Cinema: The Saint Who Could Fly

The Reluctant Saint. Little Giuseppe Desa was a miserable child. He was born in a mean village near Otranto, Italy, in the year 1603. His mother treated him “with great severity,” and the child, sickly and confused, wandered about with dazed eyes and slack lips, understanding little, forgetting even to eat. The villagers called him Boccaperta, The Gaper, and considered him an idiot.

Partly they were right; partly they were wrong. Little Giuseppe grew up to be San Giuseppe of Cupertino, one of the strangest saints in the Roman Catholic calendar.

In this gentle little picture, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Maximilian Schell, the weird and wonderful story of San Giuseppe is humorously but reverently told, and the moviegoer is invited to believe it or not.

At 17, Giuseppe was accepted by the Capuchins as a lay brother, but after eight months they turned him out—he kept dropping stacks of plates, and couldn’t even learn to make a fire. Soon he was taken in by the Conventual Franciscans at Grottella and put to work in the stables.

There a change came over the boy. He felt at home with animals as he never had with people, and he did his work well. Mental work, alas, was out of the question. Poor stupid Giuseppe attained to the priesthood only because his bishop passed him without examination.

For the next five years the young priest fasted and prayed incessantly. But the deeper he sank into religious experience, the less able he was to have any other experience. Often he could not even recognize the people around him. In his fellow monks he saw saints and martyrs; in passing strangers he perceived Apostles. At the mention of God’s name he sank into a swoon of adoration and could not be wakened by blows, by needles stuck into his limbs, by live coals held against his flesh. Soon he was little more than a holy idiot; yet through this simple instrument, like lightning through a kitestring, a mysterious energy was led.

Animals felt it. Witnesses declared that sheep and birds flocked around him when he prayed. Yet it is not because he was loved by animals, nor even because his touch could heal the sick, that Father Giuseppe is principally remembered. It is because he could fly.

Yes, fly. In the air. Like a bird. Anyway, that’s what people said at the time. According to many witnesses, Father Giuseppe flew more than a hundred times. He flew when he had a mystical experience, and sometimes he flew for a considerable distance. Once in an ecstasy he flew about twelve paces over the head of a Spanish grandee. Once he flew for Pope Urban VIII. Several times he flew with a friar in his arms, and once, according to some not unimpeachable sources, he flew about 70 yds., picked up a 36-ft. cross that ten men could not lift, and stood it upright “as if it were a straw.” Naturally enough, the Franciscans were not loath to display their miracle man; naturally enough, other orders were jealous and denounced Father Giuseppe as a would-be Messiah. His last years were spent in close seclusion and continual rapture. “And what is it,” he was once asked, “that souls in rapture see?” He replied: “They feel as though they were taken into a wonderful gallery, shining with never-ending beauty . . .” He died in 1663 and, presumably, ascended into heaven.