A Life, for his feast on the eighteenth day of September — III classis
Oculus Dei respexit illum in bono, et erexit eum ab humilitate ipsius, et exaltavit caput eius. “The eye of God hath looked upon him for good, and hath lifted him up from his low estate, and hath exalted his head.” — Alleluia verse of the Mass, from Ecclesiasticus 11:13
I. Born in a stable
He was born on the seventeenth of June, 1603, at Copertino, a farming town in the Terra d’Otranto at the heel of the Kingdom of Naples, and he was born in a shed. His father, Felice Desa, was a carpenter of good heart and poor judgment who had stood surety for the debts of his friends; when they defaulted, the creditors fell upon him, and the family house was seized. The Franciscan accounts say that the father was already dead or in flight when the child came, and that Francesca Panara, the mother, was delivered in the stable behind the house because she had nowhere else to go. The hagiographers did not need to embellish the likeness to Bethlehem. It was simply there.
He was baptized Giuseppe in the parish church of Our Lady of the Snows. His mother, left alone with the debts and the child, raised him with a severity that the older biographers record without comment and the modern reader finds hard to read. Years afterward, when his brethren spoke of the rigours of the novitiate, the saint remarked that he had needed none: he had made his novitiate under his mother.
II. Bocca aperta
The boy was, by every account, not clever. He was absent, forgetful, and awkward; he would stop in the middle of an errand or a sentence and stand with his mouth open, gazing at nothing, so that the children of the town called him Boccaperta, “Open-mouth.” His schoolmasters made nothing of him. When he was about eight he began to fall into these abstractions at the sound of church music or the name of God, and the town took them for simplicity rather than for what they were.
In childhood he was afflicted for years with a festering ulcer that the physicians could not heal; tradition holds that he was cured when his mother took him to the shrine of Our Lady at Galatone and he was anointed with oil from the lamp burning before her image. From that time his devotion to the Mother of God was the axis of his life. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and was bad at it.
III. The rejected
At seventeen he asked to be received by the Friars Minor Conventual, among whom he had two uncles. They refused him for want of learning. He went to the Capuchins at Martina Franca, who received him as a lay brother in 1620, and within about eight months sent him away. He had broken the crockery, spoilt the bread, forgotten every errand, and fallen into raptures in the middle of his duties. When they took the habit from him he said that it was as if his skin were being torn off with it.
He walked home in his secular clothes and was not welcomed. A prosperous uncle called him good for nothing; his mother, who wanted him out of the house and could not feed him, took up his cause with a vehemence that was as much desperation as piety, and pressed her brother among the Conventuals until they relented. They received him at their little friary of Santa Maria della Grottella outside Copertino, not as a friar, but as a tertiary servant in a rough habit, to look after the mule.
It was there, among the animals as he had begun, that he became a saint. He took the lowest tasks and asked for more; he fasted, he watched, he prayed, and he was so plainly and unaffectedly good that the community which had admitted him out of pity began to revere him. In 1625 they received him among the clerics, and he was professed.
IV. The two examinations
Holy Orders required study, and study was precisely what he could not do. He laboured over his books and retained almost nothing, and he approached the examinations for the diaconate with a very reasonable dread. There was, the tradition says, one text of the Gospels he could expound well: Beatus venter qui te portavit, “Blessed is the womb that bore thee” (Luke 11:27). The bishop opened the book at random, and it fell there.
For the priesthood the examination was sterner, and his case was worse. But the bishop, having questioned the first several candidates and found them all excellent, concluded that the rest were surely as well prepared and passed the whole group without further examination. Joseph was ordained priest on the twenty-eighth of March, 1628. Popular devotion has ever since made him the patron of students before examinations, and there is no harm in that, provided the student remembers that the saint first did all the work he was capable of and then left the rest to God.
V. The flights
What followed at the Grottella over the next ten years is the thing for which the world remembers him and the thing the Church, characteristically, made the least of.
He began to be lifted from the ground in prayer. The raptures that had made him Boccaperta as a child now carried him bodily into the air: at the altar, in choir, in the garden, sometimes at a word — the Holy Name, the name of Mary, a phrase of the Office, a strain of music, the bleating of a lamb that put him in mind of the Lamb of God. It is recorded that on one Christmas night, hearing the shepherds’ pipes, he cried out for joy, danced, and rose to the altar, where he hung in the air in the midst of the lighted candles without disturbing them. It is recorded that when workmen could not raise a heavy cross on the hill of Calvary near the friary, he rose and set it in place. Those who witnessed the ecstasies said that he was insensible during them — deaf to shouts, indifferent to pins and flames — and that one word from his superior under obedience would recall him instantly to himself.
The extraordinary thing about these phenomena, from the historian’s side, is not that they were claimed but that they were witnessed, repeatedly and in public, over thirty-five years, by persons of every rank including cardinals, princes, a pope, and a great many sceptics, and that the testimonies were taken under oath and examined in one of the most rigorous processes of canonization ever conducted. Prospero Lambertini, who as Promoter of the Faith had the office of finding the weaknesses in causes, and who later as Benedict XIV wrote the classic treatise on the subject, reviewed the evidence and was satisfied that it came from eyewitnesses of unimpeachable integrity. It was he who beatified Joseph in 1753.
He himself was mortified by the whole business. He called himself Fra Asino, Brother Ass — the name St. Francis had given to the body — and begged his brethren to pray that the raptures be taken from him.
VI. The Inquisition
Crowds follow wonders, and crowds alarm the authorities. By 1638 the people of Apulia were flocking after the friar of the Grottella, and a vicar-general of the region denounced him to the Inquisition at Naples as a man who drew followers after him like a new Messiah. He was summoned, examined over several weeks, and found blameless. He was said to have been rapt in the air while celebrating Mass in the city before he left.
He was sent to Rome, where the Minister General of his Order received him with suspicion and then with veneration; and there, admitted to kiss the feet of Urban VIII, he fell into ecstasy in the Pope’s presence. Urban is said to have declared that if the friar died before him, he would himself bear witness to what he had seen.
In 1639 he was assigned to the Sacro Convento at Assisi, beside the tomb of the Seraphic Father. There, for about two years, he entered a desolation as dark as his consolations had been bright: dryness in prayer, the withdrawal of every sensible comfort, and hard treatment at the hands of a superior who thought him a fraud. He bore it, and it passed. For thirteen years Assisi was his home, and pilgrims of every kind sought him there. Among them, in 1649, came John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a Lutheran prince, who watched the friar’s Mass and saw him rapt at the elevation; he returned, was instructed, and was received into the Church.
VII. Humiliabam in ieiunio animam meam
In July of 1653 the Holy Office, still uneasy at the crowds, removed him from Assisi without warning and without explanation. He was taken first to the remote Capuchin hermitage of Pietrarubbia in the mountains of the Marches, and, when the people discovered him even there, to the Capuchin friary at Fossombrone. He was forbidden to leave his cell except for Mass, forbidden to write or receive letters, forbidden to speak with any but the friars of the house. He was, in all but name, a prisoner, and the men who guarded him were not of his own Order.
It is fair to the authorities to say that they were not persecuting a heretic. They were managing a man whose holiness had become a public disturbance, in an age when false mystics were not rare, and the Church’s caution toward extraordinary phenomena is an old and sound caution — St. John of the Cross had written two generations earlier that such things are never to be sought, and that the soul must pass through them to God in the darkness of faith. But the cost fell on Joseph, and he paid it without complaint. He asked only whether he might still say Mass. He was told that he might.
In 1657 Alexander VII allowed him to return to his own brethren, and he was sent to the Conventual house at Osimo, near Loreto, where he lived his last six years under the same seclusion. He fasted as he always had — the Franciscan custom of several “Lents” of forty days each year, taking in many of them almost nothing — and the Offertory of his Mass is the verse of the Psalm that describes it: Humiliabam in ieiunio animam meam, “I humbled my soul with fasting” (Ps. 34:13).
He died at Osimo on the eighteenth of September, 1663, at the age of sixty. The Communion antiphon of his Mass gives the whole of his life in a sentence: Ego sum pauper et dolens: salus tua, Deus, suscepit me — “I am poor and sorrowful: thy salvation, O God, hath set me up” (Ps. 68:30).
VIII. The vindication
He was buried at Osimo, where his body rests today in the basilica that bears his name. The process for his beatification was opened almost at once, and the testimony of those who had seen him taken up in prayer was gathered while they still lived. Benedict XIV beatified him on the twenty-fourth of February, 1753.
On the sixteenth of July, 1767, Clement XIII canonized him — in the same ceremony in which he raised to the altars Joseph Calasanctius, whose feast this series kept three weeks ago. The two Josephs make a strange and instructive pair: the one a doctor of both laws who spent his life teaching the alphabet to the poor, the other a man who could scarcely learn the alphabet, taught by God alone. Both were humbled by authorities of the Church in their old age; both obeyed; both were vindicated after death on the same morning.
His feast was afterward placed in the universal calendar on the day of his death. The reformed calendar of 1969 removed it from the general calendar and left it to his Order and to local observance; in the traditional Roman calendar it remains on the eighteenth of September, with the Mass Dilectio Dei.
IX. The Mass of a flying saint
The liturgy of his feast is a lesson in how the Church reads the extraordinary.
On the day of the most famous levitating saint in her history, the Church does not read an Epistle about wonders. She reads St. Paul’s hymn to charity: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass… and if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries… and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1-2). It is as though the Church, knowing exactly what the faithful will be thinking about on this day, says to them first: not that.
St. Thomas gives the principle. There are graces given freely for the sake of others — prophecy, miracles, tongues, the gratiae gratis datae — and there is the grace that makes a man pleasing to God, sanctifying grace with its charity; and the second is incomparably the more excellent, because the first only prepares men for God, while the second unites them to Him (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, a. 5). A man may work wonders and be damned; no one can have charity and be lost while he keeps it. The Church does not canonize flights. She canonizes heroic virtue, and treats the flights, at most, as God’s signature upon it.
The Gospel is the parable of the wedding feast (Matt. 22:1-14). The guests who were first invited — men with farms and businesses, men who had somewhere better to be — would not come; and the king sent his servants ad exitus viarum, to the ends of the roads, to gather whomever they found. Joseph Desa was found at the end of the road: refused by one Order, expelled by another, taken in to mind a mule. “The foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27).
But the parable does not end at the gathering. A man is found at the feast without a wedding garment, and is cast out. St. Gregory the Great, preaching on this Gospel, asks what the wedding garment is and answers without hesitation: it is charity (Homiliae in Evangelia 38). So the Gospel returns to the Epistle. The invitation is for anyone; the garment is required of everyone.
The Collect then gathers the whole meaning of his life into one petition, taking its image from Our Lord’s word, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself” (John 12:32):
Deus, qui ad unigenitum Filium tuum exaltatum a terra omnia trahere disposuisti: perfice propitius; ut, meritis et exemplo seraphici Confessoris tui Iosephi, supra terrenas omnes cupiditates elevati, ad eum pervenire mereamur.
“O God, who didst ordain to draw all things unto Thine only-begotten Son, lifted up from the earth: mercifully grant that, by the merits and example of Thy seraphic Confessor Joseph, being raised above all earthly desires, we may be worthy to come unto Him.”
The Church does not ask that we should fly. She asks that we should be raised above all earthly desires. That is the interior levitation of which his bodily flights were only the outward sign, and it is offered to everyone.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That charity, not gifts, is the measure of a soul. He had the most spectacular gratiae gratis datae of his century, and he begged God to take them away. What made him a saint was not that he rose into the air but that he was humble, obedient, chaste, poor, and patient for sixty years, most of them under contempt or confinement. The man who envies his flights has missed the point of them.
That God is not impeded by our incapacity. The world, and more than one religious house, judged Joseph useless. God did not ask him to become clever; He asked him to become holy, and supplied what was lacking. Those who are slow, unlettered, awkward, or of no account in the eyes of others have in him a patron who was all of these, and whose incapacity was the very door by which God came in.
That obedience is the test of the mystic. Every true mystic in the Church’s history has submitted his experiences to authority, and every false one has set them against it. Joseph was examined by the Inquisition, hidden away by the Holy Office, cut off from his friends and his Order for years, and he never once appealed to his raptures against his superiors. A single word under obedience brought him down from the air. That word is the proof of everything else.
Practice
Examine. What do I secretly admire in holiness — the visible, the remarkable, the admired — and what do I neglect in myself: the plain charity, the unseen obedience, the humble duty? Would I rather be thought spiritual or be good?
Do. Take one task this week that no one will notice and that you are not good at, and do it as carefully as you can, for God. Joseph kept the mule before he kept the altar.
Pray. The Collect of the day, given above; or this short aspiration, in the spirit of his devotion: Monstra te esse Matrem — “Show thyself a Mother.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, dwelling on the Ascension, where the Son is exaltatus a terra, and on the Assumption of Our Lady, to whom he owed his healing and his vocation.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path treats grace in its divisions — sanctifying grace, actual grace, and the charismatic graces gratis datae — and why the Church judges holiness by the first and not the last. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up mental prayer and the teaching of St. John of the Cross on detachment from extraordinary favours. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the Franciscan mystics and with those who, like Joseph, were hidden from the world by the very Church that would afterward glorify them.
Sancte Ioseph a Cupertino, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Missale Romanum (1962), Mass Dilectio Dei for 18 September; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Joseph of Cupertino”; Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints*, 18 September; Angelo Pastrovicchi, OFM Conv.,* Life of St. Joseph of Copertino (1753), drawn from the acts of the process; Benedict XIV, De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 38. Episodes of the saint’s childhood and early ecstasies follow the traditional Franciscan accounts and are presented as such.