Who was St. Joseph of Cupertino?
Joseph Desa was born on June 17, 1603, at Cupertino, a village in the heel of Italy that was then in the Kingdom of Naples. His father, a carpenter, died before he was born and left debts; creditors drove his mother from the house, and she gave birth to him in a stable. He was the last of six children. As a boy he was sickly, slow, absent-minded and hot-tempered. At school he had the first of the ecstasies that would mark his whole life, standing open-mouthed before holy pictures, and his classmates called him "Bocca Aperta," open mouth.
At seventeen he asked to join the Conventual Franciscans and was refused for lack of learning. In 1620 the Capuchins took him as a lay brother and sent him away after eight months because his raptures made him useless for work. He walked home. His family did not want him. He ended up at the Franciscan friary of La Grottella near Cupertino, first as a helper who looked after the mule, then, through sheer persistence, as a cleric in 1625. He could barely read. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that what he knew, he knew from prayer rather than from books.
The examinations for ordination are the part of his story that students remember. The shrine at Cupertino says he knew one passage of Scripture well and prepared on that alone, and that when the examiner opened the book he asked about exactly that passage. He was ordained a priest in March 1628; the Encyclopedia says the 28th, the shrine the 18th.
Then the levitations began in earnest. Here is what the sources actually say. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that "frequently he would be raised from his feet and remain suspended in the air," and that a bell, church music, or the name of Jesus or Mary could send him into ecstasy, during which beating and burning did not rouse him; only his superior's voice did. The shrine dates the first public levitation to October 4, 1630, during the procession of St. Francis in Cupertino, when he rose above the crowd. The Conventual Franciscans of California say he was seen to rise from the ground more than seventy times; Franciscan Media says the canonization investigation recorded seventy incidents. The Church weighed these accounts for more than a century before canonizing him. Whether a reader believes them is between the reader and God. What is beyond dispute is what they cost him.
Crowds came. Envious men, the Encyclopedia says, denounced him to the Inquisition, and in 1638 he was summoned to Naples. The judges found no fault in his doctrine, but to put an end to the spectacle they ordered him away from his home region. From 1643 he was kept for fourteen years in seclusion at the Sacro Convento in Assisi, then in remote friaries, and from 1657 at Osimo. For thirty-five years, the Encyclopedia says, he was not allowed to sing in choir, eat in the refectory, walk in processions or say Mass in public. He obeyed. He died at Osimo on September 18, 1663, at sixty. His body is in the church there. Benedict XIV beatified him in 1753, and Clement XIII canonized him on July 16, 1767.
Why Catholics pray to St. Joseph of Cupertino for exams and anxiety
The shrine at Cupertino states that he "was proclaimed protector of students and of those sitting examinations," and also of aviators. It does not say by whom, and no papal document names him patron of anything, so these patronages are traditional. The Conventual Franciscans of California call him patron of students and aviators, and of air travelers, pilots and people with learning disabilities; Franciscan Media adds astronauts.
Students pray to him for an obvious reason: he was a bad student who passed. But the deeper reason is that he knew what it is to be the slow one in the room. He was called stupid by his family and by the friars, and he failed at every job before he found the one thing he could do, which was pray. For anyone sitting at a desk the night before an exam with a mind that will not hold anything, he is the saint who got through anyway.
The anxiety he carries for people is of the same kind. His whole life was out of his control. He could not stop the ecstasies. He could not stop the crowds, or the Inquisition, or the orders that moved him from one locked room to the next. He gave himself up to it and grew, the Conventual Franciscans say, in humility and gentleness. People with anxiety ask him for exactly that: not to be lifted off the ground, but to be able to bear the ground they are on.
How to pray to St. Joseph of Cupertino
His feast is September 18, the day he died. He is not on the General Roman Calendar, so most parishes will not celebrate a Mass for him; in the 2026 calendar for the United States the day is an ordinary weekday. The Franciscans keep his feast, and so does the church at Osimo where his body rests. A novena runs September 9 to 17. Before an exam, students pray to him the night before and the morning of.
Say the prayer below once, then say in your own words what the exam or the interview is and what you are afraid of. Pair it with the work: he prepared his one passage. Pair it with Confession if an old failure is part of the fear, and with Mass, on the morning of the exam if you can.
If anxiety is more than nerves before a test, if it stops you sleeping, eating or leaving the house, prayer goes alongside a doctor or a counselor and does not replace them. Joseph had superiors who, for all their harshness, kept him housed and fed for some forty years. Let someone keep you.