One day, an unknown elderly man appeared at the parish house, asking the priest to go and assist a woman who was dying.
He offered to accompany the priest to her home. Since the street had a bad reputation and night was approaching, the priest suspected that it might be a trap. But the old man insisted:
“You must go at once, for the sacraments need to be administered to an old woman who is at death’s door.”
The priest set out, carrying the Blessed Sacrament and the Holy Oils. The night was bitterly cold, but the old man seemed not to feel it. He walked ahead until they reached a house of ill repute. The priest hesitated for a moment, overcome by fear, but the old man encouraged him, saying:
“I shall wait for you here.”
The priest knocked repeatedly at the door, but when no one answered, the old man gave a few peculiar knocks, and the door immediately opened.
“Go inside, climb the stairs, open the door at the end of the hallway, and you will find the dying woman.”
He spoke with such force and authority that the priest no longer hesitated. He found an abandoned woman lying on a miserable bed, crying out again and again:
“A priest! A priest! Will you let me die without a priest?...”
“My daughter, here I am. I am the priest you called for. An old man came to fetch me...”
She could hardly believe it.
“No, there is no one in this house who would go to fetch a priest, and I do not know any such old man.”
At last, convinced, she confessed the sins of her long life as a sinner. She did so with such sorrow and repentance that the priest was astonished to find such sentiments in someone who had been so far removed from God for so many years.
The priest arranged the little table and lit the candles for the Viaticum and Extreme Unction. Meanwhile, several people came and went, seeming not to notice the priest’s presence.
After administering all the sacraments, the priest asked her whether she had preserved any religious practice that might have merited such a blessing in her great hour of need.
“None,” she replied, “except for a little prayer I said every day to Saint Joseph, asking him to grant me a happy death.”
Comforted, the priest remained with the converted woman until her final breath.
He found the old man neither at the door nor along the way, and became convinced that he could have been none other than the merciful patron of a happy death, the glorious Saint Joseph.
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