The Patron Saint of the Internet?

Peggy Noonan has an idea:

St. Isidore of Seville, inventor of the encyclopedia, is said to be the leading contender for the title, but I hope he doesn't get it. The obvious patron saint of the internet is St. Joseph Cupertino. St. Joseph was a great man of the 17th century, and is my second favorite saint.

Many saints were deeply intelligent, and some were geniuses, but St. Joseph Cupertino, God bless him, was a bit of an idiot. Great saints like Teresa of Avila (my favorite: her common sense had a kind of genius to it) wrote books. St. Joseph Cupertino couldn't even read them. He had a low IQ. He was accepted to the priesthood only when a small miracle occurred: His big final test question dealt with the one part of the Bible he'd managed to fully memorize.

What was so special about St. Joseph? His intellectual dullness left him modest; the fact that no one seems ever to have loved him left him not angry but humble; the violence inflicted on him by others left him sympathetic to their frustrations. He thought nothing of himself, and God knew. He loved God with pure and complete ardor, and God knew that too. And God filled him with what most others could not be filled with because they were so full of themselves, and that was love. God poured so much love into St. Joseph that he was lit with it, floated with it. It literally left him airborne.

St. Joseph would pray, and then have visions, and soon he would begin to float. He would come to and find himself in the top of a tree and climb down with great embarrassment. It angered his superiors--who is this idiot to be so filled with love? Smarter people deserved visions! They also resented the fact that the local peasants began to follow him, for they and not the monks and nuns could see something special, the man was a saint. (He was: he'd be sent out to beg for food for the monastery and wind up giving the poor peasants his shoes and cloak instead. One cold winter day he came back naked.) Instead of wearing his shoes, the peasants saved them as relics.

Animals too seemed to understand St. Joseph. They felt the love within him like a mighty vibration. Maybe it was the exact opposite of an earthquake vibration dogs are said to feel. They didn't run from him but to him, and were quiet when they were with him, and put their heads on his knee. Birds would follow him. He'd tell them to shoo but they wouldn't, and he'd laugh. They flew all around his head. He died in obscurity after finally having been assigned never to leave his cell. The best essay on him is in "Saints for Sinners" by Alban Goodier.

Why is St. Joseph Cupertino the obvious patron saint of the Internet? Because he flew through the air, lifted by truth. Because no establishment could keep him down. Because he empowered common people. Because they in fact saw his power before the elites of the time did. And because it could not be an accident that the center of the invention of the Internet, ground zero of Silicon Valley, is Cupertino, Calif., named for the saint centuries ago.

Was God in this? Of course. Does God do such things for no reason? He does not. Has the church recognized St. Joseph Cupertino as patron saint of the Internet? No. But the church was always slow to give him his due. If you want to tell the pope that St. Joseph should be patron saint, you can reach him at john_paul_II@vatican.va.