One of the most stirring moments of a Christmas midnight Mass is the sight of the tiny, sacred baby, finally settled in the Nativity scene between the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph. The Holy Family, now made whole, emanates all the loving tenderness that the followers of Christ have aspired to throughout the ages.
But as it happens, in the history of Catholic devotion and Western art, the baby Jesus was not the last member of the family to arrive. Instead, it was Joseph’s entrance into Nativity scenes that completed the image of family and introduced an ordinary, flawed human into the moment of the divine miracle.
The Madonna and Child has been portrayed from the earliest days of Christian art in reliefs, statues, frescoes, and paintings. But Joseph was almost never included. For example, in a depiction of the Christmas story painted on a wall in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla, dated around 300 AD, the three wise men approach Mary as she holds her child, but Joseph is nowhere to be seen.
At that point in the Roman Empire, the Latin word familia referred to a household of multiple kin, servants, and slaves under the male head, the paterfamilias, who effectively ruled over them all. But in the fourteenth century, the Black Plague and multiple wars decimated families. Italy was especially hard-hit, making households of three more common there.
As this turmoil unfolded, the friars of the Franciscan Order spread throughout Europe. St. Francis of Assisi had famously celebrated the birth of the savior in Greccio, Italy, in 1223 by having a manger set up on Christmas Eve. According to his first biographer, Thomas of Celano, Francis had the manger filled with straw and placed between an ox and an ass. At midnight Mass, standing before it in the robes of a deacon, Francis sang the words of the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus came to Earth and God became man.
The saint’s focus on the modest circumstances of the Incarnation inspired his Franciscan followers to encourage veneration of Joseph as the hardworking protector of Mary and Jesus. As the fifteenth century unfolded, the faithful turned to Joseph to defend them against pestilence and the ever-spiraling armed conflicts between various Church and civil rulers, according to the late art historian Carolyn C. Wilson, who studied records of the city of Milan and the Venetian Republic.
In 1479, Pope Sixtus IV, who earlier in his life had led the Franciscan Order, established the feast day of St. Joseph. By doing this, the pope made Joseph not only the defender of the Blessed Mother but of the Church and all the faithful. The people took this carpenter saint to their hearts, feeling that he knew their struggles as working people raising families.
The first statues of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus grouped in Nativity scenes began appearing in the churches and chapels of Naples. Artists and craftsmen created miniature Nativity scenes for private homes.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Protestant Reformation brought new impetus to the image of Joseph as a guardian. “The Protestants rejected celibacy and their clergy were free to marry. There was an emphasis on the goodness of marriage…. Joseph was a Catholic response to that,” says Thomas Worcester, a Jesuit and history professor at Fordham University. “The Church said, ‘We are in favor of the family. The Holy Family is our model.’ Well, before it was not. A Catholic response to the Protestant Revolution was attention to the Holy Family and the idea that marriage is good.”
After the Council of Trent promulgated reforms to clarify practices and doctrines that Protestants had objected to, Church treatises on religious art recommended that Joseph be depicted as the guardian of Mary and Jesus, according to religious historian Joseph F. Chorpenning, OSFS. The Holy Family became a powerful concept, Chorpenning says:
The idea was that as in heaven there is the Holy Trinity, so there is also the earthly trinity and the Person who unites them is Jesus. At the beginning there was what was called “the promenade of the Holy Family,” the standing figures of Joseph and Mary with Jesus in the middle holding their hands. Above in the sky you would see the Holy Trinity, God the Father and beneath Him the Dove of the Holy Spirit. You would have a vertical Trinity and a horizontal trio of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the wedding of heaven and earth.
The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is an example of the two trinities and represents a change in how the saint was portrayed. As Worcester notes, “By the early sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in the focus and devotion to the Holy Family, St. Joseph is depicted as younger and less grandfatherly and more plausibly a father figure.”
Now, the Feast of the Holy Family, established by Pope Benedict XV in 1921, is celebrated on the first Sunday after Christmas, when the Nativity scene near every Catholic altar calls parishioners and visitors alike to participate in the great Mystery and honor Jesus, Mary, and the essential Joseph by their side.
