♔ ST. JOSEPH HEARS A MOTHER'S CRIES DURING THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR ♔

During the Franco-Prussian war (1870), after the bloody battle of Patay, an unhappy mother, whose son was a soldier in the French army, went into a church. Her husband had just told her of some sad news: the Prussian Army had refused a pass to a lady they knew who wanted to visit the battlefield in order to collect her husband’s body. “Alas,” said the poor mother, “if our son should die, we won’t even have the consolation of giving him a decent burial.” The anguished mother came to the church in tears to kneel before Immaculate Mary; after a few moments of prayer, she got up and went to the altar of St. Joseph, where she knelt and again shed many tears. All of a sudden, with the bravery and hope that a mother’s love inspires, she took her son’s picture which she carried with her from her pocket and slid it behind the statue of the holy patriarch. “Bring him back to me, St. Joseph,” she cried.

 

St. Joseph heard the cry of the devoted mother. On March 19, 1871, Feast of St. Joseph, the young man, safe and sound, came home to his family. In fulfillment of a sacred vow, the mother of this young man protected by St. Joseph had a white, marble exvoto placed in the chapel where she had wept and prayed, with these words on it: “Glory to good St. Joseph, who preserved a beloved son for his family during the war of 1870 and brought him back safe and sound on March 19, 1871.” That is how St. Joseph, having experienced sorrow in his life on earth, knows how to console the grieving hearts who implore his protection.