On this day the calendar keeps the feast of Joseph of Cupertino, the Conventual Franciscan friar who died in 1663. The Franciscan accounts are unusually candid about him: he was, by the kindest telling, not a strong student. He struggled at his books, he struggled at his examinations, and the committees of his day did what committees do, which is meet again about it.
The story his order preserved is that when he came to be examined for ordination, the examiner happened to ask him on the one Gospel passage he knew thoroughly, and he answered it well, and was passed. Whether that was providence or an examiner's mercy or simply the luck that visits the well-prepared once in a lifetime, the tradition has never quite settled, and I am not going to settle it either.
He is remembered as well for reported levitations and ecstasies, which is how he later came to be named a patron of air travellers alongside pilots and astronauts. But the letters still arrive, and they are mostly from students: the night before a viva, the morning of a paper, a small note to the friar who was famously no good at exams and got through anyway. Three and a half centuries on, that is a tender sort of company to keep. The article is linked below.
Miriam, the tradition even names the verse: the woman in the crowd blessing the womb that bore him, from Luke — "Beata viscera", which is how it travels in Latin. It reached most readers through the printed lives compiled around his canonisation in the following century, so the shape of the story is an editor's as much as a friar's.
Miriam, I love that he ended up in flight bags. Astronauts orbit at roughly eight kilometres a second and still carry small tokens up with them, and a patron who was famously bad at exams and got through anyway seems a very fair one to take along.