St. Joseph of Cupertino

Who they were

Joseph was born in a shed in southern Italy, an awkward, absent-minded boy nicknamed "the Gaper," so slow at studies and so useless at practical work that a Franciscan house dismissed him from even tending the mules. Readmitted as a servant, he was eventually allowed to study for the priesthood despite barely being able to read. The exam stories are why students love him: for one examination he had managed to learn a single Gospel passage, and the examiner opened the book to exactly that passage; at the final hurdle, the first candidates performed so well the examiner passed the rest unquestioned, Joseph among them. Ordained, he became famous for something else entirely: reported levitations during Mass and prayer, dozens of them, witnessed by crowds, examined by the Inquisition, and so disruptive that his superiors moved him from friary to friary and barred him from choir. He bore the isolation without complaint and died at sixty. The levitation accounts are unusually well-attested for their kind and still argued about; the page can say both things.

Why people turn to St. Joseph of Cupertino

Every student who has ever prayed to be asked the one thing they know. And pilots, half-seriously and then seriously, took the flying friar as their own; the patronage is formally recognized.

How to ask their intercession

The night before the exam is allowed, but he was a years-of-struggle student, not a lucky one, ask his prayers at the start of the course too. ---