St. Joseph from a ‘Pilgrimage Card’ (Detail; B 01)

This image comes from a devotional print that can be broadly categorised as a Pilgrimage Card. Typically, pilgrimage cards depicted a saint or saints in the sky beneath heavenly rays of light and hovering in the clouds above their titular church. Such devotional prints were given out to the titular church’s visitors, that is, its pilgrims, as souvenirs. Here, St. Joseph hovers not over ‘A’ church but over ‘THE’ Church as its patron. Writ larger than usual on contemporary pilgrimage cards, the figure of St. Joseph is a dominating presence garbed in a robe of emerald green with gold trim and a white mantle lined in shades of pink and rose. He raises his right hand in a blessing gesture and holds a spray of white lilies symbolising purity in his left. Directly below him (but not visible in this detail) appear emblems of the papacy--the three-tiered crown or tiara of the Pope and the two crossed "keys to the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 16:19)—superimposed on the planet earth. To the left, St. Michael the Archangel skewers the devil with a cross-tipped lance; to the right, vanquished demons appear in the guise of dismembered serpents. + The original devotional print was issued c. 1889 to promulgate Pope Leo XIII’s “Prayer to St. Joseph”, today the official prayer of The Year of St. Joseph. Proclaimed by Pope Francis, The Year celebrates the 150th Anniversary of Blessed Pope Pius IX’s declaration of St. Joseph as Patron of The Church. It should be noted that Pope Leo also authored a very famous short “Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel”. + The Year of St. Joseph: 8 December 2020-2021 December 8; Principal Feast of St. Joseph: March 19; Feast of St. Joseph the Worker: May 1 + Image Source (B 01): Detail of an antique image of Saint Joseph, Protecteur de l’Eglise Universelle [Saint Joseph, Protector of the Universal Church], originally published in chromolithography by Bonamy Pont. Edit., Poitiers, France, No. 164, from the designer’s private collection of religious ephemera.