Ite Ad Joseph
By a Home-Educating Parent | 3 September 2025
What is Ite Ad Joseph?
Ite Ad Joseph is an informal prayer association. Its purpose is to place under the total protection of St Joseph the inalienable right of parents to home educate their children. Pope Pius IX described this right as “anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State” and yet there has emerged a persistent and aggressive threat by the state to remove this right. In response to this threat, an unimpeachable defence is needed; it is the purpose of lAJ to ask St Joseph to be this defence.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider when asked if he may encourage the IAJ movement responded:
“I wholeheartedly bless this project to home educate the children. It is indeed an inalienable and natural right of parents to do so without State interference [and it is] reserved to the family and to the wise decision of parents to seek the education more suitable for their children, so as to preserve them from the spread of a woke and deadly culture ruining their innocence and trying to reprogramme their brains. May St Joseph, custodian of the Holy Family of Nazareth, protect all families and their children.”
Why the name?
The name lte Ad joseph is taken from Genesis 41:55. Faced with a terrible famine, the starving Egyptians were commanded, “Go to Joseph”, who then provided them with all the food they need. This can be seen as a foreshadowing of the St Joseph of the New Testament and of his role in our spiritual life today. Many Catholic parents are starving — not for want of food but for want of protection of their children’s spiritual and physical well-being against what the state and secular society wish to impose on them.
Why is lAJ needed?
The right to home educate in the UK has been under attack, on and off, for decades. The latest legislative attack (2025), which has an unprecedented likelihood of succeeding, seeks to:
- Require parents to justify to the state their decision to home educate and prove it is in the child’s best interests, with the state arrogating the “final say” on the matter.
- Enable local councils to issue School Attendance Orders for any ill-defined reason of their choosing, with only a token process of appeal that is stacked against parents.
- Enable official inspections of homes and curricula, and fine and imprison parents who refuse to comply with inspections and/or School Attendance Orders.
It is also worth noting that for Catholic home educators in particular, the education they provide is woven so seamlessly into family life that it is essentially identical with it. As such, any attack by the state on home education is, for Catholics, a direct assault on the very essence of their family unit, their ecclesia domestica.
What does membership involve?
Any person can join IAJ and being a member simply means committing to the three spiritual exercises listed below, always with the intention of imploring St Joseph to protect the inalienable right of parents to home educate their children without state interference and for the defeat of all political efforts to the contrary.
- Recite, daily and preferably after the rosary, Pope Leo Xlll’s Ad te Beate Joseph prayer.
- Undertake some act of fasting and/or penance each Wednesday.
- Include the IAJ intention in your weekly Holy Communion.
Members are also encouraged to have Masses said for the protection of home education.
IAJ of course does not question the duty of the state to intervene in homes where there is a violation of natural law.
What is so wrong with school?
IAJ is not anti-school. There are some excellent Catholic schools in the UK. But for the majority of home educating parents, given what is on offer in their local area, the notion of sending their children to school is absolutely unconscionable and reminds them of the words spoken by our Lord: “But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt 18:6). Reasons typically cited for eschewing school education, even in Catholic schools, include: promotion of the “rainbow” agenda; the RSE curriculum; the indirect influence, via peers, of television; a peer sub-culture based around the use of “smart phones” which destroys purity; the ineffectual and even damaging provision for special educational needs; poor teaching and a narrow curriculum; the list goes on …
Is there anything else I can do to help protect home education?
Aside from IAJ, which is a spiritual movement, we also desperately need the support of people who are not home educators to take up the political fight. Home educators themselves are vulnerable and need to protect their children; even writing to their MP is something many parents feel too risky to undertake. Hence, we need the help of others to undertake the societal and political fight for us — to write to the government, to lobby MPs, to use whatever lawful political lever possible to promote and defend home education.
Please do what you can. For home educating families, the threshold of their home marks a last line of defence, behind which, out of reach of the state, they can safely pass on a wonderful education and preserve the souls of their children. Please, friends, help us!
Sancte Joseph, ora pro nobis.
Ad te Beate Joseph Prayer
For the protection of the inalienable right of parents to home educate their children without state interference and for the collapse of all political efforts to the contrary:
To thee, O Blessed Joseph, do we come in our tribulation, and having implored the help of thy most Holy Spouse, we confidently invoke thy patronage also. Through that charity which bound thee to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God and through the paternal love with which thou embraced the Child Jesus, we humbly beg thee to graciously regard the inheritance which Jesus Christ has purchased by his Blood, and with thy power and strength to aid us in our necessities.
O most watchful Guardian of the Holy Family, defend the chosen children of Jesus Christ; O most loving father, ward off from us every contagion of error and corrupting influence; O our most mighty protector, be propitious to us and from heaven assist us in our struggle with the power of darkness; and, as once thou rescued the Child Jesus from deadly peril, so now protect God’s Holy Church from the snares of the enemy and from all adversity; shield, too, each one of us by thy constant protection, so that, supported by thy example and thy aid, we may be able to live piously, to die holy, and to obtain eternal happiness in heaven. Amen.
(Pope Leo XIII)