Pope Francis, St. Joseph and Dorothy Day

Pope Francis has demonstrated a great personal devotion to St. Joseph.  His pontificate was inaugurated on the Feast of St. Joseph and he soon added St. Joseph to the other three canons of the Mass.

Popular devotion to St. Joseph began in the sixteenth century with St. Teresa of Avila.

The Catholic Worker movement has also demonstrated a devotion to St. Joseph from its beginnings; a statue of St. Joseph stands prominently in the window of the Catholic Worker office on Mott Street.  This might have been more influenced by Peter Maurin than Dorothy Day but there can be no doubt that her attention to St. Joseph began during her years in Greenwich Village when she followed the working poor to Mass on those freezing Advent mornings of 1917.

“There was many a morning after sitting all night in taverns or coming from balls over at Webster Hall that I went to an early Mass at St. Joseph's Church on Sixth Avenue. It was just around the corner from where I lived, and seeing people going to an early weekday Mass attracted me. What were they finding there?
I seemed to feel the faith of those about me and I longed for their faith. My own life was sordid and yet I had had occasional glimpses of the true and the beautiful. So I used to go in and kneel in a back pew of St. Joseph's, and perhaps I asked even then, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’"

From the back pew of St. Joseph’s the stained-glass window of the Holy Family in the workshop of Nazareth is conspicuous and young Dorothy could not have missed the connection with her own desire to right the injustices meted out to the working poor.

“Our Lord said, ‘Blessed are the meek,’ but I could not be meek at the thought of injustice. I wanted a Lord who would scourge the money lenders out of the temple, and I wanted to help all those who raised their hand against oppression.”