Chaste Heart of St. Joseph sticker – clear background

Description

The Most Chaste Heart of St. Joseph is on fire for love of you and of God. His heart also has lilies either around or on top of it to signify his purity.

But guys. The devotion to the heart of St. Joseph is incredibly recent. In our lifetimes, a new devotion is becoming wide spread, just how the Immaculate Heart of Mary grew as a devotion in 1830 in Paris and 1917 in Fatima, and the Divine Mercy Jesus image was revealed in 1931 to St. Faustina.

The Church has long venerated St. Joseph as the father and protector of the Holy Family, and in 1870 he was declared Patron of the Universal Church by Pope Pius IX, though he had been revered as a Saint since the foundation of the Church. In 1962 Pope John XXIII added St Joseph’s name to the Roman Canon of the Mass (in Eucharistic Prayer I) and in 2013 Pope Francis, completing the work of Pope Benedict XVI, added St. Joseph to the other three Eucharistic prayers.

What really gets me excited is that in 1994 (1994! 25 years ago!) Mary and Jesus appeared to a Brazilian student named Edson Glauber asking for devotion to the Chaste heart of St. Joseph, and in 1998 St. Joseph himself appeared to Edson and told him the 10 promises that we obtain for honoring his chaste heart. These apparitions were approved in 2010 as being of supernatural origin by Bishop Carillo Gritti.

These revelations are approved for what we call “private devotion”. Each Catholic can choose to believe in the message of the apparitions or not. In the Council of Trent it was decided that the local bishop is the first and main authority on the authenticity of local apparitions, so this is an approved apparition! The Vatican can continue research (and probably will) and give it final approval, which usually involves adding a feast day to the Church calendar. Technically a ruling of a bishop can be reversed by the Vatican, but this has yet to happen, and traditionally the Vatican will only continue to look into an apparition if the devotion becomes massively widely spread like Divine Mercy and the apparitions of Mary at Fatima.

This is just one of many apparitions of St. Joseph, but the first one that so specifically is for devotion of his heart.

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Because this is so new, I’m going to list some links if you are interested in learning more. I encourage you to research it.

Click here for the National Catholic Register’s article on the apparitions. It’s a good introduction to what happened.

Click here for the text of what St. Joseph said in these apparitions. This is well worth the read.

Click here for a digital book about this apparition and all the other St. Joseph apparitions.

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Devotion to the Most Chaste Heart of St Joseph is in particular for men – to shower graces upon them to help them in the path to purity and to build them up into fathers, both for the domestic home in marriage and spiritual fathers in the priesthood – but also for any Catholic.