(LifeSiteNews) — Have you ever wondered about the inside stories of the saints? What about Saint Joseph? He is hardly mentioned in the Scriptures, after all. But what if I told you we can know something about the life of the foster father of our Lord Jesus Christ?
Today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show gives us a look inside the inspiring and hidden life of Saint Joseph. My guest is Dr. Paul Thigpen, who recently published a book on this topic called The Life of Saint Joseph as Seen by the Mystics.
The book basically weaves together a life of Saint Joseph based on private revelations. Dr. Thigpen says not all of the revelations come from canonized saints such as Saint Bridget of Sweden, but nonetheless they are all mystics: Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, Venerable Mary of Jesus of Ágreda, and Marina de Escobar, among others.
“The Church tells us we don’t take these things as gospel. We don’t take them even as history,” he explained. “But what you can do is take them the way you would take the scenes in Mel Gibson’s [The Passion of the Christ] — as a very powerful, sacred drama that brings us more deeply into the Gospel stories.”
Dr. Thigpen says the storyline spans Saint Joseph’s entire life, beginning with his early childhood, moving into young adulthood and onto the events recorded in the Gospels, his “hidden years” in Nazareth, and then his late life and death. He provides us with a taste of what the book offers.
“You get [insights] into not just Our Lady and Saint Joseph and Jesus, but into the people that they interacted with. You learn more about Judas, or you learn more about Our Lady’s parents, or more about the people in Egypt and what it would have been like to interact with the pagan people there,” Thigpen says. “You also have extremely visual imagination, not in the sense of making it up, but of being able to picture in the mind what God was showing them and saying to them.”
“Some of the scenes are just remarkably detailed and give you everything that you would get in Mel Gibson’s movie, for instance, not just the person, but everything around,” he added.
For more from Dr. Paul Thigpen, check out today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show. Click here to buy his book.
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