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Two dynamic clerics thought it sounded enough like Joseph, Mary and Jesus to propose the carpenter as the paternal model for what would eventually be called the nuclear family--and for much, much more. Unlike the writers of the Apocrypha, they did not add to the biblical story, but they concentrated fiercely on the implications of the Egyptian exile and Jesus' unknown life in Nazareth prior to his ministry. Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris in the late 1300s, thought a 90-year-old Joseph ridiculous in light of the rigors of travel in Egypt and recalibrated his age at Jesus' birth to 36, the Aristotelian "prime of life." In contrast to earlier descriptions of a distant and alienated parent, Gerson portrayed (in a 2,957-line poem, among other vehicles) an adoring father to Jesus: "Joseph leads him," he wrote. "Joseph soothes him with kisses." Meanwhile, Bernardine of Siena, a powerhouse preacher whom Miesel describes as "the Billy Graham of his day," scored points with the Italian merchant class by pointing out that in Egypt and back in the Nazareth carpentry shop, Joseph would have had to have been "a diligent administrator."
They were styling him, says Chorpenning, "as a figure who would help navigate the crisis of the family and the church: as a protector, a nurturer." Moreover, Gerson and Bernardine maintained that Joseph's bond with the Messiah and the Virgin was so close that, like them, he was assumed bodily into heaven--where, as Bernardine put it, "just as this holiest of families ... lived together on earth in a laborious life and affectionate grace, so do they now rule in affectionate glory in heaven." That novelty, eventually known as the Holy Family, became a church staple and effectively transformed Joseph, as a member, from a nobody into one of the universe's most powerful personages. Why not pray to St. Joseph, Bernardine asked, since "Christ does not now deny to Joseph that intimacy, reverence and very high honor which he gave him on earth, as a son of his father."
That was radical, highly charged stuff, but in time it found a suitable champion. Teresa of Avila, born in 1515, was one of the Catholic Church's great mystics and--through tireless work founding and defending a new model for convents and monasteries--a heroine of the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism's vigorous response to the challenge of Protestantism. After prayer to Joseph cured her of an early case of paralysis, she adopted him as her "true father," stating that "in heaven God does whatever he commands." Teresa took the Nazareth household as the model for her order and named 12 of 17 monasteries after Joseph. "The devotion snowballed," says Chorpenning, and the Earthly Trinity, as Jesus, Mary and Joseph came sometimes to be called, took Catholic Europe by storm. It had also leaped to the New World, where Joseph became the patron saint of both "New Spain" and "New France." He remains the official saint of Catholics in Mexico and Canada.