Jimmy Akin the other day commented on the practice of burying St. Joseph upside down in order to speed up intercession in selling of your house. Matthew at Shrine of the Holy Whapping concurred that he "always found this one a little too much even for my appetite." I also find this practice to be a little bit annoying (if not downright superstitious) as if St. Joseph needed to be coerced into intercession. I mean if you feel that this tactic would really work then why not threaten to break of a finger each week until the house is sold? Or perhaps suspend him in a vat of hot Wesson oil or attach tiny electrodes to the statue. Wouldn’t the Church’s prohibition against torture also apply to the threat of burying statues upside down to elicit selling of your house?
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Superstition does not depend on whether the petitioner is “prayerful” or not. The 450 priests of Baal were deeply prayerful when they cut themselves with knives.
CCC, prg. 2111: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.”
This is where the “as long as it’s sincere” argument collapses: Whether you place him upside down or not has nothing to do with sincerity. If you think it matters a damn which way he’s facing or what side he’s on, you’re being superstitious. The notion that you’re increasing the odds by planting him in the ground in his favorite position represents a perverse excess of religion.
I think it was Servant who published a book called “St Joseph Is My Real Estate Agent.” I read an excerpt and the author had some good points.
While the practice can seem to border on the superstitious, in actual fact it seems to work!
I have to say, I incouraged my parents, last month, to do this with the St. Joseph’s statue, and how things turned out with the sell of their house was just to good to be true. Every circumstance involved with the sale of the house fell into place with out a ripple, and if you knew all the strings involved here it looked highly unlikely that even half of what was being asked would play through. All was taken care of, and as it was my parents moved out on the feast of St. Joseph. ~ ~ ~ Why is he buried upside down…you’ve got me, but I don’t think he minded, it’s just our faith, and belief that he will help us.
Interesting you mention that… my sister and I were browsing through a local store today, and we saw one of these little ‘bury St. Joseph’ kits for a few bucks. We were just speaking of how that seems to be ‘stretching the limits’ of belief, and now I see this posting!
My take on it is this:
I don’t have an ardent belief of burying St. Joseph statues, dressing Infant of Prague statues in liturgical colors and a host of other sacramental practices.
BUT
It’s been my experience that the people who do are generally more congenial and lovable people. They are church attending, and when they ask you how you and your family are doing, they really want to know how you and your family are doing.
So, I say, I luv ya’ statue dressing and burying Catholics!
Our house is currently on the market. I have been somewhat averse to the whole burying St. Joseph thing because I concur that it borders on the superstitious. Instead, I have thought about walking across the street to my parish – St. Joseph’s Catholic Church – and placing petitions before the statue of St. Joseph there.
But then I think, what’s the difference?
I reserve the right to change my mind about burying a statue of St. Joseph if our house takes longer than we’d like to sell.
🙂
Electrodes?! Bwahahaha!!
In the seventies I met this young woman from Spain who said her mother would do something similar with a portrait of the Virgin Mary. She’d say some prayer, and after a week or so turn the portrait around to face the wall, apologizing to the Virgin while restating her request (really a demand, if this dubious coercion method is required). As a second stage she’d cover the portrait with a cloth and face it to the wall, apologize, and restate her request. The story played well in a crowd of non-believers as an object lesson in their straw man version of what religious people are like.
I might suggest the woman’s poor mother in Spain was confusing the image with what it represented somewhat, and also making false assumptions about the ability human beings have to leverage Divine assistance.
Our priest encourages people to buy the statue but then give it a place of honor on the kitchen windowsill instead of burying it in the yard.
–Sparki
The belief that burying the statue upside down, facing the house or facing the street (I’ve heard it both ways) will have better effect than burying it rightways up (or not burying it at all) doesn’t border on superstition. It’s right, smack, dab in the very center of superstition, as are all ideas that you can compel God, or an angel or saint, to do things for you if you get the right trinket and perform the rite correctly. If you want St. Joseph’s help in selling your house, ask for it. Prayer – what a concept! We did, and our sale went pretty well. But for Heaven’s sake let’s not spread this ridiculous and irreverent notion that we can make him do it by conducting some weird ceremony and getting all the trappings just right. Muriel is right – this sort of nonsense just brings the Faith into disrepute.
Superstition is trying to coerce favors from heaven, hmm?
“Never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy assistance, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence…”
I say this prayer all the time and it reads to me like, “Mother, I KNOW your gonna PRODUCE, ’cause, y’know, your REP’s on the line!”
Burying St. Joseph may be superstitious in form, but I suspect that most of those who do it, do it in prayerful confidence, with reliance on tradition rather than their own judgment, and God takes the imperfect show of faith better than many a prideful, overintellectualized rejection.
Trying to coerce favors from Heaven by making up a semi-magical ritual that must be correctly observed is definitely superstitious. Superstition can be excused in people who know no better, but anyone who can read may reasonably be held to know better than that. If the people who perform and encourage this bizarre activity relied on the Church’s judgment rather than their own they would certainly know better. God, we are assured, takes a willful ignorance of the Faith (and with the Catechism available in every library and every bookstore such ignorance is certainly willful) in very bad part. And how could you possibly say the Memorare in that spirit? It doesn’t mean anything like that, unless every instance of seeking a mother’s dependable help and comfort is in fact an act of extortion on the grounds that you’ll ruin her reputation before the world if she won’t pony up. When we ask the Blessed Mother’s help, we’re asking her to give us what will be best for us, which may be the thing we ask for, or a different thing, or the fortitude and resignation to bear our trouble. There’s no particle of coercion or superstition about it, and I’m really surprised to hear you suggest such a thing.
One of my friends sent me information on someone selling the “St. Joseph kit” on a Wicca site! Yep, it includes “prayer incense” and a little “sacred candle” for “casting the spell”. Makes me a little ill.
The thing about it is that it could be superstitious, but it isn’t necessarily so.
If it’s done with the mentality that it will produce a certain result, then it’s superstition. On the other hand, if it’s done with the mentality of entrusting the sale, the property, etc, to St Joseph, it’s something quite different. But it seems to me that when Saints would bury medals or statues it was more because they wanted to consecrate it to God’s work (and often wanted to buy that land for God’s work).
I’m in agreement with Joshua’s comment on Jimmy’s blog (but then, I’m biased, because my brother goes to that school).
Oh, pooh, Elinor. Your being an old sobersides and an uncharitable, schoolmarmish silly. Loosen up! I’m just saying that the theoretical line between superstition and prayer may be clear, but the practice isn’t.
Of course, a little child who wishes upon a star is being “superstitious”, but in a pious soul there is trust and hope and a merciful God may smile and grant.
People’s minds don’t run along these clearly definable lines. Superstitious impulses and Thomistically clear strands of devotion get mixed up in people’s thoughts and are practically speaking inseparable.
Will you cast into outer darkness all the hundreds of thousands of peasant women in Mexico or Syria who believed that walking up these steps on their knees while reciting a particular prayer or lighting a candle with this offering was sure, just sure, to get them pregnanant? Probably not, you’ll just say it’s somehow all “different.” And what will you say if someone who tells you that they were converted to Catholicism after Upside-Down-St. Joseph got them an impossibly high price for their ramshackle old hut and they had enough money for that special operation their newly born granddaughter needed?
I won’t be burying any of those statues and neither will you, I suspect. But there are more things in the Economy of Salvation, Horatia…
Over and out; I leave you the last word if you wish!
Jeff