Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (c. 1600) by El Greco (1541–1614)
“I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and commended myself earnestly to him,” says Saint Teresa of Ávila (?? 1582) in her autobiography. But she did not think devotion to Saint Joseph was a private grace given to her alone: “If anyone cannot find a master to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious saint as his master and he will not go astray.”
Saint Joseph emerges
During and after Teresa’s lifetime, public devotion to Saint Joseph experienced its most dramatic period of growth in all of Christian history. Writers, painters, mystics, and Christians of all walks of life found themselves newly drawn to Saint Joseph, fueled in part by the Council of Trent’s emphasis on the Scriptures as the basis for devotion to the saints and on sacred images as a means of encounter with them, and in part by the personal experience of Saint Joseph’s paternal love in the writings of mystics like Teresa. By …More