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Dearest Saint Joseph,

we have entered the month of March, in which for centuries the Church has celebrated your name day and admires your faith and your collaboration in God's plan. In this time we wish to be in your company to confide in you our state of mind and draw from your testimony the strength and courage in our journey towards the peak of holiness. The word "holiness" makes us almost fearful, it seems like an inaccessible mountain, but your life teaches us that holiness consists in intimate communion with Jesus, your "legal" son and a relationship of solidarity with your brothers.

You, O Saint Joseph, are truly the model of holiness, not only for the mission that God has entrusted to you, but, above all, for the intimacy experienced with Jesus. Jesus learned from you to taste the flavors of our earthly life and you learned from him to be a mirror of the divine requirements present in your life. 

The saint, in fact, is one who allows himself to be invested with the very sanctity of Christ Jesus. 

You, Saint Joseph, brought your family into the dream and into everyday reality. The heritage of faith and experience of your origins constituted the essential source of your education, of your relationship with God and others. Every family has its soul, the world of its memories, each hearth keeps alive its seasons, its emotions, its struggles and its joys. The groom's authority and maternal love prepare the nest for their future. The father and mother are the crackling fires that maintain the unifying warmth of harmony. From this circle of blessing there is a supportive embrace from which no member of the family is excluded. When God took the helm to direct your family along paths different from your plans, you, or Joseph, stopped to listen to a superior will that wanted to give your love story a new seal: a pact of one eternal alliance that would never suffer cracking or breaking.

Just as at the dawn of humanity, God the creator placed the family at the source of people's physical and spiritual well-being, so "in the fullness of time", God placed you, Joseph, and your wife Mary as models of a humanity, freed from the black yeast of corruption, injustice and called you, "just man", to begin a new era of redemption. 

In Nazareth, your family's oasis has become the new Eden, where God is not a stranger, but has taken up residence by becoming Jesus, the Emmanuel, "God with us". The adventure of the "earthly trinity" began in the house of Nazareth. "God has pitched his tent among us" and your family had become a stronghold, where Jesus in advance inaugurated the season of "when two or three people are gathered in my name, I am among them". 

With regret, dear Saint Joseph, I must confess that today unfortunately there are many mothers and grandmothers who turn to us to ask for prayers for their children or grandchildren who see their dream of love shipwrecked. In too many families the hearth of love has gone out and the walls of the house have lost the colors of love and are covered in ice, cold as a winter night.

To us, dear Saint Joseph, all that is left is the mouth to pray, the heart to love and feelings of mercy for these our brothers who have turned a warm nest of love into a den of misunderstanding.

We ask you for additional intercession to renew our hope, because we are convinced that where there is faith, there is also love; where there is love, there also lives peace. Where there is peace, blessing hovers. Where there is blessing, God is present and where God is, nothing is missing.