Patris corde: Pope Francis’s letter on Saint Joseph

Patris corde (“with a father’s heart”) is Pope Francis’s apostolic letter on Saint Joseph, signed on December 8, 2020, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the declaration of Saint Joseph as Patron of the Catholic Church, made by Blessed Pius IX on December 8, 1870. With that same letter, Francis convoked the Year of Saint Joseph, which ran from December 8, 2020, to December 8, 2021, enriched with special indulgences granted by the Apostolic Penitentiary. The core of the document is seven portraits of the saint: beloved father, father in tenderness, father in obedience, father in acceptance, father of creative courage, working father, and father in the shadow.

The opening sentence sets the tone of the whole text: “With a father’s heart: that is how Joseph loved Jesus, designated in the four Gospels as ‘the son of Joseph’” (Patris corde, prologue). And Francis recalls an objective fact that justifies the attention Josephology devotes to this document: “After Mary, the Mother of God, no Saint occupies as much space in the papal Magisterium as Joseph, her husband” (prologue).

The occasion: 150 years of the patronage over the Church

On December 8, 1870, by the decree Quemadmodum Deus of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, Pius IX declared Saint Joseph Patron of the Catholic Church. The Latin text is lapidary: the Pope “CATHOLICAE ECCLESIAE PATRONUM solemniter declaravit,” that is, he solemnly declared him Patron of the Catholic Church (ASS 6, pp. 193-194). John Paul II summed up the gesture in this way: “In difficult times for the Church, Pius IX, wishing to entrust her to the special protection of the Holy Patriarch Joseph, declared him ‘Patron of the Catholic Church’” (Redemptoris custos, n. 28).

Patris corde thus takes its place in a precise magisterial lineage: the encyclical Quamquam pluries of Leo XIII (1889), which founded the patronage on the fact that Joseph was the husband of Mary and the putative father of Jesus, and the apostolic exhortation Redemptoris custos of John Paul II (1989), published on the centenary of that encyclical. Francis does not intend to replace that doctrinal corpus, but to reread it in an existential key, starting from the experience of the pandemic, when so many ordinary people sustained the lives of others far from the spotlight.

The seven portraits of the father

The letter is organized into seven titles, each of them a trait of Joseph’s fatherhood. They are not seven parallel devotions, but seven facets of a single mission: to serve the Person of Jesus through the real exercise of fatherhood.

Beloved father

“The greatness of Saint Joseph consists in the fact that he was the husband of Mary and the father of Jesus” (n. 1). Joseph had “the courage to assume the legal fatherhood of Jesus” (prologue), exercised in the act of giving the name: Joseph gave the Child “the name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Mt 1:21, cited in the prologue). To give the name, in the Judaism of the Second Temple, is the juridical gesture of a true father, not a symbolic formality.

Father in tenderness

“Jesus saw the tenderness of God in Joseph: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him’ (Ps 103:13)” (n. 2). The child Jesus learned the fatherly face of God in the face of a carpenter. Francis draws from this a spiritual lesson: “in the midst of the storms of life, we must not be afraid to leave to God the helm of our boat” (n. 2).

Father in obedience

“In every circumstance of his life, Joseph knew how to pronounce his ‘fiat,’ like Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus in Gethsemane” (n. 3). Joseph’s obedience is always operative: in the four dreams of Matthew, he wakes up and acts. John Paul II had already called it the purest “obedience of faith” (Redemptoris custos, n. 4).

Father in acceptance

“Joseph accepts Mary, without setting prior conditions. He trusts in the words of the angel” (n. 4). From here comes one of the most quoted sentences of the letter: “The spiritual life that Joseph shows us is not a path that explains, but a path that accepts” (n. 4). Joseph does not receive answers to the mystery; he receives the mystery itself into his home.

Father of creative courage

In the flight into Egypt, Joseph “is the man through whom God takes care of the beginnings of the history of redemption” (n. 5). This is why Francis proposes him as “a special patron for all those who have to leave their land because of wars, hatred, persecution, and destitution” (n. 5). It is the most visible pastoral updating in the document.

Working father

“Saint Joseph was a carpenter who worked honestly to provide for his family. From him, Jesus learned the value, the dignity, and the joy of what it means to eat bread that is the fruit of one’s own work” (n. 6). The theme continues the tradition of Saint Joseph the Worker and takes on urgency in a time of unemployment that the letter faces head-on.

Father in the shadow

It is the most original portrait. “One is not born a father, one becomes one… And one does not become a father merely because one has brought a child into the world, but because one takes responsible care of him” (n. 7). Joseph is the shadow of the heavenly Father over Jesus: “He never placed himself at the center; he knew how to decenter himself, to place Mary and Jesus at the center of his life” (n. 7). True fatherhood is the chastity of the one who does not possess the child.

The Josephine year and the indulgences

In order to translate the letter into ecclesial life, Francis convoked a Year of Saint Joseph, from December 8, 2020, to December 8, 2021. On the very day of publication, the Apostolic Penitentiary issued a decree granting the gift of special indulgences for the whole year. Under the usual conditions (sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Pope), the plenary indulgence was granted, among other ways, to those who meditated on the prayer of the Our Father for at least thirty minutes, prayed the Rosary as a family or between engaged couples, entrusted their own daily work to the protection of Saint Joseph, performed a corporal or spiritual work of mercy, or recited a legitimately approved prayer in honor of the saint.

The declared aim of the year was not to accumulate practices, but to obtain what the letter itself asks at the end: “It only remains for us to implore from Saint Joseph the grace of graces: our conversion” (conclusion).

The seven new invocations of the litany

Also as a fruit of the Josephine year, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, by a letter of May 1, 2021, updated the litany of Saint Joseph approved in 1909, inserting seven invocations drawn from the recent Magisterium: Custos Redemptoris (guardian of the Redeemer), Serve Christi (servant of Christ), Minister salutis (minister of salvation), Fulcimen in difficultatibus (support in difficulties), and Patrone exsulum, afflictorum, pauperum (patron of the exiled, of the afflicted, of the poor). Among them, the support in difficulties comes from the prologue of Patris corde, and the patronage of the exiled, of the afflicted, and of the poor comes from n. 5.

What Patris corde adds to Josephology

From the point of view of systematic Josephology, the letter introduces no new dogmatic theses: the real and not merely apparent fatherhood of Joseph, the spousal bond with Mary as the juridical foundation of that fatherhood, and the direct service to the Person and to the mission of Jesus were already consolidated in Redemptoris custos (nn. 7-8 and 21). The contribution of Francis lies on another plane.

First, a biblical-typological accent: “Saint Joseph constitutes the hinge that joins the Old and the New Testament” (n. 1), taking up the typology of the patriarch Joseph of Egypt, present in the tradition and in the 1870 decree itself, which opens by comparing the two Josephs. Second, an existential accent: Joseph is the saint next door, “the man who goes unnoticed, the man of daily, discreet, and hidden presence” (prologue), proposed as intercessor and guide for every state of life. Third, a social accent: migrants, the unemployed, and wounded fathers find in the letter a concrete mirror. Josephology thus gains, without losing speculative rigor, a pastoral grammar for the third millennium.

Whoever wishes to go deeper can read the full text of Patris corde on the website of the Holy See and compare it with the exhortation Redemptoris custos: together, the two pieces today form the axis of the Josephine Magisterium.

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