Word: joseph
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They were styling him, says Chorpenning, "as a figure who would help navigate the crisis of the family and the church: as a protector, a nurturer." Moreover, Gerson and Bernardine maintained that Joseph's bond with the Messiah and the Virgin was so close that, like them, he was assumed bodily into heaven--where, as Bernardine put it, "just as this holiest of families ... lived together on earth in a laborious life and affectionate grace, so do they now rule in affectionate glory in heaven." That novelty, eventually known as the Holy Family, became a church staple and effectively transformed...
...suitable champion. Teresa of Avila, born in 1515, was one of the Catholic Church's great mystics and--through tireless work founding and defending a new model for convents and monasteries--a heroine of the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism's vigorous response to the challenge of Protestantism. After prayer to Joseph cured her of an early case of paralysis, she adopted him as her "true father," stating that "in heaven God does whatever he commands." Teresa took the Nazareth household as the model for her order and named 12 of 17 monasteries after Joseph. "The devotion snowballed," says Chorpenning...
...look changed. In 1570 Johannes Molanus, the Counter-Reformation's religious-art czar, banned the old, bald Joseph and stipulated a younger model. Artists like Murillo responded, resulting in, as Miesel puts it, "a vigorous, really studly Joseph." His saintly portfolio became extraordinarily diverse. (He now enjoys 24 "patronages.") Jerome's old notion had turned him into the patron of virgins, even as his paternal status made him the patron of families. The apocryphal scene of his death surrounded by Mary and Jesus was translated into his patronage of good deaths. ("When I was a little Catholic girl," recalls Anne...
...today, the most creative popular inquirer into Joseph's merits may well be an evangelical Protestant. Jerry Jenkins looks cautious, almost nervous discussing Holding Heaven's boldness. "If we get criticized for Left Behind," he says, "it's, 'Are you adding to Scripture?' And we say, 'We're not adding. We're saying what prophesy would really look like.' You're really on more dangerous territory, though, when you quote an entire chapter and a half of a novella from a guy who's not quoted in Scripture, ever...
Holding Heaven, Jenkins' project with illustrator Ron DiCianni, has only two scenes: one in Egypt as Joseph talks his restless infant to sleep by describing the miracles of his life thus far and another 30 years later at the Nazareth carpenter's deathbed as the old man querulously but determinedly extracts from the adult Jesus the grim story of Christ's future and his good news for humanity...