As a child his boy-comrades used to laugh at him for
his open-mouthed staring habits; they called him "bocca-aperta"
(gape-mouth), and in the frontispiece to Montanari's life of him, which
depicts him as a bearded man of forty or fifty, his mouth is still
agape; he was, moreover, difficult to teach, and Rossi says he profited
very little by his lessons and was of niuna letteratura. As a lad of
seventeen he could not distinguish white bread from brown, and he used
to spill water-cans, break vases and drop plates to such an extent that
the monks of the convent who employed him were obliged, after eight
months' probation, to dismiss him from their service. He was unable to
pass his examination as priest. At the age of twenty-five he was
ordained by the Bishop of Castro, without that formality.
All this points to a certain weak-mindedness or arrested development,
and were this an isolated case one might be inclined to think that the
church had made Saint Joseph an object of veneration on the same
principles as do the Arabs, who elevate idiots, epileptics, and
otherwise deficient creatures to the rank of marabouts, and credit them
with supernatural powers.
But it is not an isolated case. The majority of these southern saints
are distinguished from the vulgar herd by idiosyncrasies to which modern
physicians give singular names such as "gynophobia," "glossolalia" and
"demonomania"; [Footnote:
