Joseph of Cupertino, the Flying Friar

Before Joseph could fly, I had to teach him to be laughed at. He was a clumsy child in Cupertino, in the heel of Italy, so absent-minded and slow at his lessons that his own mother could not sell him for apprenticeship — the Capuchins sent him away for incompetence, and the Franciscans nearly did the same, keeping him only as a stable-hand because even that seemed doubtful. They nicknamed him Bocca Aperta, Open-Mouth, for the way he wandered through his days with his jaw slack and his eyes elsewhere. His eyes were elsewhere because I already had him.

I do not choose the sharp and the capable more often than I choose the useless and the overlooked; I choose whoever will let go of themselves completely, and Joseph, having so little to hold onto in the first place, let go almost without a fight. When I finally allowed the friars to ordain him, over the objections of examiners who thought him too dull for the priesthood, I began to do through him what I have done through almost no one else in the recorded history of the Church: I lifted him.

It happened first, by the record, in 1630, and after that for over thirty years it kept happening — during Mass, especially at the elevation of the Host, when he could not always contain what seeing Me in the sacrament did to his body; during processions; while merely hearing a hymn or a bell that turned his thoughts toward heaven. He would cry out and rise from the floor, sometimes drifting to a window or an olive tree and staying there, motionless, for what witnesses timed at minutes at a stretch, until a superior — under obedience, because obedience was the only rope that could pull him back down — commanded him to descend. I want to be honest about what this cost him: his own superiors, frightened of the disruption and the crowds who came just to watch, kept him from public Masses for years, moved him from friary to friary, effectively imprisoned him in obscurity, and the Roman Inquisition itself summoned him to Naples and then to Rome to investigate whether what was happening was of Me or against Me.

I let the investigation happen. I do not fear scrutiny; I only fear counterfeit, and there was no counterfeit here to protect. Pope Urban VIII himself watched Joseph rise from the ground during an audience and reportedly said that if Joseph died before him, he — the Pope — would offer testimony of it himself. A Lutheran duke, Johann Friedrich of Brunswick, came to see the spectacle skeptically, as a curiosity to report on to his own court, and instead left the friary a convert, having seen with his own trained, hostile eyes something his theology had no room for and could not deny.

I did not lift Joseph to entertain the curious. I lifted him because I could not always keep his love for Me inside his body once it had grown that large, and gravity, which I set in place at the world's foundation, is a rule I am permitted to set aside when it serves a greater point: that the God men argue about in universities is the same God who can pick up a slow, unlettered friar in Apulia and hold him in the air until the whole room remembers what worship actually costs. He died in 1663, in enforced seclusion still, largely unknown to the wider world he had astonished in glimpses. I knew him completely. That was always enough for both of us.

The Record

Joseph of Cupertino (born Giuseppe Maria Desa, June 17, 1603, Cupertino, Kingdom of Naples) struggled academically as a child and was rejected by the Capuchins before being accepted as a lay servant by the Conventual Franciscans; he was later ordained a priest in 1628 despite examiners' concerns about his learning. Beginning around 1630, he became known for frequent, publicly witnessed episodes of levitation, often triggered during Mass or prayer, reported by dozens of eyewitnesses over more than three decades, including fellow friars, pilgrims, and dignitaries.

Because the disturbances drew large crowds, Church superiors restricted him from celebrating public Mass, choir, and refectory for years, and the Holy Office (Roman Inquisition) investigated him at Naples (1638) and Rome (1639), ultimately finding no fault but keeping him moved between remote friaries (Assisi, Pietrarubbia, Fossombrone, Osimo) for the rest of his life to limit public attention. Among reported witnesses to his levitations were Pope Urban VIII and Johann Friedrich, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, a Lutheran prince who converted to Catholicism after observing him, according to Franciscan and Vatican process records.

Joseph died on September 18, 1663, in Osimo, Italy. He was beatified on July 22, 1753, by Pope Benedict XIV, and canonized on July 16, 1767, by Pope Clement XIII. His extensive and well-documented case became a reference point in later Church discussions of mystical phenomena. He is the patron saint of aviators, air travelers, students, and those taking examinations. Feast day: September 18.