Be Weird, Catholics

At least, I don't think I'm guilty of being shy about discussing God's miracles, like St Joseph of Cupertino flying. In fact, on his Feast, I published several accounts of his flying.

From Crisis

By Casey Chalk

God is not afraid of confirming His identity or His teachings through miracles. And yet many of us Catholics remain hesitant to talk about them.

Did you miss it? I almost did. It’s not even a feast day the Church actively celebrates as part of the liturgical calendar. I’m talking, of course, about the feast day of St. Joseph of Cupertino, which technically is on September 18, though, per the USCCB website, it is simply listed as the “Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time.”

Though I’ve been a Catholic for 15 years, I confess the only reason I first learned about St. Joseph of Cupertino was because of the children’s book by Tomie de Paola—The Little Friar Who Flew. It’s an endearing story about an innocent, if somewhat hapless, 17th-century Italian friar named Joseph who starts flying all over the place, much to the consternation of his fellow brothers who are almost more annoyed than amazed by his sudden airborne abilities. 

The odd thing, as Yale scholar Carlos Eire explains in his fascinating recent book They Flew, is that the evidence to support these bizarre aerial miracles is really quite impressive. Beginning in 1630, Joseph began to regularly fly—Eire estimates at least 70 times—in front of large numbers of people and often outdoors where it was more difficult to deceive witnesses by using ropes, wires, or other such contraptions. The levitations became so famous and attracted such large crowds from across Christendom that, in time, Joseph’s frustrated and embarrassed superiors attempted to hide him away from the amassing would-be spectators.

“High clergy and nobility from all corners of Europe went out of their way to visit him and testified that they had beheld his levitations firsthand or begged for the privilege of visiting him, unsuccessfully,” writes Eire. When the Lutheran prince John Frederick of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a patron of the brilliant mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, witnessed St. Joseph’s levitations, he was so stupefied that he decided to convert to Catholicism! 

These levitations were no circus act to impress the crowds. St. Joseph of Cupertino was also widely known for his ability to discern the sins of others, reprimanding sinners and even denying the unrepentant absolution in confession. Repeatedly, his predictions of disasters or illnesses for the unrepentant came true. On one occasion, St. Joseph cautioned a certain Count Cosimo Pinelli that he would go blind if he kept sexually abusing a local girl; in time, the man lost his sight. After the nobleman demonstrated genuine contrition and repentance in the Sacrament of Confession, St. Joseph miraculously healed him. 
What are Catholics supposed to do with stories like St. Joseph of Cupertino, “the little friar who flew”? Should we embarrassingly hide people like him in the ecclesial basement, as we implicitly already do by largely ignoring his feast day on the Church calendar? Or should we venerate him with the same degree of appreciation and celebration we reserve for other saints of his era: St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Rose of Lima, St. Francis de Sales? 

The miracles of St. Joseph of Cupertino occurred at a very contentious period of religious history, when both Protestant and Catholic Europeans believed people were routinely flying through the air—in the 17th century alone there were literally tens of thousands of witch trials across Christian Europe, many of them alleging the accused of being airborne. As Eire explains, Protestants and Catholics in this era didn’t debate whether people were flying, they rather debated the cause of such supernatural activity: Protestants claimed these were demonic in origin, while Catholics proclaimed them divine miracles. As Catholics, it’s reasonable to conjecture that God may have caused such events precisely to affirm the identity of the Church as having divine approbation. Some Protestants, we know, were persuaded.

Moreover, across the history of the Church it would seem that God often uses miraculous events to confirm the divine approval of His messengers and even specific Catholic doctrines. The miracles associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe converted millions of indigenous Mexicans. Since the eighth century, there have been reports of Eucharistic miracles in which consecrated Hosts have bled—and, in more recent years, scientific testing has confirmed that these consecrated Hosts even have blood cells and cardiac tissue. If you have doubts of what transpires in the Sacrifice of the Mass, there’s a miracle for that! The Immaculate Conception, a doctrine not promulgated until 1854, was verified by the visions of St. Bernadette at Lourdes.

Obviously, God is not afraid of confirming His identity or His teachings through miracles. And yet many of us Catholics remain hesitant to talk about them. We prefer to argue in favor of the Real Presence by citing Scripture or the Church Fathers rather than confirmed Eucharistic miracles that happened this century. The same is true of the Marian doctrines, even though the evidence to support Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima is overwhelming.

Many of us, myself included, have been bullied and hoodwinked by modernity. We think that if we talk about the miracles of the Church, those we are seeking to persuade will think us credulous dupes who are just as naive as the conspiracy theorists who obsess over stories about the Illuminati, lizard people, and alien abductions. So we focus on the Bible, history, and logic and hope that will be sufficient to convert Protestants or unbelievers, while maintaining our own reputation and credibility in an increasingly skeptical public square. 

Of course, there’s obviously nothing wrong with using Holy Scripture, Holy Tradition, and historical or scientific evidence to persuade people of the truths of the Catholic Church—two millennia of Church history and magisterial teaching exhorts us to do precisely this. But if we refrain from talking about the miracles of ecclesial history, it is akin to fighting with one hand behind our back. (It might also explain why we don’t have examples of levitating saints today!)

I get it. Stories such as those of St. Joseph of Cupertino are weird. Are we really to believe some Italian monk flew through the air without modern engineering? Well, if you examine the historical evidence—and the fact that the Church has canonized him—yes! God was not ashamed of St. Joseph of Cupertino. Indeed, He was the one responsible for his supernatural gifts. 

Nor is God ashamed of bleeding consecrated Hosts or Marian apparitions. If anything, He expects many people to be converted by precisely such occurrences. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t be afraid to know, love, and share these stories. They are part of our Catholic identity, and they are a means to strengthen our faith and evangelize to the lost. So, Catholics, accept the weird. It may very well save some souls.