Traditional prayer
Prayer to St. Joseph (To Thee, O Blessed Joseph)
To thee, O blessed Joseph, do we fly in our tribulation, and having implored the help of thy most holy spouse, we confidently crave thy patronage also.
Through that charity which bound thee to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and through the paternal love with which thou didst embrace the Child Jesus, we humbly beseech thee graciously to regard the inheritance which Jesus Christ hath purchased by his Blood, and with thy power and strength to aid us in our necessities.
O most watchful Guardian of the Divine Family, defend the chosen children of Jesus Christ; O most loving Father, ward off from us every contagion of error and corrupting influence;
O our most mighty protector, be propitious to us and from Heaven assist us in this our struggle with the power of darkness;
and, as once thou didst rescue the Child Jesus from deadly peril, so now protect God’s holy Church from the snares of the enemy and from all adversity:
shield, too, each one of us by thy constant protection, so that, supported by thine example and thine aid, we may be able to live piously, to die holily, and to obtain eternal happiness in Heaven. Amen.
About this prayer
Pope Leo XIII gave this prayer to the whole Church with his encyclical Quamquam Pluries of 15 August 1889. He prescribed that through the whole month of October, at the Rosary, “a prayer to St. Joseph be added, the formula of which will be sent with this letter,” every year. In the same letter he commended March as St. Joseph’s month and urged the faithful to keep 19 March, his feast, with special devotion. The English here is the 1910 Raccolta’s, which is in the public domain. The Raccolta notes that when the prayer is said outside October, the words printed in italics, those about having first asked Our Lady’s help, are left out.
Leo’s reason is the household at Nazareth. Joseph was the spouse of Mary and was reputed the father of Jesus; he guarded that home, worked for its bread, and “guarded from death the Child threatened by a monarch’s jealousy, and found for Him a refuge.” That home, Leo wrote, “contained within its limits the scarce-born Church.” So the man who kept the Holy Family is asked to keep the Church, and every family in it (Quamquam Pluries, 3).
Leo also wrote that every state of life finds something in Joseph: “spouses a perfect example of love, of peace, and of conjugal fidelity; virgins at the same time find in him the model and protector of virginal integrity” (Quamquam Pluries, 4). A wife can pray this for her husband and her home. A single woman can ask him to guard her purity and her future. A mother can ask the guardian of a Child in danger to guard hers. He was, in Leo’s words, the protector of Mary’s honour.
When to pray it
- Every day in October, after the Rosary, as Leo XIII asked.
- Through March, and on 19 March, the feast of St. Joseph.
- For your husband, and for the fathers in your family.
- When your home is in danger: illness, money, a move, a threat.
- For the Church, which is the household the prayer asks him to defend.
Any indulgences named on this page are those recorded in the older prayer books it cites. Pope Paul VI reformed the Church's indulgences in 1967 (Indulgentiarum Doctrina); the current rules are in the Church's Enchiridion of Indulgences.