At the end of his life, Saint Anthony Mary Claret composed a short and essential pamphlet to recommend devotion to Saint Joseph.
And to warn against Renan's mistakes
by Don Bruno Capparoni
L'The nineteenth century can be called the “century of the Immaculate”, because in 1854 Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and in 1858 in Lourdes the Madonna “confirmed” it by saying to the young Bernadette Soubirous: «I am the Immaculate Conception». But it can also be called the “century of Saint Joseph”, because in 1870 Pius IX proclaimed him patron of the universal Church and Leo XIII in 1889, with the encyclical Quamquam pluries, developed the meaning of this patronage and proposed the famous prayer: "To you, O blessed Joseph...".
True “leaders” of Josephine devotion, these popes of the second half of the nineteenth century were followed by other masters of spirituality.
A Spanish saintly bishop, Antonio Maria Claret (1870), is an authoritative witness of Josephine devotion, also through the two religious institutes he founded, the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Claretians) and the Religious of Mary Immaculate (Claretian Missionaries), which prolong his charisma over time.
The life of Saint Anthony Mary Claret was full of zeal for the kingdom of God, but also of unforeseen events caused by the social and political events of Spain in that century. He was born on 23 December 1807 in Sallent, a village in the province of Barcelona, into a modest but deeply Christian family and, after a difficult search for his vocation, he became a priest in 1835. He came to Rome and attempted to enter the Society of Jesus, but then returned to Spain and devoted himself with great success to the apostolate of popular missionary, first in Catalonia and then in the Canary Islands. He had just called his Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to collaborate in that ministry when he was appointed Archbishop of Cuba (the island was then a Spanish colony); he remained there for ten years, exercising exemplary pastoral service. In 1859 he was recalled to Spain as “confessor” to Queen Isabella II and resided at the court of Madrid until 1868, when the queen was exiled. He accompanied the royal family to Paris for a year; then he went to Rome to take part in the First Vatican Council, which began on 8 December 1869. In the summer of 1870 he left Rome due to poor health and went to France, where he died on 24 October 1870 in the monastery of Fontfroide, near Narbonne. Pius XII proclaimed him a saint in 1950.
While he was in Paris with the royal family, he was a guest for a whole year of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who ran an institute for the education of girls. Stimulated by that environment of lively Josephine spirituality, he published a short writing, Devotion to Saint Joseph (Barcelona 1870, Libreria Religiosa, Imprenta G. Miró, 30 p.), where he substantially sets out the foundation of devotion to the holy Patriarch.
The booklet is divided into two parts. In the first, Claret explains the two fundamental prerogatives of Saint Joseph: being the true husband of the Virgin Mary and being the putative father of Jesus; these two privileges support the powerful intercession of the Saint and his great “authority” with God. They are the same attributes with which the Pious Union of the Transit of Saint Joseph invokes him in its brief prayer.
Saint Joseph actualizes the figure of the ancient Joseph: as Pharaoh entrusted the kingdom of Egypt to the son of Jacob, so God the Father entrusted to Saint Joseph his two treasures, Jesus and Mary. And the word spoken by Pharaoh in Genesis: «Go to Joseph (Go to Joseph)», Jesus Christ now repeats with absolute novelty and effectiveness: «Turn to Saint Joseph; he is my father and my friend». As proof of the powerful intercession of Saint Joseph, as a true Spaniard Claret recalls the exhortations of Saint Teresa of Avila to pray to him with full trust and confidence.
In the second part of the booklet, Claret briefly explains the characteristic of true devotion to Saint Joseph, which consists in living by imitating his virtues. He is a model for Christians in every state: celibates, married men, priests and religious, who follow his example "in love for work, in patience in persecutions and in love for the Virgin Mary". This is the simple synthesis of the Josephite spirituality of Saint Anthony Mary Claret.
In the same booklet, do-
After his short text, Claret wanted to be followed, translated into Spanish, by an article by the French priest Jean-Joseph Gaume, a very famous writer and polemicist at the time, published by the daily newspaper Le Monde January 30, 1869. This is a very significant addition.
A few years earlier, in 1863, the philosopher Ernest Renan had published in Paris the Life of Jesus, a very successful biography where Jesus was presented as rejecting his divinity; in a totally positivist perspective, he was considered a very high moral personality, but devoid of any supernatural element. Many Catholics had strongly refuted Renan and among them also Jean-Joseph Gaume, who in the article translated by Claret summarized one of his books, published in 1867. By adding Gaume's article to his devotional text, the holy bishop was concerned with making Spanish readers aware of Renan's serious errors.
Saint Anthony Mary Claret had
the disruptive danger of Renan's positions for the faith of the Christian people must be clearly understood; at the same time he established in the devotion to Saint Joseph the fundamental point of the cult towards the saints. These are none other than the masters, from whom we can learn "the most secure way by which, among the changing things of the world and according to the state and condition of each one, we can arrive at the perfect union with Christ, in which sanctity consists" (lumen gentium 50).