Nuala’s photo of St Joseph features again in religious magazine

A photo depicting St Joseph by a Mullingar woman has appeared for the third successive year on the front of a religious magazine.

Last year, Nuala Higgins’ photo of a stained glass window by Sue Klayman at St Joseph the Worker Church in Ozark, Missouri, featured on the front cover of a magazine, the December edition of St Patrick’s Mission magazine ‘Africa’ – and this year it appears on the front of St Joseph’s Advocate, the magazine of the St Joseph’s Missionary Society of Mill Hill.

The image depicts Joseph holding the infant Jesus as Mary rests, and in 2019 it also featured in the December edition of the St Martin magazine.

Nuala took the photo while visiting the US on holiday in May 2019. Previously, she told the Westmeath Examiner that the stained glass window struck her as unusual.

“You rarely see a young St Joseph – he’s usually depicted as an old man. And you also rarely see him holding the baby Jesus.”

“Prior to that I had been in Santa Cruz, California, after viewing the shrine of St Joseph the Redeemer. It really awakened to me St Joseph, and from that I realised that he had an important part to play in the life of Christ, and we overlook that.

“I discovered a new admiration for the role played by Joseph in the Holy Family. The prayer garden attached to the shrine together with the devotion to Joseph was heavenly and it struck a great chord with me. I feel the foster father of Christ is often forgotten. In fact, as far as we know, Jesus in his public life never mentioned him.”

In the Winter 2021 edition of St Joseph’s Advocate, in his ‘from the editor’ article, Fr Jim O’Connell, writes: “Joseph looks younger and more involved than he often seems to be in the crib and in paintings. In the stained glass window, he is at the centre of things – as a father lovingly holding the infant Jesus.

"He looks rather serious, as if he is thinking deeply, perhaps worried about what lies ahead. The infant Jesus looks calm and secure in Joseph’s strong arms. Here we see Joseph in his role as father of Jesus and husband of Mary.”

Nuala’s photos have won awards and other recognition, and in the 2022 St Martin de Porres calendar, three of them feature, for the months of February, March and August.

The photo she took of a deer in San Antonio, Texas outside the home of Fr Kevin Ryan, who is a native of St John’s Terrace, Mullingar, features in February. Nuala remembers that Fr Kevin was a well-known member of Mullingar Shamrocks and he played with Mullingar Town in the 1960s. He is now paster of St Mark the Evangelist Church in San Antonio.

Another image Nuala captured on her travels in the US illustrates August. “I snapped the squirrel in a park Little Rock, Arkansas in March 2020.”

A photo Nuala took near her home in Ginnell Terrace illustrates March in the calendar; it shows the Boris Anrep mosaic of St Patrick in the Cathedral of Christ the King, Mullingar.