Why St. Joseph matters today: A conversation with Father Calloway, author of ‘Consecration to St. Joseph’

Ahead of the Dec. 8 consecration of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to St. Joseph, Archbishop Bernard Hebda and Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens are encouraging Catholics to make an individual consecration to St. Joseph that day, following a 33-day preparation method outlined in a new book, “Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father” (Marian Press, Jan. 1, 2020). That preparation begins Nov. 6. The Catholic Spirit spoke with Father Donald Calloway, 48, a priest of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, about the consecration and why Catholics should consider deepening their relationship with Jesus’ foster father. Father Calloway spoke with The Catholic Spirit Oct. 21 from California. 

MW: Thank you again, Father, for being with me today and talking about consecration to St. Joseph. Before we jump into the consecration and this book and also its implications for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, you’ve written several books, including one about your own conversion experience. What I understand is that as a teenager, you had rejected religion and kind of lived a wild life. And then you wrote a book about Mary and had an experience of “being hit by a spiritual two-by-four.” I’m just wondering if you could boil down a bit your conversion story, and then how that led you to St. Joseph, because you’ve done a ton of writing about Mary.

FDC: Yeah, it’s a pretty crazy story for sure. I wasn’t raised in a Christian environment at all, and my family was a very dysfunctional family. My mother married three times before I was 10 years old. My examples of masculinity were really, really messed up. And so that’s what I followed. I ended up living in Japan at one point because my stepfather was in the Navy, and I got involved in drugs and immoral activity and criminal activity. And I got kicked out of the country, came back to the States and went to drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, ended up going to jail in Louisiana. But through all that craziness, my parents — my mom and my stepdad — had a conversion to Catholicism. And I thought they were crazy because I didn’t know what the Catholic Church was at all.

And so I continued my crazy life. I mean, I had long hair down on my waist. I was a sight to see. And it was crazy, but the God I didn’t know was in love with me and wanted me. And one night at my ultimate rock bottom, I was at home and I read a book about the Virgin Mary that my parents had purchased and it was in the hallway, so I picked it up. And that was the catalyst that got me thinking about these kind of questions. And I end up going to a Catholic church, ended up becoming Catholic, discerned my vocation, and then took 10 years to study and be ordained a priest.

And then I discovered that I had the gift of writing and communicating and speaking. I started writing books and preaching and doing conferences. And yeah, now I’ve got like 14 books, mostly on Our Lady and St. Joseph, because they brought me to Jesus and I love them. And so that’s what I do now.

MW: How did your love for St. Joseph deepen to the point that you wanted to write this book about a consecration to St. Joseph?

FDC: When I had my conversion, I was a very messed up man. I’m a product of the times. I had really jacked up my manhood. I was like, how do I recover this? I’m not God. I’m not going to ever be a divine person. So what kind of human model can I look to, to help me to know what it means to be a man? So I look to St Joseph to be pure, to be loving, to be kind and yet strong and all those things.

That meant so much to me, that about four years ago I was hearing from so many people, “Father, families are messed up. Like half of all marriages are ending in divorce now, and more than half don’t have a father and families. And what do we do, Father?” I thought to myself, well, I know what St. Joseph did for me. I think he can do this for everybody else. And he was the head of the Holy Family.

I mean, God chose him to be the dad for his son, our savior, and the husband of Mary.

I thought we could really use St. Joseph right now in the Church and families in the world. So why don’t we do something like a consecration that is similar to St. Louis de Montfort’s Marian consecration, but this one would be dedicated to St. Joseph to bring him into this picture at this crucial time when families are under attack and people are even confused about what it means to be a man or a woman or a husband or a father. And it’s proven to be so fruitful.

The fruit of this consecration of St. Joseph is off the charts. I mean, we have literally sold over 250,000 copies in eight months. It’s incredible.

MW: That’s amazing. Beginning Dec. 8, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is celebrating a year of St. Joseph. The day is a Feast of the Immaculate Conception. But it’s also the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s proclamation of St. Joseph as patron of the universal Church. And Archbishop Hebda has asked Catholics to prepare using the consecration to St. Joseph on the 33 days leading up to Dec. 8. And so some people, like you mentioned, are maybe much more familiar with the idea of a consecration to Mary, and I wonder if you could just even take me through what is a consecration to a saint at all, what consecration?

FDC: Yeah, that’s a great question, because I get asked that a lot. Yeah. The word itself just means setting something aside for a holy purpose. By our baptism, we’re consecrated to Jesus and that’s our ultimate end. Our ultimate goal is Jesus. So any form of Marian consecration is ultimately pointed towards Jesus. And it’s the same with this one to St. Joseph. And the reason that I think that we need this one, the St. Joseph today especially, is because of this crisis in families that we’re experiencing.

I think it’s important when you look at the life of Jesus as a little baby, as a young boy, he grew up in that loving, tender care of Mary and Joseph. And sometimes Joseph kind of gets left out. He’s the forgotten hero of Christianity in many ways. He’s just in the background of the beautiful paintings from the masters of artwork throughout the centuries. It’s like, who is this guy? I mean, he actually played a really important role in the life of our savior. I think that now is the time to bring him in.

And the timing is perfect. As you said, it’s the 150th anniversary of when he was proclaimed the patron of the universal Church. And God bless the archbishop for doing this for the diocese there. I think the fruits are going to be great. I think parishes will love it. I think families will love it. Spouses will love it. I think it’s going to be wonderful.

MW: Is there a history of consecration of St. Joseph in the Church?

FDC: There really isn’t, because there’s not much of a history of much regarding St. Joseph. He’s always been loved and there’s been great saints who have talked about him throughout the centuries. But St. Joseph has finally come into his own, so to speak, within these last 150 years. Now we’ve got his name in the Mass, right? We’ve got different feast days for him on the universal calendar. And this consecration movement is now something that I think the Holy Spirit is giving as a gift for our times.

MW: What does the consecration look like? What do you do over these 33 days?

FDC: Yeah, so this is the neat thing: it’s in a book form, but it’s not just something that you read, it’s something that you do. For example, it’s 33 days long and I simply got that from St. Louis de Montfort’s Marian consecration. Because you know, if it was only like five days long people would be like, “Wow, that was over fast.” Or if it was like 90 days long, they’d be like, “Father, you’re killing me. This is way too long, you know, this is too much.”

It’s one month basically. And every day we go through the litany of St. Joseph, the official prayer to St. Joseph of the Church, where we get to know his titles like “Pillar of the Family,” “Glory of Domestic Life,” “Terror of Demons” — my personal favorite — and a whole bunch of others. And you do some reading and then you pray the litany of St. Joseph every day for those 33 days.

It would take about 20 minutes a day at the most, and by the end of it, you really know St. Joseph and you’re like, “I want you in my life. Take me, I’m yours.”

MW: That’s awesome. You pointed to this, that in Scripture we see Joseph in the infancy narratives, but he’s not mentioned during Jesus’ public ministry. And I’m wondering, how do we know what we know about St. Joseph?

FDC: Yeah, that’s another great question, because people have said to me, “Father, how’d you write a whole book on a guy who never said one thing in the New Testament, you just making this stuff up?” No! As Catholics, we believe in sacred Scripture, but also sacred tradition. We have a lot of things from what saints have said, what popes have said, what apparitions, for example, St. Joseph has appeared in — approved apparitions by the Church, like Our Lady of Knock in Ireland, Our Lady of Fatima. St. Joseph was in both of those apparitions. Oftentimes he’s forgotten, but he was there.

And then you’ve got what shrines are devoted to him around the world — and there’s some pretty big ones — (and) religious communities founded to honor him, those kind of things. I mean, there’s actually quite a bit of material that you can gather.

MW: You’ve already touched on this, but I just want you to revisit this: What makes (Joseph) a very powerful figure in the Church at this moment? And why do you think individuals should make this consecration to him?

FDC: I think that right now, if you talk to a lot of people, a lot of people are confused. These are confusing days. We’ve even got right now a lot of gender ideology things. People are confused. What does it mean to be a man or a woman — or a family, even? Many of these things have been redefined by certain governments and such. There’s a lot of confusion. I think if you want to know what things are, you need to go to the blueprint. I think that the Holy Family is the blueprint for what a family is. And like if you were studying a bridge, you would want to look at the blueprints for that bridge so you know how it was constructed and put together and everything. With the family, let’s look to the Holy Family.

And we’ve been really focusing on Our Lord and Our Lady for 2,000 years, and rightly so, because they’re greater than St. Joseph and Jesus is God. But we’ve kind of forgotten St. Joseph. I think now is his time to help us to get back to some of these basic things, to bring some order into our lives, because that’s what a good father does: He cleans things up, brings order and sets some rules. You know, we could use some rules today. We’re kind of chaotic at our culture right now. And I think St. Joseph, in a loving way, will help us to do that.

MW: As people may begin praying this consecration or people that you’ve heard, have, is it something that you can only do as an individual? Is it something that families can do together or that couples can do together? How do you envision this being prayed?

FDC: Yeah, this is the cool thing, is that you can do it by yourself. If you’re just one person with the book, you’re good to go. Everything that you need is in the book. But if you do want to do it in a group format or with your family or as a husband and wife or in a parish setting, for example, in the back of the book, there’s the group format that shows you when to meet, how long to meet. It has like a leaders’ guide to help them to lead the group and then questions for the group for group sharing. It’s really convenient. You don’t have to buy all kinds of different things to get it going. The one book has everything both for the individual and the group setting.

MW: What have you heard from people who have completed the consecration?

FDC: Oh, my friend, it’s been crazy, like my phone. It’s going off like a slot machine constantly because people are like, “Father, this is great.” I’ve heard about the healing of marriages, couples who were really on the fence and thinking about pulling the trigger and calling it quits. And now they’re in love again. The romance has been re-sparked. Vocations — I’ve had two young men tell me that it helped them to discern their vocation — (and) people telling me that they suffered from not being able to sleep well. I have a little section on St. Joseph slept really well, and God talked to him in his sleep. There’s some actual healings taking place with people feeling that they have a loving father watching over them, and they can sleep better. So things like that. It’s amazing.

MW: Well, is there anything else that you’d like to add that I didn’t ask?

FDC: Yeah — maybe if people are interested in doing it, it’s you can get the book, but it’s also available as an audio book and/or an e-book. And it’s also now available in Spanish, which is awesome. And there’s about seven other languages it’ll be available and soon. It’s global now. It’s everywhere around the world. And we have a website that you can check out because we commissioned art for the book. Let me tell you, these art pieces of St. Joseph are phenomenal because it shows them as young.

A lot of times we don’t see St. Joseph as young and he’s masculine. He’s strong, he’s loving and they’re really cool. So the website is consecrationtostjoseph.org. But you can also get it at Catholic bookstores. You want to support them, of course. And Amazon, of course.

MW: Well, thank you so much. This is just fantastic to learn more about this, especially as this is something that we are being encouraged to pray here in the archdiocese. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today.

FDC: You’re very welcome. God bless you and everybody there in the archdiocese.

Related:

• Year of St. Joseph: ‘Light for the Next Step’
• Year of St. Joseph to begin with archdiocesan consecration Dec. 8