Every March 19 the Catholic Church
celebrates the feast of St. Joseph, the stepfather or surrogate father of
Jesus. Actually, the feast day is now largely neglected in America especially
since it is so close to March 17, the feast day of St. Patrick, the patron
saint of Ireland. There will be no parades or parties to honor the carpenter
who took the Virgin Mary into his house.
Surprisingly, St. Joseph was
largely neglected during the first fifteen hundred years of the Church. He played
an important role in Scripture during the early days of Jesus but was
completely absent during the adult or public life of Jesus. If you just page
through Dante’s Divine Comedy, you will be hard pressed to find any sinners or
saints called Joseph or Giuseppe. It is obvious that in the year 1300 Italians
did not name their children after the husband of Mary.
For a variety of reasons St.
Joseph only entered the spotlight in the fifteenth century after the Black
Death had devastated Europe. He was only given a feast day in 1479 by Pope
Sixtus IV, a former head of the Franciscan order. After that St. Joseph became
more and more popular and he was eventually named patron saint of the entire Church,
not just of one country or city.
At the same time, artists of the
Renaissance began to depict him in a different manner. Previously, he had been
depicted as a sleepy old man off to the side or in the background in depictions
of the Holy Family. In the gospel of Matthew angels bring messages to Joseph
while he is sleeping. However, during the Renaissance artists like Raphael
depicted him as a younger man, virile and muscular enough to protect not only
his family, but also the entire Church.
Eventually, Joseph, Giuseppe, or
Jose would go to the top of the list of popular names for children. Both of my
paternal grandparents were named after St. Joseph. Although we called them Baba
and Nana, he was Giuseppe or Joseph DeStefano, and she was christened Josephina
Maria Naclerio. I don’t want to neglect my grandmother, a great saint in her
own right, but I would like to spend the rest of this post writing about my
grandfather.
Joseph DeStefano was born in 1880
in the town of Agerola, a little town up the hills from the city of Amalfi on
the famed Amalfi coast of southern Italy. His father died when he was young and
he came to this country with his stepfather when he was only a teenager. He had
hardly any schooling and must have immediately gone to work with relatives in
the fruit and vegetable business. He was the kind of immigrant that no one
wants today. He was not an engineer or a physicist but he was one of the wisest
men I have ever known.
He must have been a hard worker
for he soon had his own stand in a kind of supermarket. My grandmother, who was
twelve years younger than him, told me that he would not consider marrying a
woman who was not from his own village of Agerola. She was born in 1892 in
Agerola and came to this country in 1906 to work in her uncle’s sewing factory.
She was the oldest child and left home never to return. I suspect that there
were too many mouths to feed back home, but she claimed that she came to find a
husband because she didn’t like the young men in Agerola.
Of course, she lived with her
uncle’s family and one day Joseph DeStefano was visiting after dinner. When he
saw this beautiful and hard-working young woman from his hometown, it was love
at first sight, for him. She was not so sure but he persisted and, according to
her, he made sure that other suitors kept their distance.
They soon married and she worked
the store with him even after she began to have children. Eventually, they
moved out of Manhattan to the borough of Queens where they bought a three
family house to live in as well as provide rental income. They opened a new
store in Jamaica, where they served the well to do nearby community of Forest
Hills.
They quickly had four children,
one of whom died in infancy. In true American immigrant fashion, they all were
upwardly mobile. Their eldest daughter married an engineer whose parents had
emigrated from Italy to open a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. Eventually,
they came to New York and opened a restaurant on the East side of Manhattan coincidentally
called, “The Original Joe’s”. Their son, also named Joseph, studied engineering
at Manhattan College. The younger daughter married a New York City policeman of
Irish German ancestry. Their only son, my father, worked in the store until the
outbreak of World War II when he left to work in the defense department of the
Bulova Watch company.
My grandparents had to close the
store on the departure of my father. They never learned how to drive a car or
truck and without my father they could not go to market or make deliveries. My grandfather retired at the age of 60
and spent most of his retirement caring for a garden that included a cherry tree, a prized fig tree, a grape arbor, and a large vegetable garden. He thought
that grass was a waste of good ground.
Like most Italian men, my
grandfather never went to church except perhaps for special events like
weddings and funerals. Also, like many Italian men he did not like priests. I
went to Catholic school and he warned me to do what the priests say, but not
what they do. Nevertheless, I believe that he was one of those millions of un-canonized
saints in the true selfless tradition of his namesake.
My mother died in 1950 when I was
only eleven years old. My father was forced to move me and my two younger
brothers next door to live with my grandparents in their modest ground floor
apartment. My grandfather was 70 years old at the time and my grandmother 58. Only
now that I am in my seventies do I realize how hard that must have been for
them. Never, ever did I feel unwelcomed or unloved. Like St. Joseph my
grandfather became a foster father to me. We made wine together. We built a
coop for the chickens together. I helped him with the constant work in the garden
but I never could match his inborn skill and knowledge. He could barely read
English and I never learned Italian but now I realize that both Baba and Nana taught
me what it meant to give up one’s life for others.
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