You're listening to St. Joseph, a four-part series on the Foster of Jesus Christ.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

I'm Taylor Kemp, the platform manager here at Formed, and with me is our fearless leader,

Dr. Ben Acres, our executive director. We are so excited to be with you here. We are doing a four-part

series on St. Joseph. We are going to start today with St. Joseph in terms of Old and New Testament.

There's Old Testament Joseph and the New Testament Joseph. Then we're going to move into St. Joseph as under the title of Guardian of the Redeemer. We're going to move from there into

patron of the Universal Church and then end with patron of the domestic church. So I was thinking,

Ben, why don't you start us off with why are we doing a series on St. Joseph? What is the motivation

and where are we coming from on this?

Right. So March, traditionally as a month of the year, is dedicated to the memory of St. Joseph.

This is something the church has done for centuries, is dedicated months to different saints and themes

and focus. And March is St. Joseph's month because his feast day is March 19th.

So this is a good thing to do in March.

It takes on even more special, yeah, more special meeting when Pope Francis surprised everybody

and declared what a year of St. Joseph.

So this was just December 8th in 2020. He declared

a year of Joseph from December 8th, 2020 to December 8th, 2021. And you might remember, you might not

remember the great Jubilee of the year 2000, but I was there. I went to Rome, I went to 10 different

countries in Europe on pilgrimage. There's so many graces. We were celebrating 2,000 years since God became man and redeemed us from our sins.

And then there was the year of St. Paul, the year of the priest.

And so there's a tradition in the church, little tea tradition in the church of celebrating different saints or different themes.

We've never had, in the 2000 years of the church history, never had

...