Posted on 03/21/2021 6:55:09 PM PDT by ebb tide
Today, March 19, is the feast of St. Joseph, a saint of whom Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been so fond since his youth that he still keeps at home, in Santa Marta, a statuette of him asleep, “under which,” he has said, “I place little slips with my problems or difficulties, so that he can dream about them at night and tell me what to do” (see photo).
It cannot therefore be ruled out that the pope’s bold decision four days ago to call a halt to blessings of homosexual couples arose within him in this way, with the help of the holy dreamer.
All the more so since the year underway is a “special year” dedicated to St. Joseph, with the relative plenary indulgences, according to what is stated in a decree from the apostolic penitentiary of December 8 2020, the 150th anniversary of the saint’s proclamation as patron of the universal Church.
The decree was signed by Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, penitentiary major, and attributed to Pope Francis himself the order “that a special year of Saint Joseph be celebrated” starting from that same December 8.
Everything clear? Not at all. Whether the pope really announced this special Josephine year, and if so how, remains a mystery to this day.
On that same December 8, in addition to the decree from the penitentiary, a lengthy apostolic letter from Pope Francis also came out, “Patris corde,” entirely dedicated to St. Joseph, in which, however, there was not the slightest hint of a “special year” in honor of the saint.
Just as in the decree from the penitentiary there was no reference to the papal letter issued the same day.
And this in spite of the fact that the material author of the apostolic letter "Patris corde" was none other than Cardinal Piacenza, according to what Pope Francis himself revealed in a speech to the penitentiary on March 12 2021:
“The Cardinal - I thank him for his words - insisted on Saint Joseph. For months [he has been saying to me]: ‘Write something on Saint Joseph, write something on Saint Joseph’. And the Letter on Saint Joseph is his work, to a large extent. And so, thank you.”
In any case, after the publication of “Patris corde” the pope as it were forgot about the special Josephine year, the proclamation of which had been attributed to him.
In the following months he never mentioned it, except in passing once, in the greeting to the French-speaking faithful at the end of the general audience on Wednesday January 13 2021, and another time on March 18 2021, in receiving at the Vatican the community of the Pontifical Belgian College that is named after St. Joseph.
And when during the trip to Iraq the pope gave a wooden statuette of St. Joseph to the seminary of Erbil, not even in the long and detailed description of the gift was the slightest allusion made to the special Josephine year.
Still no indication after the Angelus of Sunday March 14, the closest to the feast of St. Joseph this year. The pope did speak of a special year, but in the name of something else entirely. It will be called, he said, “the year of the ‘Amoris laetita’ family” and it began this very day, March 19, overlapping the misbegotten Josephine year and in practice erasing it.
This does not change the fact that some people still believe in the special year of St. Joseph. This is the case of sixteen men’s and women’s religious congregations that have this saint as their patron, with a calendar of meetings and initiatives on which the newspaper “Avvenire” reported on March 14.
Even Italian state TV, in the program “A sua immagine” that covers Vatican news, made mention of it once. On March 13 it took its cue from the reputed father of Jesus to conduct interviews on the merits of adoptive fatherhood with a famous street priest, Fr. Virginio Rigoldi, and a renowned journalist, Mario Calabresi.
Previously, on January 26, Italian episcopal conference president Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti also made reference to the “special year of St. Joseph” in introducing the winter meeting of the permanent council of bishops. But in the final statement there was not one word of it.
Too few, these sporadic hints, to flesh out a true jubilee year in honor of the saint.
And to think that - as he let us know in a footnote of the apostolic letter “Patris corde” - every morning for forty years Pope Francis has said a prayer to St. Joseph “taken from a nineteenth-century French prayer book of the Congregation of the Sisters of Jesus and Mary,” which goes like this:
“Glorious Patriarch Saint Joseph, whose power makes the impossible possible, come to my aid in these times of anguish and difficulty. Take under your protection the serious and troubling situations that I commend to you, that they may have a happy outcome. My beloved father, all my trust is in you. Let it not be said that I invoked you in vain, and since you can do everything with Jesus and Mary, show me that your goodness is as great as your power. Amen."
Curiously, one impossible thing that St. Joseph did not know how to make possible is precisely this jubilee year of his. Vaguely enunciated here and there, but far from being translated into deeds.
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POSTSCRIPT - This post had been online for just a few hours when the message of Pope Francis for the annual day of prayer for vocations was released, with the date of March 19, which this time has the title: "St. Joseph, the dream of a vocation" and in the first lines refers to the "special year" dedicated to him.
But it should also be noted that there appeared in "L'Osservatore Romano" of March 18 an article on St. Joseph by the regent of the apostolic penitentiary, Krzysztof Józef Nykiel, in which there was not the slightest mention of the "special year" in honor of the saint promoted by his own dicastery.
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Bergoglio's "Amoris Laetita family" (divorced and remarried) is the antithesis of the Holy Family, of which St Joseph is the patriarch.
Ping
More confusion, as usual.
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