Today I wish to speak about worry, and I hold up for your admiration and imitation the great St. Joseph. You might well wonder why I have chosen him because we know so little about him.

It is true that the Gospels are quite skimpy about the foster-father of our Lord. If the word "Gospel" means "Good News", St. Joseph broke into the news only on four occasions; and ironically enough each time it was bad news for him; each time he was in trouble. That in itself should draw us commonplace people close to him, because isn't that the way it is with us? The only time the ordinary good man gets his name in print is when his house burns down, or he is robbed, or the undertaker suavely requests not to send flowers.

But take St. Joseph and his troubles. Here he is at Nazareth, pacing up and down his little carpenter's shop, perplexed at the mysterious pregnancy of Mary. At Bethlehem the inn door slams in his face, and he trudges on to hang up a lantern in the broken down cattle stall where the Boy had to be born. In the flight toward the frontier of Egypt, he is just one jump ahead of Herod's sheriffs, their swords still dripping with the blood of the Holy Innocents. And at the gates of Jerusalem, he begins his distracted and frantic search for the Lost Child which lasted three agonizing days.

Enough worry for one man, don't you think? Yet tradition has always painted St. Joseph as the serene Saint. St. Joseph never saw an American dime, but he lived its little motto: "In God we trust." St. Joseph is the Saint who would not worry. His carpenter's mind would have seen worry as a colony of spiritual termites: though a man's heart be of solid oak, worry will gnaw it away. It is pretty hard to get interested in doing good, or even in being good, when some worry is bothering you like a cinder in your eye.

Let me say that I have the greatest sympathy for people who are prone to worry. For one reason, I have done my share. And for another, you cannot be a priest in a busy parish, and day after day come face to face with the problems of the people, many of them bewildering, heart-breaking problems without being touched to the very depths of your being. But in spite of all this, I still insist worry is absolutely wrong. It only drills holes in the one bucket that will put out the fire: Christian courage.

Now note, I am talking about worry, not reasonable thinking, not prudent planning. We should think; we must plan. But worry is useless thinking. Trouble is trouble, but worry sets out to make 5,000 extra copies!

I'll admit that some of your worries are not little. Many of them are king-sized problems, major fears. But isn't that still just what they are - fears? This terrible blow may fall. I can see a man drawing an advance paycheck, but who in his sane mind want to draw an advance on trouble.

Suppose I were to say to myself, "Let's see. In course of my life, I'll probably fall down the stairs once anyway. Well, may as well start getting used to it!" Worry is falling down those stairs mentally, and the bumps really hurt. Shakespeare said the same thing much more elegantly and eloquently when he wrote: "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant taste of death but once."

And anyone who has ever kept a diary knows that the proper entry for each Dec. 3lst should be: "Dear Diary, I have had many fears and worries this year. But, thank God, most of them never happened."