Kellett:
No, yeah.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
That totally misunderstands Joseph’s role in the nativity. But the that’s an understanding that, on a more or less conscious level, it seems like a lot of people in the church had up until about 1300. Now there are exceptions to that, but you don’t have huge devotion to Joseph in the church fathers, you don’t have huge devotion to Joseph in the early Middle Ages.
Cy Kellett:
So, there is a kind of though something that happens over the course of the Middle Ages though, where the spirituality turns more inward as the Middle Ages go on. So maybe the father figure of Joseph fit with the inward turn in the high Middle Ages and late Middle Ages.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think that’s a good read. Like I said, you start to see the seeds of this around the 13 hundreds. 1416, John Gerson, who was a theologian in the University of Paris. He was actually the chancellor. He gives a speech before the Council of Constance in which he argues that Joseph deserves the feast day and the church has been undervaluing him. But then he also does this really fascinating thing, he writes a 3000 hexameter Latin poem about Joseph it’s called the Josephina.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And so, he’s kind of angling in two directions. He’s speaking to the council saying, “You guys can control the church calendar. You can put Joseph on there and really encourage kind of from a top down perspective.” But then he is writing a popular poem to encourage more of a grassroots devotion. And, it works. Within a very short span of time. The church does respond and gives Joseph a feast day. And also we see a real ground swell of devotion to Joseph. One of Gerson’s arguments is that Joseph isn’t this kind of dried up old man that he’s actually a young strong man who’s been misunderstood by a lot of Catholics.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So then, my question to you to start all of this, why the phrase Guardian For Our Time? And your point was to in responding is, well actually our time, at least if you consider the last 5, 6, 700 years, this has really been Joseph’s time and he didn’t have a time before that.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah, he has now. So, I wanted to kind of set all of that stage just to tee up the fact that when I say Joseph is now the second most cited Saint after the Virgin Mary in people, magi documents, this is a radical sea change that the church is constantly pointing us to Joseph now in a way that just wasn’t true before. So we should be asking the question, what’s different now? And I think you’ve already highlighted one of the things is there is a little more of an interior shift as we’re no longer primarily in places in which we’re being martyred. The things we’re looking for in a Saint may be different. And so a Saint who is a father and a protector, and all of that, especially in an era in which you have the breakdown of the family, seems incredibly timely.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
So then to get to the other, that’s kind of the “our time” half of the answer. The guardian dimension, the first paper title, and the reason that the immaculate conception feast date is the one that Pope Francis chose is that 150, well now 151 years ago, St. Joseph was given his first title, which was Patron of the Universal Church. And patron of the universal church, he is made the guardian or acknowledged as the guardian of the whole church for a pretty simple reason that if you think about the church as Jesus is the head, and then the body of Christ, the church in union, you know Ephesians one, that at the time of the nativity or at the time of the incarnation during those nine months of Mary’s pregnancy, the visible church is basically just Jesus is the head and Mary the body. And then Joseph very quickly joins the ranks as a protector, that he’s protecting them as they go from Nazareth to Bethlehem, he’s protecting them on the flight into Egypt.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And his role is more than that, but it is certainly inclusive of the fact that he has been entrusted by God to protect Mary and to protect Jesus. And that is something that if you have never chewed on that before, it’s worth chewing on. St. John Chrysostum has a homily. He’s one of the few to kind of point out St. Joseph’s really important role in the early church. And one of the things he says is Joseph is told that Jesus is going to come and save the people from their sins. And then the next time the angel appears to him, he basically says, “You need to save Jesus. You need to bring the family into Egypt because Herod is coming to kill him.”
Joseph Heschmeyer:
He is tasked with saving the savior and what a remarkable sort of inversion and turn that is, no one else in history. No really can claim that. I mean, Mary, in one sense can, but Joseph in this very special sense in the flight into Egypt is tasked with saving Jesus’ life, which is mind blowing. And so the idea that he is the guardian of the church flows from the fact that he protected the whole church in the little home in Nazareth, the very first manifestation of the visible church is right there.
Cy Kellett:
If I may, it also seems to me that in the modern period and the reason that I said that Catholic reformation was, you think of a saint like St. Therese of Avila who had a profound devotion to St. Joseph, One that I think led to many other saints, considering St. Joseph and many other Catholics.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
St. Francis of Sales as well, another reformation era Saint, that…
Cy Kellett:
But it also strikes me, Joe, that after the Italian Renaissance, the world of the Catholic world is becoming, becomes, and now has maintained for a long time, extremely wealthy. Wealth, wealth, right? And that means leisure and division of labor and all that. Well, I want to get to the division of labor part. Joseph, as a worker speaks to a certain status, a modern status that really didn’t exist before the modern world. That is the worker who is engaged in what can appear to be meaningless work. You’re not mending a fence or milking a cow, but you are making the part of a part, you know what I’m saying? And so that this tends to really wear on the soul. I think.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There’s a reason that Joseph, the worker is the church’s kind of response to the communist feast of Mayday. The communists declared May 1st as like a worker’s holiday and the church not wanting to jump on the communist bandwagon, but still recognizing that workers deserve to be celebrated, said, “Well, here’s basically what Christians have to offer.” Like we have a theology of work beginning in the garden of Eden, but even before the fall work is something good in dignified, but work like everything else is corrupted by the fall.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Well, Joseph in a beautiful way really embodies that. And I think there’s a great, it’s really just two lines in parallel accounts in the synoptic gospels, when Jesus is a Nazareth, one account says, “Is this not the carpenter son?” And one account says, “Is this not the carpenter?” That the people know him as those two things, the son of Joseph, the carpenter and a carpenter in his own right. And contained in those two lines is a whole story left untold of Jesus learning carpentry from St. Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
So, as radical as it is to save the savior, you’re also going to teach the one who is also the all-knowing God, teach him how to wood work. And if you think about the fact that Jesus would die for our sins on a wooden cross, there’s something beautiful and profound in a way that Joseph wouldn’t have even known of teaching Jesus to hammer the nails into the wood that he’s learning. He has an incredible intimacy with the wood, with the nails and this lead up to the cross and he’s learning that in a real way in the school of St. Joseph
Cy Kellett:
Beautiful Joe. So if I may, I would say one of the marks of now the post-modern era and I really do think we’re in a post-modern, the modern world does doesn’t exist anymore. The modern world had a kind of optimism and positive morality that, even though it’s a diminishment from true Christian morality, is not the basement and, and negativity that we have today. So, I would argue we’re in post-modern era. And one of the marks of the post-modern era is the triumph of the self and the opinion that opinion holds a place in, or point of view or my truth, or however you want to say that holds a place of ascendancy that it has never held before in human history.
Cy Kellett:
And that the more intricate our gadgets get at communicating, the more we are devoted to what’s sometimes called self expression, but even news channels, as we know, are opinion channels now. What matters is not facts or reality as much as opinion. And it strikes me, and I’ve written a little bit about this, but I wanted to run my idea by you, that Joseph is everything except a man of opinions. He’s everything that… You know, he’s truly manly in every good sense of that, but he never utters an opinion once.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There’s a shirt. I think that I saw, and it just is empty quotation marks. And then underneath it, it says St. Joseph. And the joke there of course is that there’s zero recorded words from St. Joseph. We have one word we know, he said, do you know what that is?
Cy Kellett:
No, I’m…
Joseph Heschmeyer:
It’s, what’s the word you’re supposed to do if you don’t know the answer.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, Jesus. Oh. All right.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Were you never in Sunday school Cy? So we know he said-
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know. Yes, I was, but I don’t remember that lesson. I’m sorry, Joe.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
I just mean like, whenever you grill kids, if they don’t know, they always just guess Jesus and half the time it’s right.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
But no, the angel tells him that he’s going to name the child, Jesus. So we know at some point he must have said the word Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
Joe, you are so good. Yeah.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
That’s all we have. So he has this incredibly referential sort of life, meaning like, just like, you don’t understand who Mary is, unless you understand who Jesus is. You don’t understand anything about St. Joseph except in relation to Jesus and Mary. Everything we know about his life is in relation to one or both of them. And there’s something really beautiful and really profound about that.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Even, he’s not defined by his work. And that’s one of the ways that we can easily allow ourselves to be defined. He is a worker he’s Joseph, the carpenter, but no one remembers him primarily carpentry, right? It’s for his family life for these relations. And I think that’s actually something, frankly, I think something as men we can easily slip into is allowing ourselves to be defined by work or to view that as where our success and importance lies.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And Joseph has this incredibly relational life. Case in point twice in his life, he has to just totally nuke his own job and up and leave without any notice to his clients. I mean, think, we have no idea like what he was in the middle of project wise, but you know, as a carpenter, you’re regularly working on something for someone often someone who either has paid you, or at least is expecting you to produce something. And then Joseph just disappears. He skips down, he goes to Egypt with his family.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And, he may well have left some annoyed clients or people saying, he said he was going to be back after the census. Where is he? He never returns, but then after Herod dies. He does it again, he leaves Egypt. Now, again, we have to fill in a little bit of story. We aren’t told how long they’re in Egypt, but as Pope Francis points on Patris Corde, the document that he released for the year of St. Joseph, that the family needed to eat. It wasn’t like they just have like a huge reserve sum of money. Now, sure, they got gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the Magi, but they can’t just live off of life savings. They’re going to have to actually, he’s going to have to get a job and build a clientele, presumably in carpentry, somewhere in Egypt, in a totally new culture and then do it all over again.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
So we see someone who’s willing to put his job on hold and totally shutter his own business multiple times for the good of his family. And that’s a huge sacrifice as a breadwinner, as a father and as someone who can easily imagine that the way you serve your family best is by working, which is some true, but not always. It’s easy to slip into that trap.
Cy Kellett:
It’s funny to think that somewhere in Bethlehem in a basement or something, there’s a half finished armoire somewhere that… Oh-
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Joseph was working on that but. Yeah, but, this is the thing I think Joe, that St Joseph, his silence and his kind of fortitude, even waiting after death for 1400 years before people started to pay any attention to him. I think it’s helpful to us Christians now to kind of… Like, it’s very hard for a Christian to know how to respond to postmodernity. It’s very hard to know because we never have, have dealt with a civilizational catastrophe ever in the history of the church that’s like this one. This one’s not analogous to any of the others.
Cy Kellett:
So part of the… If we listen to St. Joseph, if we take him as a guardian for our times, then part of the answer is it’s Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. I mean, stop trying to… You don’t have the answer to what’s coming in a year nevermind where the church is going to be in a hundred years, make it all about Jesus and that’s your job and don’t worry about the rest.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And, in the scheme of things, as we look back, we can even see the providential design and allowing Joseph to be overlooked. Meaning in the very early days of Christianity, it would be easy for the mistake to creep in that Joseph was Jesus’s biological father. And so, his silence, his being overlooked, helped to preserve the doctrine of the virgin birth.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And then once that’s firmly in place, it’s like now we’re ready to understand who Joseph is now that we’ve seen who he isn’t. He isn’t the biological father of Jesus, but he is called the father of Jesus in Luke chapter two. So there’s a sense in which he has a real adoptive fatherhood of Jesus, which is a remarkable and overlooked thing where we’re always quick to say the foster father, the stepfather, but it’s like, yeah, but he’s also the father.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And if, if we miss that, so he takes the lowest place, even seemingly in some way, relationally, he allows himself to be overlooked. And then we can kind of see the brilliance and the role shine forth. I begin the book by looking at Jesus’ parable in loop 14, when he talks about a marriage feast. And he says to go to the lowest place so that you can be told “friend, go up higher” rather than trying to take the highest place for yourself and being cast down. And he says, “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Now we live at an age. That’s very much like influencer culture, where people are promoting themselves and their brand. And they’re, they’re always hustling to do all of that. And that’s very much the way people are making a living for themselves online and so forth. And it’s easy to fall in it. I mean, it’s even easy to fall into that. You know, as apologists for Catholic Answers, we can start doing a lot of self-promotion and try to take that highest place and get top billing.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Joseph gives a different way where he takes the lowest place. And then is told friend go up higher. It takes 1400 years to be told that, but eventually he is, he’s put in this second highest place after Mary, in terms of the Papal Magisterium, that’s a huge kind of turnaround. And I think it really does speak volumes. Like I think we’re afraid to embrace that kind of humility today for fear that we’re going to take the lowest place and be left there forever.
Cy Kellett:
Right. I think that’s right. I hope everyone in the church is grateful for, whether you’ve observed it well or poorly, grateful to the holy spirit and to Pope Francis for promoting this year of St. Joseph. If nothing else we got here, it meant a good conversation with you for this episode, but anything else you want to say about Joseph before we conclude the year of St. Joseph?
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Well, yeah, maybe one thing. When we had like the whole worldwide fight against communism, one of the things the Pope did at the time, Pope Pius, the 11th, I believe it was yeah. Papa 11th in 1937. He placed the vast campaign of the church against world communism under the standard of St. Joseph, Her Mighty Protector. So to take this idea of Joseph as the protector of the church and as protector of each member of the church seriously, one concrete thing we can do is say, Joseph, here is the battle I find myself facing. And you’re a protector, you’re a guardian. You’re someone who takes care of the weak and vulnerable. I’m feeling weak and vulnerable in this area come and help me.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
And be assured of his prayers, be assured of his help that he’s not going to let that go unnoticed. On a personal note. My invitation to join Catholic Answers was on the feast of St. Joseph during the year of Saint Joseph and he’s my name Saint. So I feel very much like this is one area where he is interceded for me. I’d say there are going to be those areas in everyone’s life. If you allow them, if you open up that door and just ask for his help, he really will pull through.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer. Future St. Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
Notably, not the worker.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right, or the patron of the universal church and I don’t think you’re going to get that title. I don’t care how holy a life you live. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us about St. Joseph.
Joseph Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I feel a little bit less guilty now about my lack of fervent observation of the year of St. Joseph. I do love St. Joseph, it’s hard to be Catholic and not love St. Joseph. I mean, I don’t know any Catholic fathers who, at some point haven’t turned to St. Joseph and said, “Pray for me, St. Joseph, I know you are the model father and I ain’t.” So, we have St. Joseph, we love St. Joseph, but this year we got to honor St. Joseph with the year of St. Joseph. And it feels like maybe we didn’t do as much as we could have.
Cy Kellett:
Well, we have this episode, we’ll always have this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve got something you’d like to share with us about a future PO a possible future episode, maybe something you’ve heard here that you would like to correct, or maybe just tell us we did a good job. You can always send us an email focus@catholic.com is our email address. focus@catholic.com. Please support us as well, financially, if you can, as we come to the, the end of the year here at the time, when lots of folks are making decisions about their charity dollars, you can support Catholic Answers Focus and help us keep doing what we’re doing and grow and expand.
Cy Kellett:
We got some big plans for the coming year, just by going to givecatholic.com, give catholic.com. If you’re watching on YouTube, well, you found our new YouTube channel and forget to subscribe and hit the little bell icon. It does something. They tell me to say that I don’t know what it does, but there’s a bell icon. Please hit it. And if you’re listening on Apple, Spotify, Stitch, or any of the other places where you can get a podcast like and subscribe there, give us that five star review, help us grow the podcast and get yourself notified when new episodes are available. Again, I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks for joining us. Sorry, St. Joseph, we didn’t do that much this year, but I hope you like this episode. See you next time. God willing, right here. Catholic Answers Focus.