Further Justice to St. Joseph, by Michael Pakaluk

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, March 2, 2021

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. …

In this year of St. Joseph, let’s at least do justice to St. Joseph.  Mere justice is the starting point of love and devotion.

In some earlier columns, I argued (here) that we don’t do justice to St. Joseph if we take him to have doubted Mary’s fidelity.  We certainly don’t do justice to him either if we think (here) that he had relations with her after Our Lord’s birth.

So in this column, I want to challenge the assumption that it is enough to call him a “foster father.”

We often refer to St. Joseph as the “foster father” or “guardian” of our Lord.  Echoing Scripture, we maybe even say that he was “reputed” to have been Jesus’s father.  Many saints and popes have used similar expressions, which are true, so far as they go.  But they fail to get at the fullness of St. Joseph’s paternity. …

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