Solemnity of Saint Joseph

Saint Joseph stands before you as a man of faith and prayer. The Liturgy applies to him the word of God in Psalm 89: "He shall say of me, 'You are my father, my God, the rock, my Savior'. O yes: how many times in the course of long days of work would Joseph have raised his mind to God to invoke him, to offer him his toil, to implore light, help, comfort. How many times! Well then, this man, who with his whole life seemed to cry out to God: "You are my father", receives this most special grace: the Son of God on earth treats him as his father.
Joseph invokes God with all the ardor of his soul as a believer: "my Father," and Jesus, who worked at his side with the tools of a carpenter, addressed him calling him "father."
A profound mystery: Christ, who as God directly experienced the divine fatherhood in the bosom of the Most Blessed Trinity, had this experience as a man through the person of Joseph, his foster father. And Joseph in his turn, in the home in Nazareth, offered the child who was growing beside him the support of his well-balanced virility, his far-sightedness, his courage, his gifts which every good father has, deriving them from that supreme source "from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name."
--Pope John Paul II, March 1983