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Featured Saint

About Saint Joseph Statues

Saint Joseph "of the House of David" ( also known as Saint Joseph, Saint Joseph the Betrothed, Saint Joseph of Nazareth, Saint Joseph the Worker and other titles) is known from the New Testament as the husband of Mary and although according to most Christian traditions he was not the biological father of Jesus of Nazareth, he acted as his foster-father and as head of the Holy Family. Saint Joseph is venerated as a saint within the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican churches.

Saint Joseph's profession is described in the Gospels as a tektwe, a Greek word for a variety of skilled craftsmen, but Christian tradition has him as a worker in wood, or "carpenter", although the modern English words "joiner" or "cabinet-maker" might fit the sense of the Greek better. Very little other information on Saint Joseph is given in the Gospels, in which he never speaks. His places of birth and death are not given, and his dates have been presented very diffently at different periods; sometimes he has been seen as much older than Mary, and at other periods only slightly older. Persistent traditions, with some Gospel evidence to support them, make Joseph a widower when he married Mary, with children from an earlier marriage. He is mentioned in the Gospels as present on the visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve, but no mention can clearly be placed later than that one. Christian tradition, though vague on the time and place of his death, represents Mary as a widow during the adult ministry of her son.

The genealogy in Matthew shows that Saint Joseph's own father was called Jacob; but according to the genealogy in Luke Saint Joseph was a son of Heli. Saint Joseph lived at times in Nazareth in Galilee, Bethlehem in Judea, and in exile in Egypt.

In the Roman Catholic and other traditions, Saint Joseph is the patron saint of workers and has several feast days. He was also declared to be the patron saint and protector of the universal Catholic Church (along with Saint Peter) by Pope Pius IX in 1870, and is the patron of several countries and regions. He is a rare example of a saint from the early days of the church whose devotional role has tended to increase in the centuries since the Middle Ages.