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.

Over a hundred years ago, Pope Leo XIII exhorted the Catholic world to pray for the protection of St. Joseph, Patron of the whole Church.   Pope Leo appealed to Joseph's "fatherly love...for the child Jesus" and commended to him, as "the provident guardian of the divine Family," "the beloved inheritance which Jesus Christ purchased by his blood."  Since that time the Church has implored the protection of Saint Joseph because of  "that sacred bond of charity which united him to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God," and the Church has commended to Joseph all her cares, including the dangers which threaten the human family. 

Even more today we have many reasons to pray in a similar fashion: "Most beloved father, dispel the evil of falsehood and sin...graciously assist us from heaven in our struggle with the powers of darkness...and just as once you saved the Child Jesus from mortal danger, so now defend God's holy Church from the snares of her enemies and from all adversity."  Today we still have good reason to commend everyone to Saint Joseph.  It is my heartfelt wish that these reflections on the person of Saint Joseph will renew in us a prayerful devotion to him.

Commending ourselves, then, to the protection of him to whose custody God "entrusted his greatest and most precious treasures," let us at the same time learn from him how to be servants of the "economy of salvation."  May Saint Joseph become for all of us an exceptional teacher in the service of Christ's saving mission, a mission which is the responsibility of each and every member of the Church: husbands and wives, parents, those who live by the work of their hands or by any other kind of work, those called to the contemplative life and those called to the apostolate. 

St. Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer, Patron of the Universal Church, Protector of the Passionist Congregation and of this monastery bearing your name, pray for us!