Oh no ... not St Joseph!

Today I had some time to read the news, so I visited KYFR-TV's web site to watch yesterday's news over the Internet. This is something I do every now and then to keep up to date while I'm far from home, as I usually am.

I cringed when, in the first few seconds of the video clip, I saw one of those Saint Joseph "home-selling kits" on the screen. There is a Catholic tradition, in case you haven't heard, of burying a statue (upside down, no less!) of Saint Joseph in the yard of a home you want to sell. This is supposed to make the sale go faster.

While Catholics do believe in the power of intercessory prayer and prayer to the communion of saints, burying St Joseph has always seemed superstitious to me. I thought "Oh, great! This is just what we want our fundamentalist Christian brothers to see - Catholics burying statues for good luck." This sort of thing only reinforces the (completely incorrect) notion among Protestants and Fundamentalists that we Catholics are idol worshipers who put faith in superstition and luck.

Jimmy Akin, a well known Catholic apologist from Catholic Answers, has this to say about the practice:

While it is reasonable to ask St. Joseph for his intercession in helping buy or sell a home (finding housing for the holy family being one of his duties as head of the holy family), the idea of burying a statue of him upside down has no plausible connection to any patronly interest he might have in housing.

Because an efficacy is attributed to a religious act that has no apparent rational basis, the act qualifies as superstition or a perverse excess of religion. The Catechism notes that "Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (CCC 2110).

My advice: Don't waste your money on a statue of St Joseph. In prayer, maybe ask St Joseph for help. But, I think more importantly, pray for patience and understanding. And anyway, if you don't dig a big hole in the yard you won't have to explain that no, you have not buried your pet hamster in the buyer's new yard.

Disclaimer: The actual news story wasn't included in the webcast so I did not see it, but it was mentioned in the introduction so I assume the story aired.

-Jason