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Their conscientiousness in sifting and weighing the depositions is 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.
Poor Peter of Alcantara was levitated in a less pleasant manner; "he uttered a frightful cry, and shot through the air as if he had been fired from a gun." Peter had a new form of epilepsy the rising, not the falling, sickness. Joseph Copertino, again, floated about to such good effect, that in 1650 Prince John of Brunswick foreswore the Protestant faith.
He performed flights not only in Copertino, but in various large towns of Italy, such as Naples, Rome, and Assisi. And the spectators were by no means an assemblage of ignorant personages, but men whose rank and credibility would have weight in any section of society.
They fly with machines, and think it something quite new and wonderful. And yet it's as old as the hills! There was Iscariot, for example Icarus, I mean " "Pure legend, my good man." "Everything becomes legend, if the gentleman will have the goodness to wait. And here is the biography of " "How much for Joseph of Copertino?" Cost what it may, I said to myself, that volume must be mine.
Joseph of Copertino lived during the time of the Spanish viceroys, and his fame spread not only over all Italy, but to France, Germany and Poland.
A marvellous thing it was to see the branch which sustained him swaying lightly, as though a bird had alighted upon it." But Copertino is a remote little place, already famous in the annals of miraculous occurrences. It can be urged that a kind of enthusiasm for their distinguished brother-monk may have tempted the inmates of the convent to exaggerate his rare gifts. Nothing of the kind.
On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway leading past his convent evokes the memory of a misty heathen poet, likewise native of these favoured regions, a man whose name Joseph of Copertino had assuredly never heard Ennius, of whom I can now recall nothing save that one unforgettable line which begins "O Tite tute Tati tibi "; Ennius, who never so much as tried to fly, but contented himself with singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.
The patient, whose name was Chevalier Baldassarre, discovered, on touching earth again, that he had been cured by this flight of a severe nervous malady which had hitherto afflicted him. . . . Searching in the biography for some other interesting traits of Saint Joseph of Copertino, I find, in marked contrast to his heaven-soaring virtues, a humility of the profoundest kind.
He was a monk, floating before an altar. A companion, near at hand, was portrayed as gazing in rapturous wonder at this feat of levitation. I stepped within and demanded the volume to which this was the frontispiece. The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly dirty hands and face, began to explain. "The Flying Monk, sir, Joseph of Copertino. A mighty saint and conjuror!
Joseph of Copertino specialized in flying; others were conspicuous for their heroism in sitting in hot baths, devouring ordure, tormenting themselves with pins, and so forth. Diodato dell' Assunta per la Beatificazione ed ora ristampata dal postulatore della causa P. Fr. Giuseppe Rostoll in occasione della solenne Santificazione." He resembled other saints in many points. Have you smelt them?
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