ABSTRACT
Official ecclesiastical approbation of the great devotion and veneration accorded St. Joseph by all the faithful, Amerindians and Spaniards alike, occurred very early in the history of New Spain. On June 29, 1555, at the First Provincial Council of Mexico, St. Joseph was declared patron of the ecclesiastical Province of Mexico, which included the archdiocese of Mexico City (established as a diocese in 1530, it was raised to an archdiocese in 1546) and its nine suffragan dioceses (all those in Mexico, plus several others, most notably Guatemala and Nicaragua).5 Henceforth, St. Joseph's feast day was a holy day of obligation-sixty-six years before Pope Gregory XV (reigned 1621-23) so designated it for the Universal Church in 1621. In 1585, the Third Provincial Council of Mexico renewed the Province's dedication to St. Joseph, noting, in its conciliar decrees, "the extraordinary devotion with which the most chaste Patriarch and lord St. Joseph, husband of the most holy Virgin Mary, is honored, courted, and revered in this ecclesiastical Province."6 By this date, Mexico City had twelve suffragan dioceses, the most recent addition being Manila in the Philippines.7 As sermons and devotional art of the Colonial period proclaim, St. Joseph ruled over New Spain, just as his Old Testament type, the Patriarch Joseph, ruled over the land of Egypt .8
