This year’s Seminary Day has the following motto: “Father and brother, like Saint Joseph.” In the year dedicated to Saint Joseph, we want to highlight the condition of the priest as brother and father of men. The priest is taken from among men, his brothers, to be constituted a father by the sacrament of orders. It is about fatherhood born from the preaching of the Word of God and the sacraments. As Saint Paul says, “through the Gospel it is I who begot you for Christ Jesus” (1Cor 4:15).
There are many virtues of Saint Joseph that Pope Francis highlights in his apostolic letter Patris corde (“with a father’s heart”) for this jubilee year: tenderness, obedience, welcome, creative courage, industry. He finally presents it as if it were for Jesus “the shadow of the heavenly Father on earth.” In each of these virtues the priest can find the style to exercise the ministry with the strength and discretion typical of Saint Joseph. All are necessary to beget Christ in each baptized person and lead him to full Christian maturity.
In these difficult times for the exercise of the priestly ministry, the figure of the legal father of Jesus on earth (let’s not forget that he was known as “son of Joseph”) shows us God’s plan through a man apparently without social importance . “From a superficial reading of these stories – Pope Francis writes about the Gospels – one always has the impression that the world is at the mercy of the strong and the powerful, but the“ good news ”of the Gospel consists in showing how, despite the arrogance and violence of earthly rulers, God always finds a way to fulfill his plan of salvation.
Even our life sometimes seems to be in the hands of superior forces, but the Gospel tells us that God always manages to save what is important, on the condition that we have the same creative courage as the Nazareth carpenter.
In the Gospel of Saint Matthew the expression “to take the child and his mother” is used four times to refer to the mission that God entrusts to Saint Joseph, who fulfilled it with total fidelity. The treasure that God put in the hands of the carpenter was not the tools of his work, which he dignified with his honesty and constancy, but the Son of God and his mother. The secret of his life and vocation is in the acceptance, custody and total dedication of the “child and his mother.” This is also the secret of the priest’s fruitfulness: welcoming Christ and his mother to form the family of God’s children. The priest, with the grace of the sacrament of Holy Orders, is called to “conform” the Christian to Christ, a task that I can only carry out to the extent that he identifies himself with him, allowing him to live in his own daily existence.
For this, he must also welcome his mother, as John’s son at the foot of the cross, to learn from her, and from her motherhood, the attitudes of Christ, who was educated by Mary and Joseph in the faithful fulfillment of God’s will. . Undoubtedly, Joseph had in Mary an incomparable teacher to discover his office as father and custodian of Jesus. And both found in Jesus, not only the one they had to educate, but the Master par excellence, whose daily life was a permanent lesson in divine and human things.
The seminary is a school for the following of Christ under the tutelage of Joseph and Mary, like a small Nazareth where those who are called to identify with Jesus, High and Eternal Priest, learn from such unique teachers to resemble him with clear conscience that this task occupies a lifetime.
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-Bishop of Segovia.
