Old Calabria

e flew. Being a monk, these feats of his were naturally confined to convents a

says Father Rossi whom I follow throughout, are on record in the depositions which w

He suddenly flew towards the altar in a straight line, leaving untouched all the ornaments of that structur

anot

ture for the space of half an hour. A marvellous thing it was to see the branc

have tempted the inmates of the convent to exaggerate his rare gifts. Nothing of the kind. He performed flights not only in Copertino, but in various large towns of Italy, such as

passing through Assisi in the year 1645, the custodian of the convent commanded Jo

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and raised his eyes to a statue . . . situated above the altar, when he threw himself into a flight in order to embrace its feet at a distance of twelve paces, passing over the heads of all the congregation; the

e to win credence, the foll

(of the Franciscan Order) to kiss the feet of the High Pontiff, Urban the Eighth; in which act, while contemplating Jesus Christ in the person of His Vicar, he was ecstatically raised in air, and thu

that he made all the cells of the dormitory tremble, so that the monks, issuing thence in consternation, cried, 'An earthquake! An earthquake!'" Here, too, he cast a young sheep into the air, and took flight after it to the height of the trees,

ook a passenger, if such a t

onvent, and "seizing him by the hand, he raised him from the ground by supernatural force, and with jubilant raptur

Assisi is still mor

ying M

ther after him by his hair, carrying him in this fashion for a short while through the air, to the intensest admiration of the spectators." The patient, whose name w

hildlike nature of the pure in heart. "La Mamma mia"--thus he would speak, in playful-saintly fashion, of the Mother of God--"la Mamma mia is capricious. When I bring Her flowers, She tells me She does not want them; when I bring Her candles

ng blows and jangling chains. "We were only having a little game," he would then say. This is refreshingly boyish. He once induced a flock of sheep to enter the chapel, and while he r

ness! But to go into this question of the relative hilarity and moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for aught I know it may, at bottom,

s, caused the lame to walk and the blind to see--all of which are duly attested by eye-witnesses on oath. Though "illiterate," h

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yed the company of two guardian angels, which were visible not only to himself but to other people. And, like all to

ntanari's life of him, which depicts him as a bearded man of forty or fifty, his mouth is still agape; he was, moreover, difficult to teach, and Rossi says he profited very little by his lessons and was of niuna letteratura. As a lad of seventeen he could not distinguish white bread from brown, and he used to spill wat

to think that the church had made Saint Joseph an object of veneration on the same principles as do the Arabs, who elevat

names such as "gynophobia," "glossolalia" and "demonomania" *; even the founder of the flying monk's order, the great Francis of Assisi, has been accused of some stra

his shirt, and exposed himself thus to a crucifix, exclaiming, "Here I am, Lord, deprived of everythin

dau calls Echolalie are to be f

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a pathetic scene was witnessed on his death-bed when he was heard to mutter: "L'asinelio begins to climb the mountain; l'asi

nection, that Saint Joseph of

incidence. For the divine Saint Fra

er of these holy me

ther individual initiative. And one marvels to think into what exotic beauties these southern saints would have blossomed, had they been at liberty, like those Greeks, freely to indulge their versatile genius--had they not been bound to the wheels of inexorable precedent. If the flying monk, for example, were an ordinary mo

Tuscany, the Duke of Bouillon, Isabella of Austria, the Infanta Maria of Savoy and the Duke of Brunswick, who, during a visit to various courts of Europe in 1649, purposely went to Assisi to see him, and was there converted from the

him up in the convent of Osimo, in close confinement, in order that his aerial voyages "should not be dist

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le time previous to that event, but managed to take

sufficiently attested by the fact that ninety years were allowed to elapse ere Joseph of Copertino was solemnly received into the number of the Blessed. This occurred in 1753; and though the date may have been acciden