Living the Gospel of Work, Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, May 1, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
St. Paul Center, Steubenville, Ohio
Making a Home in the Catholic Church Conference
Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker
May 1, 2026
Gen 1:26-2:3, Ps 90, Mt 13:54-58

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today we celebrate the Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, which was instituted 71 years ago in 1955 by Pope Pius XII both to give a spiritual context to “Labor Day” in many European countries as well as a spiritual response to the “May Day” celebrations in communist countries where the meaning of human work and the relationship between human worker and the State were distorted. Pope Pius XII wanted the whole Church on this day to go on pilgrimage to a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth to find in the hardworking St. Joseph and his diligent foster Son the key that unlocks the meaning of the dignity, beauty and redemptive importance of human labor as part of Christ’s mission of love, so that we might not perish but have eternal life. Moreover, at the beginning of our time together dedicated to “Making a Home in the Catholic Church,” we recall that the greatest teachers we have for making such a spiritual home are St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother, who made their home — in Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth and along their journeys to Egypt, to the Temple for the feasts and elsewhere — in full communion with Jesus.
• When the Church celebrates the Solemnity of St. Joseph in March, we have a chance to ponder together so many of the reasons why Catholics love St. Joseph. We look at how he was truly a “just man,” humble, obedient, and holy. We examine how he put his whole life at the service of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as her most chaste spouse, and how he was a provident Father of God the Father’s only begotten Son virginally conceived within her, raising him to be a man according to his humanity. We ponder how St. Joseph was fundamentally a man of action whose only word in Sacred Scripture was the saving name of Jesus, Yeshua, but whose body language has proclaimed an unforgettable message that the Church has never forgotten. And we are able annually to contemplate the wisdom of saints and sinners across the centuries in “going to Joseph” as the great patron and protector of the Church as he seeks to help us center our lives on Jesus just like he and the Blessed Virgin Mary did.
• On May 1, however, it is important for us to hear what the silent spouse of the Virgin teaches us about the Good News of work in God’s divine plan. We do this because so many today are confused about how important work is. Some, for example, behave as if work is just a necessary evil that we have to endure until we earn enough money or get to the magic age when life can become an unending vacation on the golf course or lounging at the pool. Others fail to see in the crisis of unemployment, especially among the young, that we’re dealing with something far greater than a pressing economic problem, but rather a profoundly dehumanizing one that can gradually deprive millions of a sense of moral worth through a sense of being useless. Sometimes we see a combination of both of these confusions when people who can work just choose not to do so, opting rather to take advantage of the generosity of family members or other workers in society so that they can remain on vacation 365 days a year. Finally, whe rise of artificial intelligence and its inevitable impact on industries and employees has many wondering, and not a few worried, about the future of work. Some wonder whether they will have jobs. Some are thinking AI will just make us rich such that we won’t “have to” work.
• The feast of St. Joseph the Worker helps us to see that there’s a Christian response to many of these questions and challenges. Insofar as most us will spend at least 25 percent of our week, from the time we’re five through when we’re in our late 60s or older, doing some form of work, it’s important that we enter the vocational school of St. Joseph and learn from him how to turn our work into a pleasing offering to God. One of the ways that God is calling us to be salt, light and leaven is precisely through our work. One of the ways that we’re called to make our home in the Catholic Church is entering into the home office of St. Joseph and learning why St. John Paul called him “the very epitome of the Gospel of work.”
• We see in today’s Gospel that Jesus was known as the “son of the carpenter,” likely because St. Joseph must have distinguished himself for that trade among his contemporaries. It was with St. Joseph in Joseph’s workshop, as a manual laborer, as a “construction worker”  (that’s a better translation of the Greek word tekton, found in Mk 6:3, than “carpenter”) that Jesus spent the vast majority of his saving life. Following his foster-father, Jesus entered into the world of human work, not as a “cover” until his “real work” of preaching, miracles, and leading us through the new and eternal Passover would begin, but precisely to redeem noble human work in his process of redeeming the human person. Jesus built houses, made tables and wheels and produced lots of other needed items. He would say that his work was to do the will of his Father, to do what pleased him, and this labor over the course of two decades was part of that glorification. The early saints taught that whatever Jesus didn’t assume he didn’t redeem, and he assumed our human work in order that we might be able through our work to participate in the work of redemption. Today’s memorial is an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the meaning of human work — and specifically our work — in God’s divine plan.
• In the beginning of time, which we ponder in today’s first reading, God gave us the vocation to work, which was meant to bring his gift of creation to perfection. He commanded us to do three different forms of labor: to “increase and multiply,” cooperating with his creative power to bring new human beings into existence; to “fill the earth and subdue [or cultivate] it,” by bringing forth the earth’s inner potential, producing fruits and vegetables from the soil, glass and computer chips from sand, medicines from plants and more; and to “have dominion” — to exercise stewardship — over all living creatures, treating them as gifts of God.
• God gave us this vocation to work because through work we would become more and more like him, who himself worked in creation and, as Jesus would later say, “works still” (Jn 5:17). Work is meant not only to produce somethingbut to perfect someone, by bringing out the various hidden talents and potentials God has implanted in us — physical, intellectual, and spiritual — which are far greater than the hidden potentials God has inscribed in the earth. We see this human cultivation, for example, in the study that forms our brain, in the physical labor that forms our muscles, in the caring for children and others in need that forms our heart. The interior effect of work is even more important than its external outcome. St. Gregory of Nyssa would even teach that through our work we become our own parents, through forming our character through work well or shoddily done.
• After Original Sin and the Fall, as we know and Genesis teaches clearly, our work became arduous. There would be pangs in childbirth, working the fields would become toilsome and sweaty, and animals would often rebel. But we retained the vocation to work, because work remained a fundamental good and gift and would now become a means of our redemption. Through labor we would be helped to overcome our selfishness by working for others, for the family we’re supporting, for the persons receiving the fruits of our efforts, even out of gratitude for our employers or employees, clients and vendors, without whom, in many cases, our work would not be possible.
• So great was Jesus’ appreciation for human work in the divine plan that he could not stop using it as an analogy for the kingdom he had come into this world to establish. In his preaching, Jesus favorably mentions shepherds, farmers, doctors, sowers, householders, servants, stewards, merchants, laborers, soldiers, cooks, tax collectors and scholars. He compares the work of evangelization to the manual work of harvesters and fishermen. He called us not to be “bodies” in his vineyard taking up space but “laborers,” those who roll up their sleeves and work hard.
• As St. Josemaria Escriva, the great apostle of the laity and of the importance of ordinary work in God’s plans, taught us last century, honest work well done is an opportunity for a triple sanctification: the sanctification of the work itself by offering it to God like the sacrifice of Abel (or we can say the labors of St. Joseph); the sanctification of the worker doing the work honestly and diligently; and the sanctification of others through contact with one’s coworkers, clients, customers and vendors. Work well done is an act of love for all those who will benefit from the fruits of one’s labor, just like everything we use — from watches, to cell phones, to automobiles, to clothing, even to microphones and sound systems, light and HVAC units — is the fruit of someone else’s good work. The marketplace is meant not to be simply an exchange of goods and services but ultimately an exchange of virtuous action and rewarded appreciation that at its best can become an exchange of mutual loving concern.
• When Jesus left his foster father’s workshop to begin to his public ministry, he called all of us to follow him, to become perfect as God the Father is perfect and holy as God is holy. But he only called relatively few people to leave their fishing boats or tax-charts behind to proclaim the Gospel with nowhere fixed to lay their head. The vast majority he called to proclaim the Gospel by livingthat Good News right where they were in their work. That’s still what Jesus does today. Most of Jesus’ followers are called to live out their discipleship and apostolate, their vocation and their mission, just as St. Joseph did, in the family and in the workplace. Jesus calls them to become saints and bring others to sanctity through this “increasing and multiplying” and “subduing” and “dominion.” One’s desk and keyboard, or sewing machine, or kitchen, or classroom, or operating room, or workbench or boat, is meant to become an altar that sanctifies not only what is given to God in work, but the giver as well. It is there that the vast majority of men and women are called to be sanctified and sanctify others through showing the original dignity and meaning of human work. It’s there that the vast majority are called to make their home.
• We prayed at the beginning of Mass today that God the Creator of all things, “who laid down for the human race the law of work,” will grant us through “the example of St. Joseph and under his patronage, [to] complete the works [he sets] us to do and attain the rewards [he promises].” That’s what this feast is all about. Work is not principally about earning a paycheck, but about serving and loving others, about accomplishing the work that God sets before us to do. No matter what we do, we are supposed to be helping Jesus through that work to save the human race. When work takes on this divine meaning, the perfection of the human person continues, the workplace is evangelized, and God’s kingdom is advanced. In every age a diligent construction worker from Nazareth, together with his foster father, waves to each of us with calloused hands and says, “Come, follow me!”
• And Jesus does that in a particularly special way for us here at Mass. As the Second Vatican Council teaches us, the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of any life that is truly Christian. It’s supposed to be the starting point and the goal, therefore, of our work each day. We receive strength here to sanctify our work and the goal of our efforts ought to be to place our work on the paten to be offered to the Father with the work of Jesus’ whole redemptive life, including all he did for us in Nazareth. Just as Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish from the raw material of five buns and two sardines a boy gave him, and just like Jesus worked the miracle of Cana not by creating wine out of nothing but changing the 180 gallons of water brought by the servants from the town well, so Jesus wants to incorporate us and our work in the miracle of the Mass. We don’t celebrate Mass with the raw material of grain and grapes, but rather bread and wine, which are not just the gifts of God but, as we pray, the “work of human hands.” From the beginning Jesus wanted to incorporate your work and mine into his supreme sacrifice. It’s here at Mass that we learn how to pray our work so that the entire world becomes God’s sacred workshop. Let us ask St. Joseph to intercede for us today before his foster Son so that we can do well the work he’s asking of us during these days together, so that we might strengthen to go out from here to do our work well all the days of our life. That is the way we will ultimately and fully build our life on Jesus and make our home with him. That is the way, too, we will grow in holiness, help others grow in holiness, and do something beautiful for God and others. St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: