Prayer

To you, O Blessed Joseph, do we come in our need, confident that you will hear our prayer. Through the tender and chaste love that bound you to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and through the paternal love with which you embraced the Child Jesus, we humbly beg you to look upon us with the same affection and through your power and strength aid us in our necessities. (mention petitions)

O glorious St. Joseph, spouse of Mary our Mother, obtain for each of us a pure, humble, and charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the Divine Will. Be our guide, our father, and our model through life, that we may merit to die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary. Amen.

O glorious St. Joseph, through the love you bear to Jesus Christ and for the glory of His Name, hear our prayers and obtain our petition.

Reflections excerpted from Guardian of the Redeemer, by St. John Paul II.

Saint Joseph was called by God to serve the person and mission of Jesus directly through the exercise of his fatherhood. It is precisely in this way that he "cooperated in the great mystery of salvation" and is truly a "minister of salvation."  His fatherhood is expressed concretely "in making his life a service and a sacrifice to the mystery of the Incarnation and to the redemptive mission connected with it; in using his legal authority over the Holy Family in order to make a total gift of himself, of his life and work; in turning his vocation to domestic love into a superhuman oblation of self, an oblation of his heart and all his abilities into love placed at the service of the Messiah growing up in his house." 

The beginnings of our redemption were entrusted "to the faithful care of Joseph."   "God placed him at the head of his family, as a faithful and prudent servant, so that with fatherly care he might watch over his only begotten Son." Joseph stands out in his august dignity, since by divine disposition he was guardian, and according to human opinion, father of God's Son. Whence it followed that the Word of God was subject to Joseph, he obeyed him and rendered to him that honor and reverence children owe to their father. 

Since it is inconceivable that such a sublime task would not be matched by the necessary qualities to fulfill it, we must recognize that Joseph showed Jesus by a special gift from heaven, all the natural love, all the affectionate solicitude that a father's heart can know.  Besides fatherly authority over Jesus, God also gave Joseph a share in the corresponding love, the love that has its origin in the Father "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Eph 3:15). 

During this novena, we thank St. Joseph for his faithful care of our community.  We ask that as a faithful and prudent servant of God the Father, he may continue with fatherly care to watch over all our spiritual and temporal needs, especially our need for good vocations.