It is not generally known among Protestants that the deification of Joseph has long been in course of similar evolution. In the fifteenth century, Saint Teresa seems to have regarded him as the "plenipotentiary" of God (= Jesus), obtaining from the deity in heaven whatever he asked, as he had done on earth according to the Apocrypha. The cult has never been very prominent; but the latter-day litany of St. Joseph treats him as at least the equal of the Virgin. "The devotion to him," says Cardinal Newman, "is comparatively of late date. When once it began, men seemed surprised that it had not been thought of before; and now they hold him next to the Blessed Virgin in their religious affection and veneration." It had of course been dogmatically retarded by the insistence on the virginity of Mary. But Gerson, one of the most distinguished theologians of the fourteenth century, is credited by modern Catholics with having suggested the recognition of a second or created Trinity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And seeing that Joseph in the popular medieval representations of the Advent Mystery is a constant figure, it is inferrible that for the multitude he had practically a divine status. The process is strictly in keeping with religious evolution in general; and the official apotheosis of Joseph may one day take place. For a time, in the period of the Renaissance, there was an amount of devotion paid to St. Anna, the mother of Mary, which might conceivably have led to her deification. Pictures of that period may still be seen in Holland, in which Anna, Mary, and Jesus constitute a Holy Family. But the cultus of Anna had no persistent or powerful advocate, and she seems latterly to have passed definitely into the background.
§ 2. Doctrines of the Eucharist, Purgatory, and Confession
In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the "body and blood" of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout pagans thought of one of the some kind in their mysteries or temple ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour to the charge of cannibalism, the Fathers seem always to have explained that the terms were purely figurative; and such was the doctrine laid down by Augustine. But when pagan culture had passed away, and there was none in the barbarized West to challenge the Church as such, the strange literalness of the original liturgy set up the stranger belief that what was eaten in the eucharist was by "transubstantiation" the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man. Where such a belief was possible, it was the special interest of the priesthood to make the affirmation. A stupendous miracle, they claimed, was worked every time the eucharist was administered; but it was worked through the priest. He and he only could bring it about; and thus the central mystery and prodigy of the faith, the command of its most essential ministry, was a clerical monopoly. The economic and spiritual centre of gravity of the entire system was fixed in the priestly order.