MIRACULOUS MIRACLES^™

The one-sentence prayer to St. Joseph with which Bernardine closed his sermon on the saint — read in the Office of St. Joseph's feast to this day.

The nine days before 19 March: the indulgenced novena prayer with its sevenfold versicle for the seven sorrows and joys, and the Memorare to St. Joseph — 'never has it been heard that anyone ever invoked thy protection… without being consoled.'

'Never has it been heard that anyone ever invoked thy protection, or besought aid of thee, without being consoled' — St. Bernard's Memorare turned toward the carpenter, and indulgenced by Pius IX in 1863.

Leo XIII's prayer, ordered in 1889 to be added to the Rosary through October: the Church in her struggle with the powers of darkness turning to the man who once carried the Child out of Herod's reach.

Seven pairs, each a grief turned inside out into a gladness — the doubt and the angel, the stable and the angels' song, the flight and the fallen idols — prayed on the Seven Sundays before his feast.

Four lines to the man into whose keeping God placed Innocence itself and the Virgin of virgins, asking to serve them both 'with spotless mind, pure heart and chaste body'.

Written for a Church that had just lost the Papal States and seen its Pope shut inside the Vatican: 'let it move thy paternal heart to see the mystical Spouse of Christ and His Vicar weakened by sorrow.'

'To work conscientiously, putting the call of duty above my inclinations' — the prayer of the workshop, indulgenced by Pius X in 1907, half a century before the feast of St. Joseph the Worker existed.

Three petitions, one to each Person of the Trinity, for ourselves and for everyone in the world who is dying at this moment — because Joseph died with Jesus and Mary beside him, and is patron of a good death.

The long one: a month of asking, built by walking through every sorrow of his life in turn — the inns of Bethlehem, the flight, the days when the Child asked for bread and he had none to give.