St. Joseph and Catholic Masculinity
March 19 is the feast of our parish patron, St. Joseph, and an especially important feast, since in 2021 we are celebrating a Year of St. Joseph to commemorate the anniversary of his declaration as patron of the Universal Church. If you haven’t Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter Patris Corde yet, please, get on it immediately — there is so much good. The Holy Father gives us seven enumerated reasons to look to St. Joseph and ponder the mysteries of his life. In all of these qualities of St. Joseph, we are brought to a more complete understanding of what a “Catholic masculinity” could look like.
Society surely has its own stereotypes of what masculinity looks like, and sometimes, I find myself fitting inside them quite nicely. I can talk about NFL football for longer than most people are willing to listen, my go-to music genre is alt rock, and I’m always down for a craft brew or a glass of whiskey. But most of the time, I find myself struggling against these stereotypical conceptions of masculinity that American society seems so hung up on. I’ve never been the “big tough guy” and I never will be. There just seems to be something empty in this vision of masculinity.
And so one of my greatest pet peeves, if we can call it that, is the astonishing prevalence of “battle” imagery in descriptions of the Catholic life, particularly with regard to Catholic manhood. So often, people speak of life — and manhood in particular — as a battle, or as a war between good and evil, and so our greatest responsibility is to fight — fight Satan, fight others, fight whatever gets in the way. I don’t buy this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we toss it out altogether or that we rid of ourselves of Saints Michael, Joan of Arc, or George, my namesake. There is something to be learned here; it is part of the tradition in a variety of forms.
But, that being said, it absolutely cannot be our primary vision of the moral life, or of masculinity, for two primary reasons. The first is the example of Jesus himself. Many in 1st Century Israel were hoping for a warlike messiah, one who would lead armies against their enemies and cast off the Romans. They were surely disappointed. When we face opposition, Jesus tells us to “turn the other cheek” (Mt. 5:39). The strength of God is not made manifest in war against invading armies, but, to quote St. Paul as we learn in Christ, “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The power of God exists in the overabundance of love poured out on the Cross. Again, St. Paul speaks, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). All we have to do is remain in the love of God and this love itself will be as light, our transfigured selves casting out darkness by the presence of God within us.
The second objection is one from moral theology. Our first responsibility is not to combat evil, but to do good, especially if we, as St. Augustine does, view evil as a “privation of good.” Evil does not exist on its own; it is only found where good is not. “Fighting” evil is then only a response to some evil, or lack of God, that already exists. It isn’t something that we are called to do a priori, and it isn’t as much a good in itself as it is a reaction. To use an analogous example from moral theology, one can speak in potentiality of a “just war,” but one can never speak of a “good war;” war is never good. What we are called to do before all else as men, and as humans, is to love — to love God, to love our neighbor, and to love all of creation.
St. Joseph, as we find in Patris Corde, offers a bold example of this vision of masculinity. Pope Francis describes St. Joseph as a “tender and loving father,” an “obedient father,” an “accepting” father, a “creatively courageous father,” and a “working father.” None of these attributes has anything to do with violent or combative imagery, but only his role as reflecting the love of God the Father to God the Son. Joseph, like all saints, is a saint because of his great commitment to love. His love for Mary and Jesus and his faithfulness and obedience to God the Father are matched only by that of his wife and adopted Son. As we learn from the example of Saint Joseph, love is the masculine vocation, much as it is the feminine one. We are all called to follow Jesus Christ, and isn’t that beautiful?
Now, what about these societal stereotypes of masculinity, such as the ones I listed previously? Can we really speak of “feminine” men, or, for that matter, “masculine” women? We can look to Pope John Paul II for an answer. Prudence Allen, RSM writes:
Pope John Paul II took a different approach to masculinity and femininity…He did not then, nor did he ever, suggest that a man may have femininity or a woman masculinity. Instead, he argued that masculinity is a man’s way of being and acting in the world, and femininity is a woman’s way of being and acting in the world: “masculinity and femininity [are] . . . two ways of ‘being a body.’”¹
What makes something “manly” is if it is done in Christ-like love in a man’s body — no more, no less. Masculinity is not a false bravado, nor engorged biceps, nor an aggression to all things foreign. To be more fully man is to be more fully human, body and soul, made in the image and likeness of God for the purpose of relationship with God. The more we love, the more we become the men God calls us to be.
Now, is there a difference between masculinity and femininity? Of course, but it doesn’t lie in any sort of stereotype, which I think we are too quick to grab at — “boys like blue, girls like pink,” “men should be strong, women should be nurturing,” etc. Placing people exclusively into such culturally arbitrary and morally irrelevant boxes weakens the individual’s capacity to live his or her God-given personhood within the broader whole of the Church. As John Paul II taught, our theologically-grounded natures as men and women lie primarily in our innate physical differences, in the kind of love we are oriented toward giving, and definitely not in weak caricatures. Since we are created as a unity of body and soul, our physical realities dictate our lived experience of personhood, even as we are free to live within our created masculinity/femininity as we see fit, according to Christlike love. I as a man will never know personally the woman’s capacity to share life with another person inside her own body, nor the vulnerability that capacity entails. Likewise, no woman could fully know what it is to be man, a person who does not have that same vulnerability and beautiful capacity to bring life into the world.
As the Holy Family, Joseph and Mary bear witness to real complementarity in love, modeling for Jesus the examples of both feminine and masculine virtue. Jesus knew, and so can we all, that the perfection of man and woman reflect and are contained in the perfection of God, who is neither man nor woman (CCC 370). In living our own vocations of love, both man and woman are able to draw closer to the God who loves us first.
On this feast day and through the remainder of the Year of Saint Joseph, may we all, and especially men, pursue the virtue embodied so clearly in the life of St. Joseph, our patron. St. Joseph, Husband of Mary, Foster Father of Jesus, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us.
¹Prudence Allen, “Man-Woman Complementarity: The Catholic Inspiration.” http://www.laity.va/content/dam/laici/documenti/donna/filosofia/english/man-woman-complementary-the-catholic-inspiration.pdf
