St. Joseph the Worker

I would be remiss, of course, if I neglected to mention the handsome man on our left.
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Who is he, you might ask? Well, he is St. Joseph the Worker, indeed, the very same Joseph venerated on March 19 as the Spouse of the Virgin Mary. Today, however, he is venerated on a separate feast-day and for a separate reason, and that is, precisely, his status as an entirely ordinary, common manual laborer. Tradition tells us he was a carpenter, and that is why we see him operating a laborious manual drill by the candle-light of what seems to be a young girl, but is probably supposed to be Our Lord. (Kudos to Georges de la Tour for that intensely masculine rendering.) In any case, this feast-day was decreed by Pope Pius XII on 1955 to be celebrated on May 1 each year, in order to sanctify the secular (sc., of heavily communist influence) celebration of labor in and of itself common in Europe, thus continuing an ages-old Church tradition of sanctifying a non-Christian celebration by placing a new Christian celebration over top of it.

So, the message to be drawn from this is, of course, that work is a good thing, not a necessary evil. Work is a person's way of participating in the Divine act of creation, by maintaining and sustaining the creation that God has given us to watch over. Work is a means of sanctification and of cultivating virtue, as both St. Joseph and his Foster-Child were well aware. Work, however, is not a supreme good simply in itself, as the secular celebration might have us believe. Work ought not to be venerated for its own sake, but for the sake of the fact that it is yet another way in which the Lord allows us to imitate Him in one of His most profound activities. It is another way for us to "be perfect, as...[our] heavenly Father is perfect."