Patron saint of Canada chosen four centuries ago
The Catholic Register
Canada Day often seems a rather tepid, bureaucratic affair celebrating the day Great Britain’s Parliament managed to pass a law granting four small North American colonies the right to elect their own politicians to a single House of Commons, with not a shot fired and no declaration of independence. But why limit ourselves to such a paltry notion of Canada’s origins?
If the United States was a project of the English Reformation, led by Puritans landing on Plymouth Rock, Canada was born of the Catholic Counter Reformation, led by the Franciscan Recollects and Jesuits who launched themselves deep into the continent by canoe, discovering new people and learning new languages.
The first thing those missionaries did was dedicate this new world to St. Joseph.
On March 19, 1624, Franciscan Recollect friar Father Joseph Le Caron celebrated Mass and held a feast with the Huron in what is now Ontario.
“We held a great feast in honour of St. Joseph where all the inhabitants were included, several wild (aboriginal). This feast was held as a vow we made to St. Joseph, choosing him as patron of New France,” Father Le Caron wrote in a letter to his French superiors.
Now if ever there was just one moment that we might call the start of nation-building in the true north strong and free, this March 19 feast might be it. The English weren’t there yet, but Father Le Caron brought together the new European presence and the ancient aboriginal people to celebrate.
Devotion to St. Joseph was then a young movement in the Church, unknown in medieval Europe. The human father of Jesus was mostly ignored before the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV formally established a feast day for him in 1476.
Franciscans were the first to celebrate a feast day for St. Joseph, in 1399. It wasn’t until 1621 that Pope Gregory XV declared March 19 an obligatory feast for all Catholics.
Only three years later, Canada was entrusted to St. Joseph.
Before Luther and Calvin, and well before the Council of Trent, the Catholic Reformation began with study of the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and with mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans.
The Renaissance was mostly theological, and it was distinguished by an intense search for the true Jesus. There was also a popular spirituality among illiterate peasants and newly urbanized merchants, as ordinary people sought closer, more emotional ties to Jesus.
Longing for intimacy with God reached its height in the 16th-century writing of St. Teresa of Avila, who had a great devotion to St. Joseph. Devotion to the Holy Family was promoted in preaching and writing by Franciscans and Jesuits throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Canada of the mid-1600s was something new, a clean break with the past. It was all in the care of St. Joseph, the quiet working man who cared for and protected his wife Mary and his adopted Son, the father who shaped the hidden life of Jesus.
