On October 4, 1630, the village of Cupertino, Italy, held a procession on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi. During the procession a young priest named Joseph, who was there to clean up after the animals, suddenly flew into the sky, where he remained hovering over the crowd for nearly a minute.
The animals in the procession—not to mention the villagers watching it—liked to shit themselves at this development. Indeed, many of them did; and when Joseph got his feet back under him, the parade marshall told him to clean up the mess he had caused before returning to the monastery for dinner. He took so long at the task that he missed dinner and breakfast the next morning.
Thus it always was with Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a small village in the Kingdom of Naples. Most of what he touched turned to shit because he was wont to trip over his feet, his dick, his good intentions, and anything else in his path.
Joseph was born in a stable on June 17, 1603, with fewer talents than Ringo Starr—and even less by way of looks if that is possible; but at least, we are given to believe, Ringo was born indoors. People in Cupertino said that Joseph had una faccia come il culo di un asino. As soon as he was able to walk, other children in the village began playing a game called pin the tail on Joseph.
Joseph had only two gifts. One was his acceptance of the fact that he was always going to be the last one chosen for anything. His other gift, frequent ecstatic visions, was often misdiagnosed as attention deficit disorder.
These visions began when Joseph was eight. While in their grip he gaped and stared and dropped whatever he was doing— his books at school, his shoemaker’s tools, the dinner plates in the monastery.
Not surprisingly Joseph was a failure in school, in his apprenticeship, and later in several of the monasteries to which he reluctantly had been admitted, even though he could barely read and ofter misspelled his name. He was sent down from one monastery because he could not learn the difference between brown bread and white.
Finally after a run of good luck involving social promotion and the Franciscans’ commitment to diversity, Joseph was ordained a priest, but his troubles did not stop there. When he went out begging for his brethren, he often returned to the monastery with his sack full, but without a sandal or his girdle or his rosary or sometimes parts of his habit. His friends among the poor had taken them for keepsakes, but Joseph had no clue the items were missing.
When he was told that the monastery could not afford to give him new clothes every day, he asked to be left alone in his cell “to vegetate for that is all I can do.”
Apparently Joseph forgot that request, too, for he continued to get into all kinds of bother. He was transferred from one monastery to another for his own good and for that of the rest of the community. He was even reported to the imperial tribunal of the Inquisition, but he was exonerated.
Finally after getting on the very last nerve of everyone who knew him—save for the poor, who thought of him as their amico stupido—Joseph caught a fever and died when he became disoriented and crashed into a tree while levitating in one of the many apple orchards around Cupertino on September 18, 1663.
FYI: Joseph is the patron saint of astronauts, pilots, co-pilots, flight attendants, air travelers, balloonists, cupertino, California, and the For Dummies book series
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