The Greatest of the Patriarchs

 From The Catholic Weekly:

A recurring question about St Joseph is that of his age at the time of his marriage to Our Lady. It seems from Scripture that St Joseph had died before the start of Jesus’s public ministry but how old he was at the time of his death is impossible to tell from scripture. In the Eastern churches and especially in the Coptic Church the tradition has been that St Joseph was of mature years when he married Our Lady, and according to some Eastern traditions he was a widower. However in the western Church the stronger tradition has been that St Joseph was a virgin at the time of his marriage to Our Lady.

Three contemporary figures in western Christianity have argued that St Joseph was not an old man when he married Our Lady but someone who was young vigorous and chaste. First, Mother Angelica, the founder of the global EWTN television network with some 264 million subscribers. She was also a mystic who claimed to have had a vision of the child Jesus. She remarked, “who has ever heard of an old man walking to Egypt?” In other words, we are told that St Joseph had to take Our Lady and the baby Jesus away from the territory of King Herod so that he would not be slaughtered and this had to be done in the middle of the night.

What we now call the flight into Egypt sounds like getting out of Vienna to a neutral country just hours before the Anschluss. Mother Angelica’s point was that if Our Lady and Our Lord needed someone to protect them and manage the logistics of secretive border crossings and then the task of earning a living in the foreign country, assuming they managed a safe passage, the Holy Spirit would have chosen a young and athletic man. St Josemaria Escriva agreed that St Joseph was probably not elderly. He wrote:

I don’t agree with the traditional picture of St Joseph as an old man, even though it may have been prompted by a desire to emphasise the perpetual virginity of Mary. I see him as a strong young man, perhaps a few years older than our Lady, but in the prime of his life and work. You don’t have to wait to be old or lifeless to practice the virtue of chastity. Purity comes from love; and the strength and joy of youth are no obstacle for noble love.

Venerable Fulton Sheen made the same argument in his book The World’s First Love:

To make Joseph appear pure only because his flesh had aged is like glorifying a mountain stream that has dried. The Church will not ordain a man to his priesthood who has not his vital powers. She wants men who have something to tame, rather than those who are tame because they have no energy to be wild. It should be no different with God.

Archbishop Sheen concluded that St Joseph was probably young, strong, virile, athletic, handsome, chaste, and disciplined … Instead of being a man incapable of loving, he must have been on fire with love … Instead … of being “dried fruit to be served on the table of the king, he was rather a blossom filled with promise and power”. (Read more.)

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