From patron saint of the universal Church to role model for workers : devotion to Saint Joseph in the ^19th century.

During the^19th c., under the pressure of the hegemony of intransigent Catholic culture, devotions were politicized, with the aim of spreading among the faithful the aspiration to a Christian society opposed to modern society. The cult of St. Joseph, by virtue of its popularity, was part of this general process. It was first Pius IX who promoted a transformation of the saint's image: from patron saint of good death to patron saint of a Church threatened by the "revolution" brought to Italy by the Kingdom of Sardinia. The aim was to arouse a piety capable of thwarting the objectives of those who, under the pretext of national unification, were in reality aiming to abolish the Pope's sovereignty, the only guarantee of his freedom, and to introduce the principles of 1789 into the peninsula. Leo XIII, as part of a modernization of the Church's presence in society, attributed a different meaning to devotion to the saint. The greatest danger of modernity now comes from socialism: devotion to St. Joseph is therefore presented as a means of spreading the model of the virtuous Catholic worker, whom the Church's social doctrine sees as the remedy for the evils engendered by the industrial revolution.