Narrow and Stifling

Sleepy St. Joseph, pray for us!

I have no intention of commenting extensively on the recent papal exhortation, nor even on reading the thing. It would get in the way of me completing Augustine’s City of God, for one thing. If you’re looking for extensive thoughts on the matter, Mr. Skojec has been providing birds-eye view commentary, and Mr. Bear is examining the document in excruciating detail.

Perusing the document quickly drives one to exhaustion. It has that almost hypnotic effect so indicative of intentionally non-offensive yet passive aggressive rhetoric. It either lulls the reader to sleep or drives him mad.

But I digress. After about half an hour of bored reading, I started running text searches, and my running obsession with St. Joseph paid off in spades. Here is a fascinating little selection from the middle of the document:

No family can be fruitful if it sees itself as overly different or “set apart”. To avoid this risk, we should remember that Jesus’ own family, so full of grace and wisdom, did not appear unusual or different from others. That is why people found it hard to acknowledge Jesus’ wisdom: “Where did this man get all this? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:2-3). “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” (Mt 13:55). These questions make it clear that theirs was an ordinary family, close to others, a normal part of the community. Jesus did not grow up in a narrow and stifling relationship with Mary and Joseph, but readily interacted with the wider family, the relatives of his parents and their friends. This explains how, on returning from Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph could imagine for a whole day that the twelve-year-old Jesus was somewhere in the caravan, listening to people’s stories and sharing their concerns: “Supposing him to be in the group of travellers, they went a day’s journey” (Lk 2:44). Still, some Christian families, whether because of the language they use, the way they act or treat others, or their constant harping on the same two or three issues, end up being seen as remote and not really a part of the community. Even their relatives feel looked down upon or judged by them. (Amoris Laetitia 182)

Jesus listening to people’s stories
and sharing their concerns.

The reader is left to his own conclusion about what sort of families are being described as “constant[ly] harping on the same two or three issues.” It’s a vague accusation easily used as a weapon against any family the reader does not like because of some real or perceived assumption of moral high ground. (Maybe a family in which the parents have remained married for fifty years in spite of difficulties is “looking down” on their divorced and adulterous cousins.)

The really interesting language is used to describe what is in fact the popular idea of the Holy Family, in which the threesome of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph make up a kind of self-sufficient unit like an “Earthly Trinity.” P. Francis calls such a small unit “narrow and stifling.”

And he is right! A distorted devotional ideal of the Holy Family is indeed narrow and stifling, and earlier beliefs about the widowed St. Joseph’s children from a previous marriage and the so-called Holy Kinship are great antidotes to this narrowing devotional crutch.

Let us take this opportunity to move past the propagandist devotionalism of the past, and venerate the relatives of Our Lord as tradition tells us they actually were!

“Even their relatives feel looked down upon or judged by them.”

Josephology Sidebar: The Holy Kinship

(Jan Baegert)

“Who is as the Lord our God, who dwelleth on high: who maketh a barren woman to dwell in a house, the joyful mother of children.” (Ps. 112)

The “Holy Kinship” is a strange example of a short-lived iconographic theme. The earliest examples in art seem to have sprung up in the late 1400s, only to peter out in the 1600s. However, the idea itself comes from the Golden Legend of the mid-1200s, which theorizes on the extended family (and “brethren”) of Our Lord in the entry about the Nativity of the Virgin. The West having long rejected the earlier marriage of Joseph, thanks to Jerome, Jacobus de Voragine theorizes that St. Anne was actually married three times, bore three daughters named Mary, and was the grandmother of many personages in the Gospels:

Joachim spoused Anne, which had a sister named Hismeria, and Hismeria had two daughters, named Elizabeth, and Elind. Elizabeth was mother to John Baptist, and Eliud engendered Eminen. And of Eminen came Saint Servatius, whose body lieth in Maastricht, upon the river of the Meuse, in the bishopric of Liège. 

(Jean Fouquet) 

And Anne had three husbands, Joachim, Cleophas, and Salome; and of the first she had a daughter named Mary, the Mother of God, the which was given to Joseph in marriage, and she childed our Lord Jesu Christ. 

And when Joachim was dead, she took Cleophas, the brother of Joseph, and had by him another daughter named Mary also, and she was married to Alpheus. And Alpheus her husband had by her four sons, that was James the Less, Joseph the Just, otherwise named Barsabee, Simon, and Jude. 

Then the second husband being dead, Anne married the third named Salome, and had by him another daughter which yet also was called Mary, and she was married to Zebedee. And this Mary had of Zebedee two sons, that is to wit, James the More, and John the Evangelist. (source)

Anne and her sister bore quite a clan, it seems! The Holy Kinship theme was apparently most popular in the Germanic countries, but wasn’t unknown even in Spain, where it was ruthlessly expunged by the Counter Reformation in favor of the Holy Family. When Anne was deemed fit to exist as a real historical personage, it was deemed unfit that the mother of Our Lady would be so tied to the flesh as to marry three times.

Molanus and his disciples could have criticized the Holy Kinship on the basis of it contradicting the oldest traditions of the “Brethren of the Lord,” but that would have admitted too much concerning the supposed invalidity of apocryphal writings. He wished to be rid of de Voragine’s work entirely, but even that work had discarded earlier stories.

(from the Nuremberg Chronicles)

I don’t know when the Holy Kinship was first illustrated, and can only assume that some artist was perusing his copy of the Golden Legend one day and decided that this small section would make for an interesting picture. Apparently it was very popular for a brief while before it was overtaken by the Holy Family devotion. The drastic change from a large clan to a small “nuclear” family must have caused a dissonant shift in the popular Catholic idea of families.

(Derick Baegert)

Of course, the genealogies of the major and minor personages of the Gospels have been the cause of debate ever since the patristic era. Are the genealogies of Christ in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels both of Joseph, both of Mary, or one of each? Are the “Brethren of the Lord” just cousins or the children of Joseph? How many Jameses were there? How many Judes? What relation do they all share, if any? The Evangelists did not see fit to be precise, either assuming that their readers would know perfectly well who they were talking about, or thinking these matters to be the subject of undue curiosity.

Either way, the Holy Kinship was an interesting attempt at sorting out these matters, and it generated a good deal of lovely art before it expired. If the Holy Family devotion hadn’t been propagated with such intensity, the Kinship might have survived to this day.

Josephology Part 13: The Propaganda Machine

(Bartolomé Esteban Murillo)

Late Medieval Sources

Before I detail the uses made of St. Joseph in the Counter Reformation period, I want to look back briefly at the pre-Tridentine attempts to kick-start Josephite devotion. The following quotations are from Charlene Villaseñor Black’s Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire (Princeton University Press, 2006), which I will also be referencing somewhat obliquely throughout this post.

After centuries of such obscurity, the cult of St. Joseph rose to prominence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In Italy, St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) preached sermons praising Joseph’s special privileges (derived from having lived with Jesus and Mary) and asserted that Joseph was next to the Virgin in importance in the pantheon of saints. Perhaps the most significant figure to promote devotion to Joseph was Jean Gerson [died 1429], chancellor of Notre Dame and the University of Paris. At the Council of Constance in 1416, Gerson urged the institution of a feast day honoring the Betrothal of Mary and Joseph, for which he wrote an office. In a sermon delivered on the birthday of the Virgin Mary, he extolled Joseph as Christ’s earthly father. His three thousand-line Latin poem, the Josephina, laid the foundations of modern Josephine theology.... 

Whereas Joseph had previously been regarded as a subsidiary figure, old and unimportant, they asserted that, as the head of the Holy Family, the saint had to have been young and robust in order to support, protect, and exercise authority over Mary and Jesus. Gerson further proposed that, like the Virgin, Joseph was assumed into heaven after his death. (23-24)

As far as I know, Bernardino and Gerson are the first theologians to posit Joseph’s bodily assumption. In 1522, shortly before the Council of Trent, the Milanese Dominican Isidoro de Isolani wrote his Summa de donis sancti Joseph (Summa of the Gifts of St. Joseph), which had a strong Gersonian influence, also positing an assumption among other things. After the quasi-iconoclastic movements of the Counter Reformation wiped the slate clean on Josephite hagiography, Bernardino and Gerson were dusted off and further exploited by the Molanusian reformers.

The other great promoter of Josephite devotion was St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), who was healed of paralysis by St. Joseph’s intercession. Her influence on the Carmelite order ensured that the new Josephite devotion would be spread wherever Carmelites held sway; most especially in the Hispanic world, but also through evangelist-saints like Francis de Sales (1567-1622) who found inspiration in Teresa’s writings.

Propaganda for the Family

(Bartolomé Esteban Murillo)

How did the new version of St. Joseph find such purchase in the Catholic world? Largely because of the rising devotion to the Holy Family, and its ties to preaching about the importance of family life. Treated often as second-class citizens in a kingdom ruled by eunuchs, the married laity of Catholic Europe were happy to see an emphasis placed on the Holy Family. The Tridentine Fathers understood that marriage was in a particular crisis, so in addition to requiring an ecclesiastical witness to all ceremonies, the Council’s reformers preached heavily on the exaltation of the sacramental married state.

(Philippe de Champagne)

Rather than pulling from the examples of married saints from Scripture and Tradition (many of whom found their cults demoted if not demolished by the Counter Reformation), the Holy Family devotion was developed as a teaching tool for the married, with St. Joseph as its newly-reimagined moral and spiritual leader. Artists were encouraged to paint the Betrothal of the Virgin to St. Joseph; depictions of the everyday life of the Holy Family, especially in Joseph’s workshop, became popular; and the traditional images of Christ Enthroned on Mary were quietly being replaced with paintings of Joseph holding and playing with the Christ Child.

(Jeroni Jacint Espinosa)

Joseph was portrayed as the perfect model for husbands and fathers: young, hard-working, chaste, paternal, affectionate to his wife and child, and faithful. Surely young men in the married state need such examples, and Joseph was reinvented to suit that need. Mary’s wifely role was emphasized, as well: maternal, chaste, obedient, supportive, and prayerful. Even Jesus’ role as a good child was elaborated: obedient, hard-working, submissive to his elders, and playful.

Most of these things may have been true about the household in Nazareth, but there is no doubt that the newer elaborations are imaginative and based on no traditions. Indeed, what few ancient traditions there are about the Holy Family suggest an imperfect harmony at best. The Holy Family of popular devotion was carefully crafted by the Counter Reformers to suit a particular need, and artistic depictions were often stringently censored to that end.

(Mafra National Palace, Portugal)

It was important to show Joseph at his workbench, usually teaching the young Jesus how to work wood at the same time. The Spanish Empire reportedly had a difficult time dealing with a lazy populace, and promoting St. Joseph the Worker helped encourage men stuck in low-class labor to see work as a form a prayer. This aspect of Josephite devotion finds modern perpetuation in the teachings of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer through Opus Dei, and it was also exploited by Pius XII by instituting the May 1 feast.

(Gaspar Miguel de Berrío)

The royal lineage of Joseph, as a descendant of King David, was frequently brought to mind as a way of exalting his worth. He was a patriarch, a prince, heir to the throne of David. Some new devotionals suggested that the Holy Family lived in intentional poverty, since Joseph had given all of his royal inheritance to the poor. The Coronation of St. Joseph was a popular artistic theme in Spain and Mexico, mirroring very closely the Coronation of Mary.

(José Cortés de Alcocer)

More questionable than Joseph’s royalty was the emerging iconographic subgenre of the Earthly Trinity, which mirrored the three members of the Holy Family with representations of the Trinity in Heaven. Even the Spanish Inquisition found this subgenre semi-blasphemous, but surely it was the fullest expression of this unjustified exaltation of the spouse of Mary, and what artist could resist painting a mirror image of threes? It lent itself to a kind of symmetry rarely seen since the old iconography died away.

Effects of Fabricated Devotion

(artist unknown)

The rise of devotional propaganda was serving a real need in the Church. Family life was in chaos, and pastors wanted a focused example for preaching and commissioning art, something that could appeal to the poor as well as the rich. It must have seemed like a useful shortcut to have one condensed example of familial piety with the Holy Family, and clerics everywhere attempted to spread this devotion among the families they were trying to save.

Meanwhile, the old cults were shrinking and dying, often with the assistance of newly-scrupulous clergy who wanted nothing that smelled of fiction or imagination in Catholic devotion. John the Baptist, previously invoked in defense of marriage, was forgotten as Joseph took his place as the highest saint below Mary. The parents of the Virgin, Sts. Joachim and Anne, were diminishing as theologians questioned their historicity. Many of the saints once invoked against unhappy marriages—Monica, Helena, Henry and Cunegundes, Gengulphus, Rita—were falling by the wayside.

It’s an unfortunate fact that shortcuts lead to problems down the road. A hastily-built house may fall apart one day because of the shortcuts taken by the builders. A concocted devotion founded on speculative fabrications will not inspire a lasting change in the Church. The more St. Joseph is forced into a superhuman mold, the more it feels like fantasy, and one even more fantastic than the golden legends of old. We shouldn’t reshape saints simply based on a perceived need in the life of the Church.

And really, doesn’t the more ancient belief in Joseph’s pre-Marian marriage with children make him more relatable to married men today? A neat and tidy household with only one child seems more like the marriages of the workaholic, compulsive, fecundophobic neo-pagans of today, and less like the messy, crowded families traditionally promoted by the Church.

Next time, we will move further into modern times, and look at recent papal writings and proclamations about St. Joseph.

St. Joseph, lover of large families, pray for us!