Flying off the calendar

So why is St Joseph of Cupertino not in the General Calendar any more? Here is the text from the commentary on the Calendarium Romanum Generale of 1969 which was drawn up by the Council for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy:

Memoria S. Iosephi de Cupertino (d. Auximi, anno 1693), anno 1769 in Calendario romano ascripta, Calendariis particularibus relinquitur, quia non agitur de Sancto "momentum universale revera prae se ferente".

The memoria of St Joseph of Cupertino (d. at Osimo 1693), added to the roman Calendar in 1769, is left to particular Calendars because it is not a matter of a Saint "of truly universal importance".

The last quotation is from Sacrosanctum Concilium n.111. The context is given by a fuller quotation:

Lest the feasts of the saints should take precedence over the feasts which commemorate the very mysteries of salvation, many of them should be left to be celebrated by a particular Church or nation or family of religious; only those should be extended to the universal Church which commemorate saints who are truly of universal importance.

Sacrosanctum Concilium is concerned that feasts of saints should not blot out feasts commemorating the mysteries of salvation; but in the General calendar, today is now a feria for which the orations are taken from the Sunday "of the year" which would have been celebrated had the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross not occurred. It seems that some other consideration was at work. It cannot be to preserve the celebration of the "mystery of salvation" through the readings of the new Lectionary since those are normally used anyway on a simple memorial of a saint.

One principle given in the Commentary on the Renewed Liturgical Year is that they wished to achieve a certain chronological and geographical equilibrium, including saints from every century and every continent and not allowing saints from Italy and France to be too numerous. (None of which has the slightest mandate from the Fathers of Vatican II.) Presumably that principle was combined with the judgement that St Joseph of Cupertino is not a saint of truly universal importance in the decision to drop him from the calendar.

Devotees of particular saints will argue until the cows come home about their saint being of universal significance, of course, and someone has to make a judgement. Nevertheless, in the heady days of the late 1960s, I wonder whether another factor was a distaste for the extraordinary manifestations of grace in the life of the flying Franciscan.