Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Saint Joseph of Cupertino was born in 1603 in that town.
If you imagine Italy as being like a booth and Cupertino as in the heel, and Joseph was the kind of boy that gets walked all over.
His father was a wheelwright who made a good living, so the family should have had a comfortable life, but he had perhaps one flaw, which was that he was so soft-hearted that he could easily be talked into guaranteeing other people's debts.
When they failed to pay, the police came looking for him to put him into a debtor's prison if he couldn't pay the debt.
When Joseph was born, the house had been seized to pay the debts, and the saint was born in a stable where his mother was hiding.
That's how, like Jesus, he was born in a stable.
He was the last of six children and was baptized Joseph Mary.
She was a firm disciplinarian who thought it safer to punish more rather than too much, rather than too little, lest the children be spoiled.
He was a temperamental but pious child and often spent time in the Church of St. Francis.
There he would spend long hours with his mouth open and send amazement at God with his arms wide open in the form of a cross.
The children made fun of him for this.
They and adults thought that he had a learning disability, but they didn't put it as politely as that.
It was something of an embarrassment to his family.
He learned little in school because he was always distracted or forgetting.
His school days ended when he was about nine because he developed open sores on his body that became infected.
The medicine of the time only made things worse, and he was bedridden for five years.
Finally, despairing of all human remedies, his mother borrowed a horse, loaded him on it, and took him to a shrine that was about nine miles away at Galatina.
Their faith obtained a miracle.
Joseph got up completely healed and wanted to walk all the way back, using a staff to support himself since he hadn't walked in years.
He was now fifteen.
He was too old to be sent back to school, but he had to find some way to support himself in life, so he was apprenticed to a cobbler so that he could learn a trade.
He never learned how to make or fix a shoe, but the cobbler let him stay because he felt sorry for him.
He spent a lot of time in churches, both by natural inclination and to avoid the company of people who would make fun of him.
His mother thought that the right place for her son was in a friary.
Her brother was a highly respected Conventual Franciscan.
He'd been a missionary in Germany.
He was a famous preacher, provincial minister of the order.
So she got Joseph to go see him at the Grottella.
The Grottella was a neglected shrine of Our Lady, two miles from Cupertino, that the conventuals were restoring.
Joseph's uncle considered the case.
Since his nephew was illiterate, he couldn't become a priest, and his incapacity to learn a trade made it very questionable whether he could be a religious brother either.
So he turned him down.
Then Joseph asked the Capuchins, and they accepted him.
They tried to train him as a religious brother, but there was the same problem.
He wouldn't pay attention long enough to learn how to cook or garden or do anything else, and he kept breaking things.
And then he also got sick. He got another infection.
So they sent him home.
Joseph was so sad about losing the Franciscan habit that he later said it was as if they had torn the skin off his body when they took the habit off him.
On his way back to Cupertino, he learned that his father had died.
So if it was to stay in Cupertino, the police would put him in debtor's prison since he was the heir.
His mother went to the Grottella to ask Joseph's uncles to take him into the friar, at least to give him refuge from the authorities, but they said no.
Joseph went there himself and asked to be taken in, at least as an oblate, if he couldn't be a friar.
But they refused that as well.
The Holy See had established that one had to be 22 to become an oblate.
So in the end, the friar sacristan took pity on him and led him up to a cubbyhole in the dome where he could hide.
He spent the better part of six months there, after which the sacristan managed to convince the other friars to let Joseph at least be a servant and to clothe him with the habit of a tertiary.
He could take care of the friar's mule.
The habit would give him immunity from the authorities because there was this division between people who were under the authority of the church and people who were under the civil authorities.
So being a tertiary put him under the authority of the church, at least enough to be free from the danger of being thrown into prison.
Slowly, the Franciscans began to realize that that dim-witted lad living in the stable had an extraordinary spiritual life.
He was very humble and had profound insights about God.
He was also cheerful, always cheerful, never complained, and he was happy to sleep on a straw mattress with a rock for a pillow.
He did harsh penances and he was very devoted to Our Lady.
He had also started studying on his own, though with poor results.
With the support of his uncles, he became a friar and began learning at least the minimum to become a priest.
They began to realize why he was always getting distracted or falling on his knees in the most inappropriate places.
St. Joseph was receiving extraordinary graces from God that showed him how God acts in all things or how everyday objects speak to us of God.
Then came the episodes that made him the patron saint of students.
He had to be ordained a deacon and then a priest, but bishops can't just ordain anyone.
They need to examine the candidates first to make sure that they're worthy.
For the diaconate, he had to explain a passage of Scripture chosen by the bishop, but there were hardly any that he knew how to explain.
As providence would have it, the bishop chose the passage from Luke that begins, Blessed is the womb that bore you.
Well, that was the one passage that he really knew how to explain well, and so he was ordained a deacon.
The next hurdle was the examination for the priesthood.
This would be with a different bishop than the one who had ordained him a deacon, a bishop known for having high standards.
There was a whole group of conventual Franciscans who were to be ordained, and the bishop began examining them.
He found the first ones very well prepared, and then he was interrupted by a courier who gave him some important news.
Because of this, he wanted to get on with the ordination to finish it, and since it seemed to him a waste of time to examine candidates who were so well prepared, he admitted the rest of them, including St. Joseph, to the ordination without any examination.
St. Joseph of Cupertino thus became a priest, and went back to the Grottella to be its sacristan.
He continued studying, especially to learn about cases that he would have to resolve in confession.
But though he was a priest, he was an unusual sort of priest, especially for the conventuals, which were such an intellectual order.
On the one hand, he knew that he was useless for preaching and other such duties, and so he gladly did the humblest tasks in the priory.
On the other, when he celebrated Mass, strange things happened.
He would levitate or let out a cry and go flying backwards over the heads of the congregation.
Being a priest had intensified his spiritual life, and instead of just being distracted, he would fall into ecstasy and lie motionless for a long time.
When he would come to, he would apologize for his bit of giddiness.
When he would fly like a bird from the door of the church to the altar, or from the ground floor to the window of his cell, or from the ground onto a tree branch that was obviously too thin to hold his weight.
In churches and in houses, he would fly up to embrace statues, or kiss paintings on the wall, or crucifix.
And he didn't always fly alone.
If he was holding someone when he went into ecstasy, they would go together.
But unfortunately, the poor passenger was not in ecstasy and was often terrified that he would fall.
He could sense sin as if it was something physical, like a stench or filth, or he could even see it on a man's face.
People who needed to confess seemed to him as though they had dirt on their faces, and so he would tell them to go wash their faces.
Those who lived in sin had filthy black faces.
They didn't understand when he said to them that they had to go wash their faces, but another friar would explain that Father Joseph was telling them to confess.
When they came back, he would congratulate them on how good they looked now.
Of course, he worked miracles as well, healing pilgrims who came to ask his help, and crediting Our Lady with the miracles.
Naturally, he attracted pilgrims, many of whom were drawn more by curiosity to him rather than by devotion to visit Our Lady, so he would send them to see Her instead.
Every Saturday, farmers and shepherds would gather at the shrine for the Litany of Loretto, led by Saint Joseph.
Once no one showed up, so Saint Joseph called out, Come, sheep of God, to venerate the Mother of your God.
The sheep left to the shepherds and came.
When the shepherds followed them into the church, they found the litany already in progress, with the sheep responding, Baa, at every invocation.
The Father Provincial thought that it would be a good idea to send this Holy Friar on a tour of all the friaries of Apulia, that region of southern Italy, or southeast Italy, for the edification of the friars and the faithful.
He went around like a new Messiah, drawing crowds and working miracles.
But the Inquisitor of Naples thought that Christendom didn't need a new Messiah and called Saint Joseph before his tribunal.
When he interrogated him, he found nothing blameworthy.
This was not a proud friar full of delusions of being a Messiah, but a humble friar of right doctrine.
Still, he sent him to Rome to be assigned to some solitary friary where he would no longer attract crowds.
When the Minister General, the General Superior of the Conventuals, met him, he conceived such veneration of him that he decided to present him to Pope Urban VIII.
In the presence of the Pope, the saint went into ecstasy and remained with his body suspended in the air until he was ordered to return to himself.
Then, Father Joseph, confused and humiliated, asked the Pope's forgiveness for having fallen asleep in his presence.
He was assigned to Assisi.
As soon as he entered the basilica there, having seen an image of the Blessed Virgin with the child in her arms, he gave out a cry and then flew to kiss the image, persuaded that the Mama of the Grotella had preceded him.
After a second such flight, he asked those present to pardon him for his defects of nature.
His Mass, because of the ecstasies, would last two hours.
When he said, Lord, I am not worthy befor communion, he would go flying to the back of the church and lie there trembling like a leaf.
Fearing trouble from the Inquisition, the Superior had a suite of rooms built for Saint Joseph with a private chapel so that he could say Mass without anyone being present.
Noblemen, however, managed to get permission to visit him.
To hide him better, he was moved to a remote Capuchin priory in the mountains.
No one was to say that he was there under pain of excommunication.
It was hard for him to be separated from his confreres.
The Capuchins asked him if he would like to join them, but he knew that wasn't his vocation.
Finally, after four years, Pope Alexander VII ordered that he return to a priory of the conventuals, and specifically the one at Asimo, a few miles from Loreto.
He was not allowed any contact with outsiders there.
Only at night could he descend from the apartment that had been built for him and pray in the church.
He died at Asimo in 1663.
As he had prophesied, this happened on the day when he was no longer able to receive communion.
After his death, the surgeons opened his chest, and his heart was examined.
It looked as if it had been roasted.
It was the fire of divine love that had so burned in his heart.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.