“What is in a Name? Joseph as the Name of a Jesuit University”
By Fr. Joseph Chorpenning O.S.F.S., Editorial Director of the Saint Joseph’s University Press
“If the first stage of all true interior healing is to accept our personal history and embrace even the things in life that we did not choose, we must now add another important element: creative courage.” This is one among many incisive observations made by Pope Francis in his apostolic letter With a Father’s Heart of 8 December 2020, which designates 2021 the “Year of St. Joseph,” to mark the 150th anniversary of the saint’s proclamation as Patron of the Universal Church. What holds for individuals, is also true for institutions. Shakespeare’s question “What’s in a name?” seems especially poignant in this Year of St. Joseph for Philadelphia’s Jesuit university, which bears the name of Saint Joseph. This special year invites us to accept and embrace our history, as well as to act with “creative courage.”
The back story for the name “Saint Joseph’s University” is found in the historic relationship between Jesus’s earthly father and the Society of Jesus from its origin: the first apostolic mission, which was the proximate occasion for the resolve to found a religious order, was entrusted to the Society on the Feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1539 (Woodstock Letters 37 [1908]: 249). It has been observed that all the works of the Society of Jesus aim to bring persons closer to Jesus, and in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola proffers St. Joseph, who, after Mary, was the person who lived in the closest intimacy with Jesus during His infancy and hidden life, as a medium for imagining a life in close proximity to Jesus. This greatly contributed to the emergence of a new and vigorous image of St. Joseph in the early modern era.
The relationship of the Jesuits to St. Joseph has been lived out in more ways than can be enumerated here, though a few highlights should be mentioned: the many books on St. Joseph published by Jesuit authors over the centuries; the designation of St. Joseph as the titular patron of all churches belonging to colleges of the Society throughout much of Europe; the invocation of St. Joseph as patron of the dying, which was due primarily to the advocacy of the Jesuits; and, most recently, the first Jesuit to occupy the chair of St. Peter, Pope Francis, has exalted St. Joseph as an “extraordinary figure, so close to our own experience” by painting a riveting fresh portrait of the saint for our times and by proclaiming a Year of St. Joseph “to increase our [knowledge and] love for this great saint, to encourage us to implore his intercession and to imitate his virtues and his zeal” (With a Father’s Heart, no. 7).
The Jesuits brought their warm affection for St. Joseph to their missions globally, to Asia and the Americas, where they offered St. Joseph as the model of a loving spouse and father who devoted himself selflessly to protecting and caring for Jesus, who “came into our world in a state of great vulnerability” (With a Father’s Heart, no. 5). The first Catholic church in Philadelphia was Old St. Joseph’s, which was founded in 1733 by the Jesuit Joseph Greaton. It is at Old St. Joseph’s Church, where the roots of Saint Joseph’s University are found. Moreover, St. Joseph was the baptismal patron of the first president of Saint Joseph’s College, Felix Joseph Barbelin, S.J., who cultivated a personal devotion to St. Joseph and even composed poetry in his honor.
Pope Francis’s paradigm envisions a progression from acceptance and embrace of history to the “creative courage” embodied by St. Joseph. Francis explains. “As we read the infancy narratives, we may often wonder why God did not act in a more direct and clear way. Yet [...] God acted by trusting in Joseph’s creative courage. Arriving in Bethlehem and finding no lodging where Mary could give birth, Joseph took a stable and, as best he could, turned it into a welcoming home for the Son of God come into the world. [...] [T]he Gospel shows us what counts. God always finds a way to save us, provided we show the same creative courage as the carpenter of Nazareth, who was able to turn a problem into a possibility. [...] If at times God seems not to help us, surely this does not mean that we have been abandoned, but instead are being trusted to plan, to be creative, and to find solutions ourselves” (With a Father’s Heart, no. 5).
St. Joseph’s creative courage invites the university community that bears his name to reimagine the pillars of Jesuit education in light of the witness of his example: finding God in all things (Joseph was ever faithful to God’s call, thus becoming the man closest to Jesus), cura personalis (he never put himself forward, but was always present when he was needed), eloquentia perfecta (the Gospels record no word spoken by Joseph, only what “he did” [Mt 1:24; cf. 2:14, 21-22), which has “its own special eloquence” [Pope St. John Paul II]), and the magis (he made a total gift of self in the service of God’s plan for human salvation). May this Year of St.
Joseph be a transformative experience of spiritual healing, renewal, and wholeness for Saint Joseph’s University.
Fr. Chorpenning is the author or editor of a half-dozen books on St. Joseph and the Holy Family. He has also published more than two dozen articles on St. Joseph and the Holy Family in scholarly books and journals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and has been interviewed about his research on St Joseph by national media outlets, including Catholic News Agency, Fox News, and Time magazine.