"This is my parish; this is what we do," said Daniel Egan told The Detroit Catholic about the procession.
"This is a perennial St. Joseph Day tradition. St. Joseph Parish has been here for almost 150 years, so this isn't new to this area. Maybe it fell out of practice for the last 30, 40 years, but we are showing we are Catholic, as we are called to," he said.
"As Catholics, we're told to live our faith in season and out of season, in the public square and in private, and that includes the city streets. If we're not Catholic out there, we are truly failing to be authentically Christian."
The photo of the procession includes the Knights of St. John in full uniform (a Catholic charitable organization with a very long history), as well as parish vicar Canon Adrian Sequeira, ICRSS, leading the procession in full choir habit, which is used when the order chants the Liturgy of the Hours together. The spots of blue throughout the photo symbolize the order's total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Stein said.
St. Joseph speaks to the hearts of today as a gentle and loving man and father and worker, Stein told CNA.
Part of the homily from the feast day, he said, explained that God sends saints for the times - either holy people of the time who are witnessing to the Gospel, or saints of old who are re-presented and raised up as intercessors for the times.
"It only takes a quick glance around the world to see a fatherless society, and to see either a slothful or workaholic society, or a lack of an appropriate understanding of manliness," Stein said.
"It's neither brute nor effeminate, it's faithful, it's steadfast, it's courageous and gentle. And we find all those things in St. Joseph, so I think that's another part of the power of that picture."
The procession, which traveled for less than a mile, stopped rush-hour traffic in the city, with the collaboration of Detroit police. It travelled to the Eastern Market, an iconic makers market in Detroit that has remained in the city since the 1800s, where workers can sell their wares and fathers can support their families - two things of which St. Joseph is the patron, Stein noted.
"So all the workers got to see their patron processing through the streets, whether they knew it or not," he said.
The procession was part of numerous events celebrating St. Joseph that took place in both St. Joseph's parish and throughout the archdiocese. In addition to the procession, St. Joseph's parish had three Masses, an Italian dinner, and a running litany of other activities and devotions throughout the day.
Other Detroit parishes had St. Joseph's Masses and dinners, including San Francesco Parish, which held a Mass, Italian dinner and St. Joseph's play, and Holy Family Parish, which held an Italian-language Mass.
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Beyond being a photogenic opportunity, Stein noted, the procession and all of the festivities on the feast of St. Joseph are the fruit of a lively spiritual and liturgical life.
"It shows that we're alive," Stein said. "These things are the fruit of a daily sacramental life, these things are the fruit of a reverent liturgy, and the fruit of a solid catechesis. They're the fruit of our young adults being committed...Detroit as a city is coming back, and a lot of millennials are staying after college to get their first career jobs here."
To fill the needs of an increasing number of young people, St. Joseph's offers teenage catechesis and young adult groups, Stein said. The parish also has daily Mass and confession, a schola choir, and active volunteer groups, among other ministries. Within just two years, it's become a hub for millennials in the Archdiocese, he noted.
"We are predominantly young," Stein said, and young people are hungry for an incarnational faith.
"We are body and soul, all these spiritual truths are meant to be communicated through our senses. We get to see our faith, hear our faith, taste our faith, etc., and that just appeals to us so much," he said.
"Truth needs to shine in beauty...we're not angels, we're not just pure intelligences, we need to see, touch, hear; and that's something the traditional liturgy has always done. That's something that a reverent Mass or procession can do, these visible signs that the Church has used throughout her history to excite devotion and promote devotion."