The witness of St. Joseph.

A counterweight to modern confusion

Over the last few years, there has been a spate of books bemoaning the confusion of men in our culture. Take but two examples. Susan Faludi and Leon Podles, very different in almost every way, have written two very different books (Stuffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, by Faludi, and The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, by Podles), both of which are nonetheless united in their lament: men in Western culture are losing their way, no longer certain of who they are or what they must do. Podles's thesis is that the crisis affects men in the Church much more than in the wider culture, which explains why most mainline Christian churches have far fewer men participating in their activities than women.

Sexuality radically confused

Perhaps no area is so fraught with danger and confusion as that of male sexuality. We have as never before a licentious and libidinous culture which provides unfathomable resources and outlets for male sexuality. The Internet is filled with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pornographic sites. At the end of February, the first scientifically rigorous study came out on this problem: more than 200,000 people in the United States alone were found to be addicted to these sites, spending hours and hours there each week. The overwhelming majority of these users, of course, are men.

Men are now told that there are no longer any morals governing sexuality. Masturbation and pornography are thought to be perfectly okay. Sexual intercourse is thought by many to be de rigueur in any relationship, even that of a single day, governed only by the apparent requirement that it be "consensual." Divorce is a commonplace and adultery is rampant. Men, it seems, have never had more official sanction and social opportunity to "sow their seed," as one well-known anthropologist studying adultery has vulgarly put it in a recent article.

Now the teaching of the Church in response to many of these developments will come as no great surprise. John Cardinal O'Connor was asked, during the impeachment of President Clinton, why he did not make a statement on the whole sordid business. He said that he didn't think the Church's position on lying, perjury, and adultery was a mystery to anyone. Yet what usually does come as a surprise to many is the often overlooked reason for these teachings: human dignity and happiness. The average journalistic portrayal of Catholic teaching, especially pertaining to sexual morality, invariably sees it as a nay-saying exercise by nasty celibate old men bent on controlling the world's hormones and imposing their "medieval" values on everyone, thereby stifling our freedom, that great idol of our rights-drenched age.

St. Joseph, patron of chastity

This, of course, is so grotesque a misrepresentation as to be risible. However, it is so common as to be nearly impossible to counteract at the level of popular imagination. This is where, I would suggest, we need to rediscover the life and witness of St. Joseph.

Permit me to suggest, moreover, that the Church consider designating a day in her liturgical calendar in which St. Joseph as the newly proclaimed "patron of chastity" would be celebrated. This aspect could be more clearly drawn out either on the Feast of the Holy Family in the Christmas Octave or especially on March 19, the solemnity designated exclusively to St. Joseph. (May 1 emphasizes St. Joseph as a worker.) Alternatively, another day could be chosen; perhaps we could even make use of that otherwise mawkish secular "Father's Day," which is always on a Sunday, and instead focus here on St. Joseph as the greatest of human fathers and the greatest of men to heroically practise the virtues.

It seems important to begin liturgically, for arguments and essays reach only a few, whereas saints, and the festal celebration of their lives, can reach everybody. As Pope Pius XI said in establishing the Feast of Christ the King,

"Pronouncements of the teaching of the Church.. usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all... .The Church's teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man's nature" (Quas Primas, no. 10).

The salutary effects of meditating upon the life of St. Joseph would be many. In an age when many men are confused and have lost their way, what is needed is a role model, a mentor, to show them how to act. And what better human role model than St. Joseph?

Consider only the most obvious factor about the man: he was married to the most beautiful woman in the history of the world (because her beauty began from her sinless nature and thus surpassed all other beauty) and was therefore the happiest man in the world, but he lived in total chastity with her! We know from Sacred Tradition, the witness of the Fathers, and the hints of his life in the Gospels, that Our Lady and St. Joseph lived as husband and wife but that theirs was a marriage lived without sexual consummation: for Mary remained a virgin the whole of her life.

To meditate on this fact is an enormously fecund exercise: St. Joseph himself remained a virgin! He remained chaste and celibate. To consider this, in a world which considers any form of sexual self-denial absolutely incomprehensible and completely impossible to practise, is a deeply revealing experience. It gives one enormous courage and hope to continue the struggle in one's own life.

I had a conversation recently with a lapsed Protestant, perhaps most charitably described as a moral libertarian, who was willing, after a great deal of effort, to concede that it was, just perhaps, theoretically possible for a man to live as a celibate priest, but he thought it completely out of the question that a man, any man, could live without masturbating regularly.

In addition to these arguments, one must also consider the social, and ultimately eternal, consequences of failing to live chaste lives. Faith supplies us reasons for devotion to St. Joseph as patron of chastity; but reason must also supply us with other arguments to use with our contemporaries. Consider the following.

Freedom for, rather than freedom from

The greatest priority for modern man is his freedom. Most often, however, this has been freedom as the philosophical liberalism of the Enlightenment understood it; viz., freedom as licence. Freedom, in this common view, means the absence of restraint. It is freedom from rather than freedom for.

What modern man has nearly forgotten is that freedom, as Pope John Paul II has emphasized over and over again--above all in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor--is only worthy of the name when it is lived in obedience to the truth: we are free for living the truth. Moreover, freedom untethered from the truth becomes freedom's own worst enemy. In politics it may lead to increasing chaos and eventually perhaps to totalitarianism and barbarism. If freedom does not deal with the questions of the true and the good, all that remains is will-power (Cf. Evangelium vitae, n.20).

Thus, to be free in matters of sexuality consists not in doing whatever feels good but in learning to master one's desires and direct them towards their purpose. Only in this way, when lived truthfully, will sexuality be lived in a morally good fashion. A man is not free if he is addicted to seeking out pornography or prostitutes; that man is a slave. A man is only free when he is able to control himself and direct his sexual passions towards their preordained goals: intimacy in marriage and procreation. When a man does that, he will discover far deeper and far more substantial happiness than that which comes from watching the Playboy channel (which the CRTC let into Canada at the same time as it denied a licence to Mother Angelica's EWTN). This happiness, in fact, is what God wills for us and what the Church's teaching intends to safeguard.

Our sexual behaviour has enormous public consequences; e.g., requiring publicly funded medicare to treat addictions, and ultimately eternal consequences; e.g., destruction of grace in the soul and peace in the heart, and consequently peace with others. What we do with our bodies affects our souls. The reasons for this are clear, and St. Thomas Aquinas sets them forth with his characteristic lucidity. The Angelic Doctor warns us that lust is a vice opposed to knowledge and understanding: "'blindness of mind arises from lust"' (STh II-II q.15, a.1, r.3, quoting Gregory the Great). This blindness of mind is one of the so-called daughter vices of the capital vice of lust; the other daughter vices include inconstancy, love of self, and ultimately "hatred of God" and "horror of eternity." That many of our contemporaries are so afflicted with these vices is so obvious as to require no demonstration.

St. Joseph was not so afflicted. To which some might say: yes, but he didn't have the rampant temptations we do. On that point, however, we must beg to differ: St. Joseph did have the greatest temptation in all the world by virtue of being married to the most beautiful woman in all the world. He, unlike Mary, was not specially conceived so as to avoid the taint of Original Sin and therefore concupiscence. He would, therefore, have been prone to the effects of Original Sin, including the temptations to commit actual sin. I am not saying of course that he did any of these, but only that, as a fully human being, he may have been prone to the temptations. But instead, he did not live impurely or unchastely.

St. Joseph was able to exercise the virtue of chastity under these most extraordinary of circumstances. He was able to master his own desires and bring them under submission to the will of God. Who are we not to attempt to do likewise? In so doing, may we grow to become men with chests (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis), aided by the intercession of the patron of Canada, protector of the universal Church--and patron of chastity. Sancte Joseph, ora pro nobis!

Adam A.J. DeVille taught history at a private Catholic school in Ottawa. In October 2000 he started his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, England.