Somebody once told me that while it was good to be a ladies’ man, it was important to be a man’s man, too. That was a long time ago, and though I took his advice to heart, he had been vague about how to arrive at either state. In the intervening years, I’ve observed men surrender to voices determined to demean and degrade them—it’s easier that way, isn’t it? They’ve become hesitant in asserting themselves, cringing before anticipated rebuke. Like a lot of dubious social evolution, this ebbing of manliness accelerated in the 1960s, but by now, the caricature of the clueless man-child is a pop culture theme.

A typical example: Some years back I attended a screening of a Sundance Film Festival-type feature, independently produced, not unambitious in its way, and not entirely awful. Ticking off every box of the prevailing political orthodoxy—the orthodoxy that prevails among those who produce independent films—its two main characters were a father and his teenage daughter. I was certain from the second their relationship was established that the not-so-old man would be portrayed as an ineffectual dolt. Sure enough, he was. He might have been a drug addict, too; I don’t quite recall. But it was clear that the father was the one crying out for guidance and direction, supplied by his wise-beyond-her-teen-years daughter.

I’ll take a stance against any misplaced article of social faith, but to avail myself of satisfactions that are deeper than a gleeful backhanding of popular gibberish, I offer St. Joseph. His genealogy is spelled out in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke; the little that scripture tells us about him portrays a man unnerved by impossible conundrums: The woman he planned to marry was with child; the father of this baby was no earthly rival, rather the Holy Spirit of God; and Joseph was instructed to accept this truth in a dream. Although he had other plans (“to put the woman away privately”), acting on the urgings of an angel Joseph took Mary as his wife.

Soon after the Blessed Mother brought Jesus into the world, the tyrant Herod ordered the slaughter of all male children under the age of two in Bethlehem. For the second time, an angel of God appeared to Joseph in a dream, directing him to rise and take his family into Egypt. He did. Once it was safe, Joseph brought Mary and Jesus back to Nazareth, and set up shop as a carpenter. The next we hear of him is years later when Joseph and Mary lose track of Jesus while returning home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After three sleepless days and nights, they find Him teaching in the temple.  “Where else,” their adolescent son asked them, “did you think I would be?”

As critical as he is in the life of Christ, Joseph then disappears from sacred scripture. We can only assume he died before Jesus began his public ministry. We can’t be certain, but we can be sure that anywhere there’s a dearth of evidence, speculation and fabrication will roar in to fill the breech. So it is with St. Joseph, the fable that he lived to be 111 being one example. We’re not going to imbibe any of that here. The main incidents of Joseph’s life—his “inclusion” in the Annunciation; the flight into Egypt; the torturous search for his missing son—were vexations, anxieties that were solved by God, and by faith alone.

Even if, as seems unlikely, he were alive when Jesus set out on his mission, Joseph’s presence receded into the background. Early Christian writers did note his “exalted dignity and sanctity,” according to the theologian Edward Thompson, but the Oxford Dictionary of Saints suggests the cult of St. Joseph was “insular.” Generations passed before his significance was appreciated by the wider Church.

Recognition of his importance gained momentum throughout the Middle Ages. During one point in this period, legend informs us, Sicily suffered through a withering drought. The Sicilians launched thousands of prayers heavenward, beseeching St. Joseph for help, and when the rains finally came, his assistance was commemorated with a great feast. To this day, St. Joseph occupies a place of particular devotion in Italy, and in the communities that formed in the United States when disadvantage and poverty brought struggling Italians out of the southern-most regions of their country to this one, braced with hope for a better life.

They took their traditions with them. Not so very long ago, the celebration of St. Joseph’s Day, March 19, was marked primarily in private homes of the faithful, and then, more recently, in parish halls, with sometimes humble and sometimes elaborate St. Joseph’s Tables. There’s little question that the feast is Sicilian in origin—the Neapolitans picked it up later—and the contents of these commemorations might vary slightly according to the local customs from which they’re derived, but they all feature sesame-crusted bread baked in religiously symbolic shapes, a cross, say, or a shepherd’s crook. And although Lenten indulgences are sometimes granted on feasts that fall within the forty days, there’s never any meat on the table.

Along with male traits like strength and resilience and perseverance, which have fallen into the despised category of toxic masculinity, the practice of honoring St. Joseph, has waned. Pockets of resistance remain. At the parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Brooklyn, the annual Giglio festival, which takes months of planning, kicks off with a celebration of his feast day. An Italian American version—kind of—of the drum circle or sweat lodge of our latter pagan days, it’s a masculine recognition of St. Joseph as the foster father of Christ the Lord.

The many younger people that it’s my great good fortune to work alongside of would be horrified by any oppressive notion of “the patriarchy,” but it isn’t clear what patriarchy they might be suffering under. The patriarchy that elevated an utter mediocrity like Maise Hirono to the United States Senate? Maybe the one that shoveled nearly a billion dollars of investment to Theranos fraudstress Elizabeth Holmes? Or the patriarchy that installed a no-talent zero like Cardi B near the top of the entertainment industry pile? That one?

None of these co-workers are obligated to know what I think about this, or any of my opinions about anything. I’m striving to stay as strong as I can for as long as I can in a job, bartending, that involves a degree of physical labor—speaking of vexations—that I’m simply aging out of. Among other citations, St Joseph is the patron of workers, especially manual laborers. He was the strong silent type. I’m the diminished noisy type, praying for his heavenly intercession on this, the day of his feast, the way my Sicilian forebearers did in the time long ago. To become what I might yet be, a protector, a provider; in response to the reluctance and timidity of today’s man, a patriarch.