Today, May 1, the Church celebrates the optional memorial of St. Joseph the Worker. It is a civil holiday, and not a day of religious precept. The image illustrating the text is “Joseph’s Workshop,” from the alabaster altarpiece of the Torreciudad sanctuary.
Michael P. Foley wrote in 2020 in the magazine The Latin Mass that devotion to St. Joseph can be an interesting “sign of the times”: just as Pope Pius IX declared Joseph the universal patron of the Church in the mid-19th century after the loss of the Papal States, Pope Leo XIII extolled Joseph as a model worker at the end of the 19th century, after the working class had been transformed by industrialization. On the one hand, the Holy Father feared that capitalist entrepreneurs might ignore the good of the worker’s soul and foster his neglect of the home and family (encyclical Rerum Novarum #20]; on the other hand, Leo saw that socialists “act against natural justice and destroy the structure of the home” when they substitute the family with the State (RN #14). For Leo XIII, the example of Joseph is a powerful reminder of the dignity of work: “The worker’s labor is not only not dishonorable,” Leo writes, “but, if virtue is joined to it, it can be singularly ennobled” (Quanquam Pluries #4).
One of Leo XIII’s favorite words to describe Joseph was opifex, the Latin term for worker or laborer. In the original Greek, the Gospels describe Our Lord’s foster father as a tektōn or craftsman (faber in Latin; Mt 13, 55), while tradition, private revelation, and later biblical translations also designate his trade as that of a carpenter. By referring to Joseph primarily as a worker, Leo was broadening the scope as much as possible to include not only skilled artisans, but anyone who must work by the sweat of his brow.
Leo XIII’s successors built on this appreciation of the saint. In 1920, Benedict XV wrote that workers should follow Joseph as their patron instead of socialism, for “nothing is more hostile to Christian wisdom” than the socialist ideology. On March 19, 1937 (feast of St. Joseph), Pius XI placed “the vast campaign of the Church against worldwide communism under the banner of St. Joseph, his powerful protector.” Joseph “belongs to the working class,” the Pope explains, “and endured the burdens of poverty for himself and for the Holy Family, of which he was the tender and vigilant head.” But Joseph was not a Bolshevik. On the contrary, he was “a living model of that Christian justice that must reign in social life”.
Pius XII shared the concerns of the pontiffs who preceded him about the difficult situation of the modern worker, crushed by a capitalist “machinery” that “not only does not agree with nature, but is in contradiction with God’s plan and with the purpose He had in creating the goods of the earth.” The main enemy, however, remained communism.
Pius XII likewise considered St. Joseph crucial for the Church’s defense of the working class and opposition to global communism, but instead of publishing an encyclical on the subject, he turned his conviction into liturgical worship. In 1955, he established the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1. The Pope explained that he instituted the new feast “so that the dignity of human work… may take deeper root in souls,” though clearly another objective was to supplant the communist celebration of May Day, which had begun to be observed in 1886.
If there is any controversy surrounding the new feast, it is what it replaced. Let us remember that we are in 1955, in the midst of Pius XII’s liturgical changes. The Sacred Congregation of Rites was not satisfied with the Pope’s decision because it displaced the ancient feast of Saints Philip and James (which was later moved to the first free day, May 11), while the beautiful solemnity of Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, which had been celebrated on the Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter, was suppressed.
In 1969, with Paul VI’s new Missal and liturgical calendar, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker was downgraded from the highest possible rank (first class) to the lowest (optional memorial). The official reason is that, while the feast might have been celebrated with enthusiasm by “Christian workers’ associations,” others celebrated it with less enthusiasm (Paul VI, Calendarium Romanum). It is curious logic. One might think that the Church would want to do everything in its power to foster popular piety, but the 1969 calendar reveals a rather systematic disdain toward popular saints like Valentine, Nicholas, Christopher, and Catherine of Alexandria. There is a sense of elitism in the calendar makers’ decisions about which saints they considered worthy of continuing universal liturgical veneration. It is possible that the architects of the new calendar also downgraded the feast because it was only fourteen years old. Despite Pope Pius XII’s warning against an archaeological mentality that privileges the ancient over the new and ignores authentic development, the committee responsible for the 1969 General Calendar abolished the 19th-century feast of the Most Precious Blood and the 20th-century feast of Christ the King. Ironically, a calendar full of novelties reveals a strange aversion toward the relatively recent.
But there may have been an additional and more decisive consideration. Just as Pope Pius XII never explicitly mentioned the feast’s opposition to communism, Paul VI may have refrained from mentioning his own hidden motive for downgrading the feast: his adoption of the Ostpolitik: his generous attitude toward communist leaders, applying a policy that often proved counterproductive and left persecuted Catholics behind the Iron Curtain and in China at a disadvantage.
John XXIII and Paul VI viewed communism differently from their predecessors. Historical sources now reveal that John XXIII fervently desired that representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church be present at the Second Vatican Council, even though its hierarchy had been infiltrated by the KGB. Therefore, he reached an agreement with the Soviet Union: Russian Orthodox observers could attend and, in exchange, the Council would not utter a word against communism or Soviet tyranny. John XXIII’s last encyclical, Pacem in Terris (1963), also gives the impression that it revokes the Church’s condemnation of communism.
Paul VI, who received Soviet authorities in the Vatican in 1966 and 1967, wanted to help Christians behind the Iron Curtain, and indeed the difficult situation of the “Silent Church” improved to some extent during his pontificate. But this was achieved at the cost of betraying the living martyrs. To appease the Hungarian government, Paul VI ordered Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had been tortured by the communists, to leave Budapest, solemnly promising him that he would remain Primate of Hungary as long as he lived. The Pope moved the cardinal to Vienna and then broke his promise, appointing someone else as primate who would be more acceptable to the communist leaders. Mindszenty died as a broken man.
Therefore, in the new era of “détente,” a feast like that of St. Joseph the Worker, conceived to oppose communism, was a “sign of contradiction” and an inconvenience. Even so, the liturgical memorial managed to survive in the calendar.
We have just seen that the Church’s change of orientation as an institution is clear, right?: from the condemnation of communism to the Ostpolitik.
I pose this question as an aside because there is a tendency among some of the people who comment on these texts, who are a minority of those who read them, to insist that I have some sort of sickly nostalgia for an idealized Church of the past and that everything now seems bad to me. And yes, it is true that the situation of the Church causes me great suffering, starting with the disastrous hierarchy. Because there has been a break in what for centuries was an organic development and the fabrication of a new faith and a new liturgy that have little to do with tradition and much with the world. But it is not nostalgia: it is that men, not even the pope, can change what God revealed, what the Church developed as tradition over the centuries, and what the magisterium taught constantly for centuries. Let us remember that the Catholic Church has had a total of 267 popes in 2000 years, of whom only 5 have reigned in the last 60 years. I think this puts us in the right perspective. Moreover, the ruptures that were made in the 20th century in the Church were intended to be imposed on the faithful to smother what the Church had believed and prayed for centuries, not in a static way, but in an organic development: developing the potentials it carried within itself from the origin, and not adding foreign elements, as was done in the 20th century. And it is the novelty that persecutes antiquity. We are not in a situation where the ancient faith opposes novelty, but rather novelty hurls insults and accusations against what the Church always said and did. Contrary to what those commentators who believe that the Church was born after the Second Vatican Council think, here we are not attacking the new church with its new contents, but rather defending from the annihilating attack of that church captive to the modernist sect what the Church always believed and taught.
And let us note that, in today’s case, we are not even commenting on a feast celebrated by the Church for centuries, but a new institution as a response to the emergence of the anti-Christian ideology and practice of communism. The change with Paul VI is his refusal, which John XXIII had already affirmed, to condemn communism, something that his predecessors did, with well-founded reasons. This is the rupture. As Jean Madiran said, “the Church’s opening to the world (in the 1960s) was in reality an opening to left-wing ideologies”.
John Paul II, who came from suffering under the communist regime in Poland, rejected Paul VI’s Ostpolitik and joined forces with President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to confine Soviet communism to the ash heap of history. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI offered a retrospective analysis of a century of “horrifying destruction” caused by communism, condemning this ideology by calling it “the worst enemy in history for more than a century.”
So let us conclude this historical review of the institution, evolution, and rupture in the feast of St. Joseph the Worker by observing how history is full of ironies. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain may have left only a handful of communist nations in the world, but as socially acceptable ideologies, communism and socialism have gained new footholds in most Western nations —with the glaring exception of the countries that actually experienced a communist regime—. What is even more disturbing is that amnesia about the evils of communism seems to have affected the highest spheres of the Church. Secondly, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker offers an important correction to capitalism, or rather to the doctrine that “greed is good” that too often animates it. For the Catholic, free enterprise and work are not aimed at wealth, but at the exercise of generosity; they are not a driver for comfort, but an occasion for holiness.
We have not yet heard Pope Leo XIV pronounce on communism or socialism, and we are not going to waste time describing Bergoglio’s Marxist ideology. We will only mention that, according to some, Pope Francis’s secret agreements with the People’s Republic of China made Paul VI’s betrayal of Mindszenty seem mild by comparison. The emeritus cardinal of Hong Kong, Joseph Zen, describes the agreement as a “suicide” and a “shameless surrender” that could lead to the “annihilation” of the Church in China, and cites the resurgence of the “double game” of the Ostpolitik as the culprit for this disastrous decision.
To conclude, a note in case it helps to live this day from faith: Peter Kwasniewski points out that the feast of St. Joseph the Worker is not “a glorification of work,” but a delight in the contemplation of the Beatific Vision: one of Our Lord’s commandments is: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (John 6, 27); the eternal food being, of course, the Eucharist. And the man whose life best exemplifies the idea of working for the Eucharist (although he died before its institution!) is St. Joseph. For Joseph was the perfect “contemplative worker”; his daily tasks were subordinated to a loving contemplation of his wife, the new Ark of the Covenant, and his foster son, the Bread of Life, and were imbued by it.