Baroque Italy (17th century)
Feast: September 18
He failed nearly every exam, was dismissed from one religious order, and then started floating off the ground during Mass — which caused its own set of problems.
Joseph Desa was, by any normal measure, a disaster. As a boy in southern Italy, he was absent-minded, clumsy, and had a terrible temper. The Franciscan Conventuals rejected him. The Capuchins took him in, then dismissed him after eight months because he kept dropping dishes and forgetting where he was going. The Conventuals finally accepted him as a stable hand, and he slowly worked his way to ordination — passing his final exam only because the examiner happened to ask the one passage of Scripture he actually knew. Then things got strange. During Mass, Joseph would enter ecstatic states and rise off the floor. Not once — over seventy times, witnessed by crowds, including the Spanish ambassador and Pope Urban VIII. Church officials didn't know what to do with him. The Inquisition investigated him, cleared him, and then essentially quarantined him — moving him from friary to friary for the last thirty-five years of his life to keep crowds away. He obeyed without protest. Students pray to him before exams not because he was smart, but because he is living proof that God uses what the world discards.