A reflection for Friday within the Sixteenth Week after Pentecost: S. Iosephi de Cupertino Confessoris, III classis (18 September)
The Introit of today’s Mass is taken from Ecclesiasticus: Dilectio Dei honorabilis sapientia (“The love of God is honourable wisdom,” Ecclus. 1:14). With the Psalm that follows, Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, Domine virtutum! (“How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!”), the Church states at the very door of this Mass what the day is about. It is not about flight, ecstasy, or wonders, though the saint of the day is remembered chiefly for these. It is about love. On the feast of the most famous levitating friar in the history of the Church, she chooses as her Epistle St. Paul’s warning that tongues of angels, prophecy, and faith to move mountains are nothing without charity. The Church knows exactly what she is doing.
I. If I have not charity
The Epistle (1 Cor. 13:1-8) was written to a community intoxicated with spiritual gifts. The Corinthians spoke in tongues, prophesied, and compared their endowments, and they were divided, litigious, and proud. St. Paul answers them by listing the greatest gifts and setting beside each one the same devastating clause: caritatem autem non habeam, “and have not charity.” The man who has the gift without charity becomes “as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” He is “nothing.” His almsgiving and even his martyrdom “profiteth him nothing.”
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this chapter, observes that the Apostle deliberately names the highest gifts, not the lowest. He speaks of tongues of angels, of all mysteries and all knowledge, of faith that removes mountains, of giving the body to be burned, so that no one could suppose that some gift, if only it were great enough, might substitute for love. Charity is not one ornament among the others. It is the thing that gives the others their worth.
Theology has a precise vocabulary for this. St. Thomas distinguishes gratia gratum faciens, the sanctifying grace that unites a man to God, from the gratiae gratis datae: prophecy, miracles, tongues, and the like. God grants the second kind chiefly for the good of others. They can exist in a man who is not holy, and they are inferior in dignity to sanctifying grace, whose fruit and form is charity (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, aa. 1, 5). This is why the Church, in her processes of canonization, has never raised anyone to the altars for his miracles. She canonizes heroic virtue, and chiefly charity. The miracles are God’s signature on a life already judged. They are not the life itself.
St. Paul then turns from what charity is not to what it is. In the Douay rendering:
“Charity is patient, is kind: charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never falleth away.”
St. Gregory the Great, in his Moralia, reads the first two qualities as a pair. Charity is patient because it bears calmly the evils inflicted on it, and kind because it gives back good for evil generously. Most of the list is negative. Charity does not envy, is not puffed up, and does not seek its own. The Apostle defines love largely by what it refuses to do to others. The final clause is the summit: Caritas numquam excidit. Prophecies will be made void, tongues will cease, and knowledge will be destroyed, but charity passes intact into eternity. In heaven there will be no need of faith, which will become sight, and no need of hope, which will be fulfilled. Charity alone crosses over unchanged.
II. The garment at the wedding
The Gospel (Matt. 22:1-14) is the parable of the king who made a marriage for his son. The invited guests refuse: one goes to his farm, another to his merchandise, and some kill the servants. The king then sends his servants into the highways to gather “both bad and good,” and the wedding is filled. But when the king comes in to see the guests, he finds a man “not having on a wedding garment.” The man is struck dumb, bound hand and foot, and cast into the exterior darkness. “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
The Church has paired this Gospel with 1 Corinthians 13 on purpose, and the Fathers explain why. St. Augustine, preaching on this parable (Sermo 90), asks what the wedding garment can be. It cannot be baptism, he reasons, nor the sacraments, nor faith alone, for the bad as well as the good receive these, and the man without the garment was already inside the hall. He had come in. What he lacked was something the wicked cannot have. Augustine then quotes the very Epistle of today’s Mass: if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity. The wedding garment, he concludes, is charity, “from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith” (1 Tim. 1:5).
St. Gregory the Great reaches the same conclusion in his thirty-eighth homily on the Gospels, and asks plainly what we should understand by the wedding garment if not charity. He adds a warning for those already seated in the Church. The feast is the Church on earth, where good and bad sit together. Having entered is not the same as being clothed. A man may be baptized, may confess the faith, may even receive the Sacraments, and still be found at the King’s inspection without the one thing that makes a guest fit for the Son’s wedding. St. Jerome says the garments are the Lord’s precepts fulfilled in works, and St. John Chrysostom speaks of the garment as a life and conduct worthy of the call. The Fathers are not contradicting one another. Charity is the form of all the virtues, and a life of kept commandments is what charity looks like when it is worn.
Notice also who fills the hall. The first invited, the respectable, the busy, and the competent, find reasons to stay away. The king’s servants go out to the crossroads and bring in whoever they find. The wedding of the Son is furnished with people nobody expected.
III. The fool from the highways
St. Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was one of those people.
He was born Giuseppe Desa in a shed at Copertino in Apulia. His father’s debts had cost the family their house, and his mother had little tenderness for him. As a boy he was so absent-minded, so slow, and so constantly caught staring with his mouth open that the town called him Boccaperta, “Gape-mouth.” He failed as an apprentice shoemaker. The Capuchins received him as a lay brother and dismissed him within months because he broke the dishes, forgot his duties, and was judged useless. He later said that being stripped of the habit felt as though his skin were being torn from his body. The Conventual Franciscans near Copertino finally took him in as a stable hand. There, by humility and prayer rather than learning, he was admitted to the novitiate and at last to the priesthood in 1628. The tradition, beloved of every anxious student since, holds that at his examinations the bishop happened to question him only on the few things he knew. For this reason he is invoked by those about to be examined.
Then came the wonders that made him famous. At the Holy Name of Jesus or Mary, at a hymn, at the sight of a sacred image, he would cry out and rise into ecstasy, sometimes lifted from the ground before many witnesses. The Church recorded these events with unusual care. Prospero Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV and the great canonist of the causes of saints, examined the evidence. It was Benedict XIV who beatified him in 1753.
The authorities did not respond by celebrating him. They grew alarmed. Joseph was denounced and brought before the Inquisition at Naples. He was examined and cleared, but thereafter he was hidden. He was moved from Assisi to the remote hermitage of Pietrarubbia, then to Fossombrone, and finally to Osimo. He was kept from crowds and from correspondence, sometimes forbidden to say Mass publicly, and treated for years as a problem to be managed. He accepted every removal without protest. He died at Osimo on this day, 18 September 1663, and was canonized by Clement XIII on 16 July 1767, the same day as St. Joseph Calasanctius. This is a fitting companionship: the Church raised together the teacher of little children and the friar who never stopped being one.
Here the Epistle judges the life, and the life passes the judgment. Had Joseph risen a hundred times into the air and been proud, resentful, or ambitious, he would have been, in the Apostle’s words, nothing. The Church canonized him not because he flew but because charity in him was “patient” under humiliation, “not puffed up” by wonders he could neither control nor explain, and “not ambitious” of any recognition. He “sought not his own” through years of confinement he had done nothing to deserve. He endured all things, and he rejoiced in the truth. The ecstasies were God’s doing. The patience was his cooperation. The first will cease with prophecies and tongues. The second numquam excidit.
He is also the parable’s man from the highways. The respectable institutions of his world had each, in their turn, found him unfit. The King found him clothed.
The Collect of the day draws the two readings together in one petition. It recalls that the Father willed to draw all things to His only-begotten Son lifted up from the earth (cf. John 12:32), and asks that by the merits and example of His seraphic Confessor we may be lifted above all earthly desires and come to Him. The Church does not ask to be lifted bodily. She asks to be lifted above cupiditates, the desires that chain the heart to its own farm and its own merchandise. That is the levitation every Christian is commanded to seek.
IV. A word for practice
The pairing of this Mass carries a quiet danger for devout souls. We can come to the feast, be counted among the guests, keep the fasts, pray the Office, love the old liturgy, and still have neglected the garment. Every gift the Corinthians prized has its modern counterpart: learning, eloquence, zeal for doctrine, a sophisticated piety. The Apostle’s test cuts through all of them. None of these is charity, and none will substitute for it at the King’s inspection.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, examine yourself against the Apostle’s list and not against your devotions. Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 slowly tonight. At each clause, set your own name in place of “charity” (“N. is patient, N. is kind, N. envieth not”) and stop where the sentence becomes false. That clause is your examination for tomorrow.
Second, accept one humiliation in silence. St. Joseph was misjudged, removed, and hidden for the better part of his life, and he did not defend himself. When you are overlooked, corrected unfairly, or treated as the dull one in the room, let it stand without comment and offer it for the person who caused it.
Third, if you have an examination, a trial, or a task beyond your ability before you, ask his intercession. Do it not as a charm against failure but with his own disposition: to do what is set before you and leave the outcome to God.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, or this short act of charity: Deus meus, ex toto corde super omnia te diligo, et proximum meum propter te sicut meipsum. “My God, I love Thee above all things with my whole heart, and my neighbour as myself for love of Thee.”
Suggested devotion: the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, dwelling on the Ascension, where the true Elevation of the Son draws all things upward, and on the Assumption. St. Joseph of Cupertino bore a tender love for Our Lady, whom he called la Mamma mia.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the distinction between sanctifying grace and the charismatic graces gratis datae, and why St. Thomas places charity as the form of all the virtues. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up mystical phenomena as the classical masters understood them, especially St. John of the Cross, who counselled souls never to desire or rest in extraordinary favours, and explains why the Church has always judged such gifts by the virtue of the one who receives them.
Sancte Ioseph de Cupertino, ora pro nobis.