Home sellers and real estate agents all over America swear by it: If you want to sell your house quickly and easily, bury a statue of St. Joseph in the yard, or flower pot if it's a condo. Miraculous tales are told of desperate pleas being rewarded. The tradition has real power, but it's not how the statue is buried or when or where it's buried. The statue's power comes as a reminder to trust God and to enlist God's power through prayer. People made desperate by a difficult real estate market have found some meaning and hope when what looks like a kitschy piece of plastic helps them tap into a way to approach God through intercession by a saint.
One Woman’s Story
Ms. V. R., who asked that her real name not be used, heard about the practice from several friends. A Protestant and regular churchgoer in St. Louis, she had never prayed to a saint before, but she believed in the power of prayer. Ms. R. said she buried the statue and said one of the suggested prayers, which had a blank for requests. In addition to asking St. Joseph to help sell her house, Ms. R. asked for peace for her family, which was under a lot of stress with two mortgages, rising debt and a sinking credit rating.
“The effect was immediate,” Ms. R. said. “Not that we sold our house right away -- that took another six months. But even on the ride back to our new place after burying the statue, I felt a serenity. As I prayed the prayer each morning for the next week or so, I noticed a change in my husband, too.”
The R. family dug up the tiny statue the morning they closed the deal on their house, cleaned it off and left it in the house for the new owners. It is pictured on this page.
Why St. Joseph?
St. Joseph is an obvious choice if you're going to pray to a saint to sell your home. As the earthly father of Jesus, he is not only the patron saint of families, but also the patron saint of carpenters and other workers who make a living with their hands, as well as the patron for those who are suffering and dying.
"If you wanted one all-inclusive saint, that would be St. Joseph," Sr. Mary Margaret Schissler said in an interview. She is program director of Pius Union of St. Joseph, which maintains a shrine, chapel, conference center and residence in Grass Lake, Mich. "He represents confidence, courage, charity, hope. . . "
Felicitas "Babes" Tan-Magkalas felt so strongly about the efficacy of St. Joseph's intercession in her life that she started a website devoted to prayers to St. Joseph. Now living in Canada, Tan-Magkalas began praying to St. Joseph when she was looking for a job that would give meaning to her life. She found it, working for a nongovernmental charitable organization in San Jose, in the Philippines. "I know this great Saint constantly watches over me, reminding me always to trust in God as he had done so faithfully during his earthly life," she says in the site's welcome page. A "Testimonials" section is filled with stories of answered prayers to St. Joseph, for home sales, for jobs, for family peace.
The Power of Prayer and Ritual
Several organizations or companies sell kits containing a plastic statue, prayers and explanations. One of the most popular, which is marketed online as "The Authentic St. Joseph Home Sales Kit," explains that the details of burial -- right-side up, upside down, in the front yard, in the backyard -- "mean little, if anything. What does mean everything is that the seller asks St. Joseph for his help, believes that he will intercede and trusts him, all as very simply set forth in a short essay, The Way of St. Joseph." The essay was copyrighted in 1992 by J. Mickelwright, who seems to be in the public consciousness solely through the booklet included with the kit.
Why bury the statue? The ritual reinforces the practice, Sr. Schissler of Pius Union says, and the important part of the practice is sincere prayer. "If you entrust your intentions to St. Joseph, that he would look after you, he will bring about good in your family in other ways as well."
Pius Union was established in 1995 as a prayer crusade and is operated by the Servants of Charity, a priestly religious group, and its sister order, the Daughters of St. Mary of Providence. That is, the people who maintain Pius Union of St. Joseph for the Suffering and Dying see their life's vocation as praying. In the mid- to late1990s, Pius Union was approached by one of the producers of statue kits of St. Joseph, asking if the religious groups would like to be suggested as recipients of donations from grateful home sellers. It seemed fitting to the leaders of the time: a way to popularize prayer and also support a praying organization.
The Legend of St. Joseph's Help for Home Sales Is Recent
The practice of burying a statue of St. Joseph is relatively recent. Snopes.com, a website that researches legends, myths and Internet scams, found no reference to the practice in the United States before 1984. Writing for the Snopes website, Barbara "joe work" Mikkelson summarizes a few stories of the origin of the practice, saying that "these theories may well be instances of retrofitting lore to a custom." Mikkelson could find no mention in "standard folklore references" of burying a statue of St. Joseph to affect real estate transactions. She concludes: "That the custom now has an interesting backstory does not mean its backstory is valid or even that old."
Since about 1990, news organizations have reported success stories of the saint's help in selling homes -- often on the real estate pages or business report. Retailers of religious goods say that many real estate agents buy the statues or the boxed kits in bulk, handing them out to many or all of their customers.
Who Buys the Statues
Catholic Supply of St. Louis Inc., which sells religious goods in retail stores in St. Louis and worldwide through the Internet, carries St. Joseph statues from several companies. Real estate agents -- from as far away as California -- order in bulk via the Internet, says Janice Wheelehan, store manager. She notes two types of walk-in customers: "Some come in kind of sheepish. They can’t believe they’re doing this, but someone told them it works for them. We try to put them at their ease."
And the second type? "A lot of people who have experienced success with praying to St. Joseph in the past, or they have seen the transformation that praying causes in a family member, " Wheelehan said. This second type often buys a statue to give to someone else.
A Postmodern Spiritual Practice
The St. Joseph legend and practice burgeoned at a time when polls began reporting a growing number of people who described themselves as "spiritual but not religious." This cohort has now been analyzed, poked and prodded as a significant demographic: people who search for meaning outside typical church membership. They believe in God, or a higher power, but do not trust organized religion.
Postmodern thinkers see the world as pluralistic, and this, too, seems to be one of the reasons for St. Joseph's appeal. That is, postmodern seekers of spirituality willingly borrow from many religious traditions to enrich their spiritual lives. This openness to a variety of traditions, coupled with a difficult real estate market, has caused many non-Catholics or nominal Christians to say, "Why not? It couldn't hurt," when burying a statue is suggested.
Some Christian leaders see the popularity of the practice as simply God's way of reaching nonbelievers in a postmodern world. As Micklewright wrote in The Way of St. Joseph, "For, very simply, sale or no sale, asking St. Joseph inspires hope; and hope brings about believing; and believing leads to faith; and ... lives are changed!"
Sources
Mikkelson, Barbara, Property Rites, http://www.snopes.com/luck/stjoseph.asp
Riggs, John, Postmodern Christianity: Doing Theology in the Contemporary World. Harrisburg, Pa; London: Trinity Press International, 2003.
Tan-Magkalas, Felicitas, "Thank You, St. Joseph," http://www.stjosephsite.com
Wallis, Kim, "Can we borrow rituals from religions other than our own?," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 26, 2008. http://www.stltoday.com
Prayer Resources
Nine Days of Prayer: http://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/novena/joseph.htm
http://www.luckymojo.com/saintjoseph.html
Virginia Gilbert - A 2007 graduate of Eden Seminary, Gilbert covered education, business and police for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for 27 years.
Join the Conversation