Lenten Campaign 2025
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Join Catholics around the world in praying the Novena to St. Joseph for Those on the Path of Adoption, beginning March 10. You can sign up for email or text message reminders and see the full novena on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' website.
The novena will take place from March 10-18, leading up to St. Joseph’s feast day on March 19:
This novena highlights the gift of adoption by seeking the intercession of St. Joseph for the many people whose lives are touched by adoption. Invoking the intercession of St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus, we pray for all whose life stories include adoption.
Each day of the novena includes the following:
- Intention for the day
- Scripture reading
- Prayer
- Petition to St. Joseph
- Concluding prayers
Praying for those whose stories include adoption
If you stop to think about it, St. Joseph is the perfect intercessor for adoption. He was the foster father of Jesus, so he knew intimately what it feels like to adopt a child. And his care for Jesus is a powerful witness of a father’s love.
This novena is a beautiful way to honor and acknowledge the hard realities of adoption. Adoption is a part of so many families’ stories. In the United States alone, between 5 and 7 million people are adopted, about 2% of the population. And around 150,000 children are placed for adoption each year.
Yet as common as adoption is, it can be a very difficult process. One Catholic writer who has shed a lot of light on it is Emily Stimpson Chapman, who has three beautiful children through adoption.
Stimpson Chapman explained in an interview with Our Sunday Visitor:
The real challenge, once you get into it, is realizing that your motherhood is made possible by another woman’s grief and another family’s grief. Adoption is not a joyful process. It is a hard, emotionally-grueling process where you are watching one woman make the hardest decision she will ever have to make and grieve that she is not going to raise her child.
At the same time, adoption has brought her so much joy, as she described:
You get a baby, you get a beautiful baby who’s the image of God, and who’s been entrusted to you and that stretches you and shapes you and grows your love.
Join the novena to add your prayers to those of many others in asking God’s blessings on all those walking the path of adoption: adoptees, expectant parents, birth parents, adoptive parents, and couples discerning or pursuing adoptions.
