Redemptoris custos: the Guardian of the Redeemer, by John Paul II

Redemptoris custos (“the guardian of the Redeemer”) is Saint John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation on Saint Joseph, signed on August 15, 1989, on the centenary of Leo XIII’s encyclical Quamquam pluries. It is the most complete document of the Church ever dedicated to the husband of Mary: in thirty-two paragraphs, the Pope sets out the figure and the mission of Saint Joseph in the life of Christ and of the Church, treating of the true marriage to the Virgin, the real fatherhood over Jesus, the work of a carpenter, the contemplative silence, and the patronage over the universal Church. Whoever seeks the standard magisterial teaching on Saint Joseph should begin here.

Context and occasion: one hundred years of Quamquam pluries

The exhortation was born of a precise anniversary. On August 15, 1889, Leo XIII had published the encyclical Quamquam pluries, the densest Josephine document of the nineteenth century, which asked for the intercession of Saint Joseph in times that were difficult for the Church. Before it, Pius IX had already declared Joseph “Patron of the Catholic Church” by the decree Quemadmodum Deus, of December 8, 1870. A hundred years after Leo XIII, John Paul II takes up and deepens that magisterial line with a new key, condensed in the title itself: Joseph is, above all, the guardian of the Redeemer, the man to whom God entrusted the custody of His Son.

Right in the first paragraph, the Pope places Joseph at the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation:

It was precisely in this mystery that Joseph of Nazareth “participated” as no other human person, with the exception of Mary, the Mother of the Incarnate Word. He participated in that mystery simultaneously with Mary, involved in the reality of the same salvific event, and he was the depositary of the same love (Redemptoris custos, n. 1).

This is the architectonic thesis of the whole document: after Mary, no one was so close to the mystery of Christ as Joseph. And John Paul II specifies the manner of that closeness: “Of this divine mystery, together with Mary, Joseph is the first depositary. Simultaneously with Mary – and also in relation to Mary – he participates in this culminating phase of God’s self-revelation in Christ” (n. 5).

Structure of the exhortation

The text is organized into an introduction (n. 1) and six chapters:

1. The Gospel context (nn. 2-3): the angel’s announcement to Joseph and the marriage to Mary.
2. The depositary of the mystery of God (nn. 4-16): Joseph’s faith and his presence in the mysteries of the infancy of Jesus.
3. The just man – the husband (nn. 17-21): silence, justice, and fatherhood.
4. Work, an expression of love (nn. 22-24): the carpenter of Nazareth and the gospel of work.
5. The primacy of the interior life (nn. 25-27): contemplation hidden beneath the actions.
6. Patron of the Church of our time (nn. 28-32): the present relevance of the Josephine patronage.

The true marriage to Mary

The first theological pillar of the exhortation is the spousal bond. John Paul II states it plainly: “As can be deduced from the Gospel texts, the marriage to Mary is the juridical foundation of Joseph’s fatherhood. It was in order to ensure fatherly protection for Jesus that God chose Joseph as the husband of Mary” (n. 7). The Josephine marriage is not a theatrical arrangement, but the way chosen by God to insert the Son into the lineage of David and to give Him a father according to the law.

In receiving Mary into his home, Joseph welcomes everything that was accomplished in her: “He received her with the whole mystery of her motherhood; he received her with the Son who was to come into the world by the working of the Holy Spirit: in this way he showed a readiness of will, similar to the readiness of Mary, with regard to what God was asking of him through His messenger” (n. 3). The Pope goes so far as to place Joseph’s gesture in parallel with the fiat of the Annunciation: Joseph did not answer the angel’s announcement with words, as Mary did, but “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife,” and what he did, John Paul II writes, is the purest “obedience of faith” (n. 4, with reference to Rom 1:5). Joseph’s matrimonial yes is identified with his yes to the plans of God: the figure of the carpenter is inexplicable without the spousal relationship with the Virgin.

Joseph’s fatherhood, “minister of salvation”

On this spousal foundation rests the most discussed and most fruitful thesis of the document, that of the true fatherhood of Saint Joseph. In n. 21, John Paul II sets aside minimalist readings:

In it, Joseph is the father: his fatherhood, however, is not only “apparent,” or merely “substitute”; rather, it is fully endowed with the authenticity of human fatherhood, with the authenticity of the paternal mission in the family (Redemptoris custos, n. 21).

Joseph did not beget Jesus, and yet he is a father in the proper sense, not by juridical fiction nor by mere appearance. The biblical sign of this fatherhood is the giving of the name: et vocavit nomen eius Iesum, “and he called His name Jesus” (Mt 1:25, in the Nova Vulgata). It is Joseph who, by command of the angel, names the Savior: in entrusting that gesture to him, the exhortation itself notes, God was entrusting to him the responsibilities of an earthly father in relation to the Son of Mary (n. 3). This is why the document can say that Joseph “was called by God to serve directly the Person and the mission of Jesus, through the exercise of his fatherhood”: in this way he “cooperates in the great mystery of the Redemption, when the fullness of time comes,” and he is truly “minister of salvation” (n. 8). In the same paragraph, John Paul II gathers up the vertiginous affirmation of Leo XIII: by divine disposition Joseph was the guardian of the Son of God, from which it followed “that the Word of God should be subject to Joseph, should obey him and should render him that honor and that reverence which children owe to their own parents” (n. 8, citing Quamquam pluries).

The just man and the eloquent silence

The Gospel defines Joseph with a single word: “just” (Mt 1:19), iustus in the Nova Vulgata. In the biblical sense, the just man is not merely the honest man, but the upright holy man who listens and obeys. John Paul II reads this justice through the silence of Joseph, of whom the Gospels record not a single word:

But this silence of Joseph has a special eloquence: thanks to such an attitude, one can grasp perfectly the truth contained in the judgment that the Gospel gives us about him: the “just man” (Mt 1:19) (Redemptoris custos, n. 17).

This silence is not empty, but dense with interiority. The Gospels, the Pope notes, speak exclusively of what Joseph “did,” and yet they let us detect in his actions, wrapped in silence, “a climate of deep contemplation” (n. 25). In Joseph the old tension between the active life and the contemplative life is overcome: the carpenter who works is the same man who keeps the mystery in his heart.

Work, an expression of love

The fourth chapter sets Saint Joseph within the gospel of work. The Pope’s synthesis is remarkably concise: “Thanks to his workbench, at which he practiced his craft together with Jesus, Joseph brought human work closer to the mystery of the Redemption” (n. 22). The manual work of Nazareth, apparently commonplace, is sanctified from within, because it is done in the company of the incarnate Word. The Catechism extends the same insight: by His submission to Mary and Joseph and by His humble work in Nazareth, Jesus gives the example of holiness in the daily life of the family and of work (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 564).

Patron of the Church of our time

The final chapter brings the gesture of Pius IX up to date. John Paul II recalls that, “in difficult times for the Church,” Pius IX, wishing to entrust her to the special protection of the Holy Patriarch, declared Joseph “Patron of the Catholic Church” (n. 28). What Joseph was for the Holy Family of Nazareth, he continues to be for the family of God: this is why the title of patron of the Church is not honorific, but operative. The concluding prayer of the exhortation extends this custody to every state of life:

May Saint Joseph become for all a singular teacher in the service of the salvific mission of Christ, which in the Church belongs to each and to all: to husbands and to fathers, to those who live by the work of their own hands and by any other kind of work, to those called to the contemplative life and to those who are called to the apostolate (Redemptoris custos, n. 32).

From Redemptoris custos to Patris corde

The 1989 exhortation became the matrix of all the later Josephine Magisterium. On December 8, 2020, on the 150th anniversary of the declaration of Pius IX, Francis published the apostolic letter Patris corde, which takes up and develops the theses of John Paul II, recalling that “after Mary, the Mother of God, no Saint occupies as much space in the papal Magisterium as Joseph, her husband” (Patris corde, prologue). In the following year, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments added seven new invocations to the litany of Saint Joseph, and the first of them, Custos Redemptoris, “guardian of the Redeemer,” was taken exactly from the title of the exhortation (Letter to the Episcopal Conferences, May 1, 2021).

More than three decades later, Redemptoris custos remains the obligatory doorway into Josephology, the theological study of Saint Joseph. In it, the saint of silence finally received a magisterial word equal to his mystery: the just man who, by being the husband of Mary and the father of Jesus, guarded the Redeemer and continues to guard His Body, which is the Church.

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