"Ite ad loseph" ("Go to Joseph")... as long as you don't bury him upside down.

A lot of people with nothing better to do today, are engaged in a hot debate at Jimmy Akin's weblog, over whether burying a statue of St Joseph upside down in the front yard to sell your house is a genuine pious devotion, or a superstition.

The answer to this and most other similar devotional acts is always... it depends.

Why are you doing it? Are you asking Saint Joseph for his intercession in securing a successful transaction? Do you as a father ask his guidance in leading your family on to the next location, and blessing it as well? Catholics can do that, you know? In so doing, they appropriate certain signs and/or actions which, in another culture, would have been an invocation of a false god. That would be superstitious. But the Church historically does not supress the cultures it evangelizes; it brings out the best in them. We would be a rather colorless and iconoclastic faith without this. In such cases, this is not superstition.

Now, don't you wish you'd asked me first, and saved you all this trouble?