Abbey-Roads2

St. Joseph Home Sale kits.

When I managed a religious goods store, what really would annoy me were some of the gimmicks producers/manufacturers came up with to increase sales of religious items.  For instance, the ordinary Brown Scapular is available with numerous different pictures depicting a variety of unrelated saints upon them.  Then there are house scapulars, candles with various saint images, St. Anthony golf balls, and other kitsch.

Slick marketing, accompanied with dubious instructions, the St. Joseph Home Sale kit is a huge seller.  Realtors buy them by the dozen, as do many people selling their own home - well, they usually just buy one kit.  Essentially, used with faith and prayer, it is not a superstitious practice.  I don’t like the stupid rule of burying the saint upside down - how one buries him doesn’t matter.

Origins of the custom.

Burying religious medals goes back a long way - although nowadays, people bury little statues.  Supposedly, St. Teresa of Avila had the practice of burying medals for the property she needed for her foundations.  What is known, Teresa and her nuns always asked St. Joseph to obtain the properties they needed.  This seems perfectly logical, since it was St. Joseph who found the dwellings for Our Lady and the Child Jesus, thus his patronage in buying and selling family homes seems most appropriate.

The local Carmelite monastery here at Lake Elmo, years ago had a friend and I bury medals on property adjacent to their monastery.  The farm fields were to be sold and turned into an amusement park.  The fun park deal fell through, and today male Carmelite hermits inhabit the area, thus the nuns solitude was maintained.  Of course the nuns prayed, and the medals were perhaps analogous to a homesteader’s claim marker to the land.

It is said that old timers buried medals on their property when a priest ws not available to bless the land.  The practice of burying a medal, or a statue, is an outward expression of an interior prayer, offered in faith, not unlike the practice of lighting votive candles in Church.

Prayer.

That said, the Home Sale kit almost makes a ritual out of the practice - bury him upside down, etc..  As I told customers, all they needed to do was make a fervent novena, or pray daily for their temporal needs, and simply bury a medal, or small plastic statue - they never needed a kit.  But they buy the kits anyway, and half the time, they never get the statue blessed - I know this because many protestants have also adopted the practice.  As some have said to me, “Whatever works!” 

The Church warns against the dangers of superstition. The Catechism tells us that superstition, “can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.” (no. 2111)

Art: John Collier, “St. Joseph and the Child Jesus”

BTW - I obtained this house through St. Joseph, and sold my condo through his intercession - but that is another story.