Jean-Jacques Olier: Feelings Regarding the Grandeurs of Saint Joseph (Part Two)
For an introduction to Olier and this work, see the introduction to Part One.
Feelings Regarding the Grandeurs of Saint Joseph
§II: How Much Jesus Christ Honored the Great Saint Joseph
The Son of God having rendered Himself visible in taking a human flesh, He visibly conversed and dealt with God His Father, that is, under the person of Saint Joseph, through whom His Father rendered Himself visible to Him. The most holy Virgin and Saint Joseph, both together, represented one and the same single person, that of God the Father. They were two sensible representations of God, two images under which He adored the fullness of His Father, be it in His eternal fruitfulness, be it in His temporal Providence, be it in His love for this Son Himself and His Church. There, he was like the holy oratory of Jesus Christ and the sensible object of all His devotion. Doubtless, the temple was, for Him, a place of religion, since He saw in that building a dead and material figure of God His Father; but here He saw a living, spiritual, and divine figure, with all His grandeurs and all His perfections: Templo hic major est [Here is something greater than the temple] (Mt 12:6). He saw in him the secrets of His Father; He heard, through the mouth of that great saint, the very word of His Father, whose sensible organ Saint Joseph was.
He was the oracle of Jesus Christ, who made Him know all the wills of His heavenly Father; he was a clock that indicated to Him all the moments marked in the decrees of God; he was before that oratory where, addressing Himself to His Father, He said, Pater noster [Our Father], and where He invoked Him for all the Church. What a lovable object for Jesus Christ! What an object of yielding! What a subject for exercising His loves! What caresses and what feelings of loving tenderness! O great saint, how blest you were to furnish so beautiful a matter for the love of Jesus! O God, what gazes of love, and what yieldings! Goodness of my Jesus! How content You were to have someone before Your eyes to satisfy Your loves! Blest Joseph! Blest Jesus! Blest Joseph, by furnishing to Jesus the most just subject for His delights! Blessed is it, O Jesus, to find in Joseph the object of Your holiest yieldings! The eyes of Your spirit saw in him a sensible image of His beauty, so much that, in him, all alone, You find Your perfect contentment.
It is doubtless an admirable life, that of God the Father in eternity, loving His Son, and the Son, reciprocally, loving the Holy Spirit. It was also an admirable life, that of Joseph and of Mary, image of God the Father for Jesus Christ His Son. How great was their love for Jesus and the love of Jesus for them! Our Lord saw in one and in the other the presence, the life, the substance, the person, and the perfections of God His Father, and, seeing these beauties, what love, what joy, what consolation! The holy Virgin and Saint Joseph, seeing, on their part, the person of God in Jesus, with all that He is, Son of God, Word of the Father, the Splendor of His life and the character1 of His substance (cf. Heb 1:3); what reverence, what respect! What a feast of love! What profound adoration! There, there was a heaven, a paradise on earth; there were delights without end in this place of sorrow, abundance of all goods in the bosom of poverty; there was a glory begun even in the vileness, the abjection, and the littleness of their life.
O Jesus, I am not astonished if You remain thirty whole years in that blest house, without leaving Saint Joseph. I am not astonished if You are inseparable from his person. His house alone is a paradise for You, and his bosom is, for You, the bosom of Your Father from Whom You are inseparable, and in Whom You take Your eternal delights. Outside of this house, You find only baleful objects, sinners, those sad causes of Your death; and, in the house of Joseph, which is also that of Mary, You find the most delightful objects of Your joy, the holy sources of Your life. You never leave that holy place except to go to the temple, and the world mocked Your solitude and this retired life; but it did not know that the temple was a dead figure of the bosom of Your Father, and that Saint Joseph, as His living image, was the place of His delights and of Your repose.
Who, then, could tell the excellence of our saint, the great respect that Our Lord had for him and the strong love that the holy Virgin bore him, Jesus Christ regarding, in him, the eternal Father as His Father, and the most holy Virgin considering, in his person, the same eternal Father as her Spouse.
Chapter II
Saint Joseph Considered Through Relation to the Church
§I: Saint Joseph, Patron of supereminent Souls
Saint Joseph, having been chosen by God to be His image towards His only-begotten Son, was not established for any public function in the Church of God, but only to express His purity and His incomparable holiness, which separate Him from every visible creature; because of this, he is the patron of hidden and unknown souls. The function of Saint Peter for the Church is one thing; the workings of Saint Joseph are another. Saint Peter is outwardly established for policing, for ruling, for doctrine, and he passes this on to the prelates and ministers of the Church. Saint Joseph, on the contrary, who is a hidden saint and one without outward functions, is established to inwardly communicate the supereminent life that he receives from the Father and which he later pours onto us through Jesus Christ. The influence of Saint Joseph is a participation in that of God the Father in His Son, while that of Saint Peter and of the other saints is a participation in the grace of Christ, pouring itself out upon men and distributing itself in its members by measure. That of Saint Joseph is a participation in the source without rule and without measure, which pours out of God the Father into His Son, and God the Father, Who loves us with the same love with which He loves His only-begotten Son, gives us to draw, to taste, to savor, in Saint Joseph, the grace and the love with which He loves His very Son. In the other saints, it is by parcel and by measure that He communicates it to us; here, it is without bounds and without measures, because of who Saint Joseph is, and because of what God the Father places in him as into His universal image. This saint is, in effect, the patron of the supereminent souls raised to the purity and to the holiness of God, to those who are intimately united to Jesus Christ, and to whom he communicates his tenderness for this lovable Savior, as well as to those who are applied to God the Father, Whose figure Saint Joseph is.
This is a hidden saint whom God willed to keep secret during his life, and whose interior occupations He reserved for Himself alone, without sharing them with the outward cares of the Church; a saint whom God revealed at the base of hearts and whose inspiration He Himself inspired in the interior of souls.
And as Saint Joseph applied himself to God alone during his life, God reserved him for Himself, to reveal Him and to imprint His esteem, cult, and veneration upon him. As the image of the eternal Father towards Whom every prayer leads, and Who is the end and conclusion of all our religion, Saint Joseph ought to be the universal tabernacle of the Church; this is why the soul united inwardly to Jesus Christ, and which enters into His ways, His feelings, His inclinations, and His dispositions, this soul, as much as it is upon earth, will be filled with love, with respect, with tenderness for Saint Joseph, in imitation of Jesus Christ living upon earth, for such were the inclinations and the dispositions of Jesus Christ: He loved God the Father in Saint Joseph, with tenderness, and adored Him under His living image, where He really dwelled.
It is for us to follow this guidance and to thus go seek our father in this saint. It is in him that we ought to go see, contemplate, adore all the divine perfections, whose assembly will render us perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:48). We learn, through this saint, how one can resemble God the Father and be perfect upon earth as He is in heaven. And since, in God the Father, Saint Joseph is the source of all good and of all mercy, it is said of this saint that one asks nothing of him without obtaining it.
§II: Saint Joseph, Patron of Priests
It is in priests, above all, in whom God resides in His fullness and in His pure and virginal fruitfulness, to conduct themselves on the model of the great Saint Joseph, with regard to the children whom they engender for God. This great saint guided and directed the Child Jesus in the spirit of His Father, His sweetness, His wisdom, His prudence; so we ought to do for all the members of Jesus Christ, who are confided to us and who are other Christs, in such a way that we ought to treat them with the same reverence as Saint Joseph. Let us be superiors in God, with regard to them, but interiors in our persons, like Saint Joseph, who saw himself infinitely below Jesus Christ, although he was His guide and although he was established over Him, in the name and in the place of the eternal Father. We have also chosen Saint Joseph as one of the patrons of the seminary, as the saint whom the Lord charged, in heaven, with the express care of priests, according to what He made knows to me through His will.
The most holy Virgin also gave me this great saint as a patron, assuring me that he was among the hidden souls, and sharing these words about him: I have nothing dearer in heaven and on earth after my Son. Bringing Our Lord to a sick man one day, I inwardly repeated these words that were placed in me in the spirit: Dux Justi fuisti [You were the leader of the just];2 they made me remember that Saint Joseph had been the guide of the Just One, Who is Our Lord; I had to represent him as bearing the Son of God with the same sentiments with which he often bore Him during his life.
1 “Character” here is a cognate of the Greek word used in Heb 1:3 (χαρακτὴρ); the Greek word refers to a stamp of impression, like the image stamped on a coin.↩
2 This is from one of the traditional antiphons at Lauds for the Feast of St. Andrew (November 30): They who persecuted the just, You sank them, Lord, into hell, and, on the wood of the Cross, You were the leader of the just. In both cases, “just” is singular (justum, justi).↩
Source: Œuvres complètes de M. Olier, Fondateur de la Société et du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, ed. Jean-Paul Migne (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1856), 1291-1296.
Translation ©2024 Brandon P. Otto. Licensed via CC BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.
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