When a young man attends daily Mass at a local parish, people will sometimes approach him and ask if he is discerning the priesthood or religious life. As Catholics, we often associate external desires for holiness with a possible vocation to the unmarried life. We tend to forget that the greatest saint in the history of the world was a Wife, and that the greatest male saint in the Church was not a priest or religious, but a husband and father: St. Joseph. St. Joseph is easily forgotten because he is so forgettable. There is little known or written about his life. Although he doesn’t say a word in the Gospels, his silence speaks of a great Christian mystery that is relevant today more than ever, especially for Catholic men. On the outside, St. Joseph was an unremarkable worker and family man who lived in obscurity. On the inside, his holiness and love for God are unmatched, precisely because he found God in his work and family life. To stress his importance, Pope Francis decreed, in the first months of his pontificate, that St. Joseph’s name be included in every Eucharistic Prayer at Mass. Pope Benedict had included St. Joseph’s name in the Roman Canon just a few years earlier. Pope Francis and Pope Benedict are clearly trying to awaken the Church to her ancient memory of St. Joseph, and proposing him to Catholics today as a saint for the 21st century.

The Church’s most pressing need, on the part of men, is not for more priests and religious, but more husbands and fathers who, like St. Joseph, live a life of hidden sacrifice and constant prayer. Sister Lucia dos Santos, one of the three Fatima visionaries, intimates this idea in a letter in which she prophesied that: “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.” Married men and women are on the front lines of this battle.

One challenge in preparing men to be future Josephs is, among other things, transmitting basic catechesis. A far-reaching catechesis is necessary. The good work of campus ministry and residence halls is not enough. The University would benefit from inviting catechetical groups to campus, such as Focus missionaries, which specialize in catechizing college students, to aid in the work of teaching men and women about their faith. Such groups, however, are often unwelcome or looked on with suspicion, partly owing to what Pope Francis has called “the temptation to survival,” which he says “makes us want to protect spaces, buildings and structures, rather than to encourage new initiatives. The temptation of survival makes us forget grace; it turns us into professionals of the sacred but not fathers and mothers….” Subsequent efforts to give college students the best possible training—forming them to be future fathers, mothers—often move at man’s pace or not at all. It falls on students to take the lead. Students must organize, on their own or with their friends, a serious study of the catechism, or else catechesis won’t go forward.

If we aspire to be like St. Joseph, after catechesis, piety must permeate courtship. The only way for relationships to survive is to flourish. Knowingly or not, all men are seeking someone like Our Lady, and all women, a St. Joseph. Men dream to say of their beloved what Dante said of Beatrice: “I look on Beatrice, and Beatrice looks on God!” In these words, Dante also reminds us that man will never find complete happiness in human love alone, but only in the vision God. J.R.R. Tolkien expresses the same in a letter to his son who was about to wed, in which he reflects on the inherent difficulties of married life, and gives him the best advice a father could ever give a son about to marry: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death.” St. Joseph is the saint par excellence of human love made divine. He gazed on Mary. He also gazed on God. He is a saint for our day. He is the saint for the 21st century!

Oliver Coughlin attended the University of California, Los Angeles for his undergraduate studies and is currently a second year law student at the University of Notre Dame.