Crusade Magazine, Vol. 193, January/February, 2025 - Saint Joseph’s Eminent Sanctity and Patronage for our Difficult Times | Saint Joseph’s Pre-Eminence Over the Other Saints - “The opinion that Saint Joseph is the greatest of the saints after Our Lady is one which is becoming daily more commonly held in the Church,” writes the renowned French theologian, Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964).
He further holds that “We do not hesitate to look on the humble carpenter as higher in grace and eternal glory than the patriarchs and the greatest of the prophets—than Saint John the Baptist, the apostles, the martyrs and the great doctors of the Church.”
The doctrine of the pre-eminence of Saint Joseph received the approval of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Quamquam Pluries, August 15, 1899, in which he writes of the need to have recourse to the patronage of Saint Joseph, together with that of the Virgin Mother of God, in the difficulties of the present times: “In truth, the dignity of the Mother of God is…
