Mirrors of Christ

Padre Pio was far from the only saint to have borne stigmata, writes Greg Daly

“God,” Pope Francis reminds us in Amoris Laetitia, “allows parents to choose the name by which he himself will call their child for all eternity.”

For all that we think of St Pio of Pietrelcina by his religious name of Pio or Pius, it’s perhaps more important that he was baptised as Francesco, named after Italy’s patron saint, St Francis of Assisi and the first person we know of to have borne the stigmata – the marks of Christ’s passion.

It’s a curious coincidence that the most famous Christian in living memory to have born the marks of Christ’s passion bore the same name of the first Christian to have done so. Stigmata seem unheard of until the 13th Century, when St Francis reportedly received them during a vision in September 1224 while fasting on Mount La Verna.

“It would seem that St Francis beheld the heavens above him occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in his popular 1923 biography of the saint, detailing in passionate terms Francis’ experience of receiving the stigmata.

Unthinkable 
power

“St Francis saw above him, filling the whole heavens, some vast immemorial unthinkable power, ancient like the Ancient of Days, whose calm men had conceived under the form of winged bulls or monstrous cherubim, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with a sword of grief and pity; it may be inferred that some sort of mounting agony accompanied the ecstasy,” wrote Chesterton.

“Finally after some fashion the apocalypse faded from the sky and the agony within subsided; and silence and the natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines,” he continued in a chapter aptly entitled ‘The Mirror of Christ’. “The head of the solitary sank, amid all that relaxation and quiet in which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete; and as he stared downwards, he saw the marks of nails in his own hands.”

Thomas of Celano described these marks six years later in the first biography of the saint, written just four years after Francis’ death.

“His wrists and feet seemed to be pierced by nails, with the heads of the nails appearing on his wrists and on the upper sides of his feet, the points appearing on the other side.

“The marks were round on the palm of each hand but elongated on the other side, and small pieces of flesh jutting out from the rest took on the appearance of the nail-ends, bent and driven back,” he wrote.

“In the same way the marks of the nails were impressed on his feet and projected beyond the rest of his flesh,” he continued. “Moreover, the right side had a large wound as if it had been pierced with a spear, and it often bled so that his tunic and trousers were soaked with his sacred blood.”

Since St Francis received the stigmata that autumn morning, hundreds of people have claimed to have miraculously received the stigmata, the term coming from a Greek word meaning ‘mark’, ‘tattoo’, or ‘brand’, as used by St Paul in Galatians 6:17 when he says “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body”.

Many of the stigmatists who followed St Francis were doubtless fraudulent, and one – a 16th-Century Franciscan sister in Spain called Magdalena de la Cruz – admitted at the end of her life that her stigmata had been fake. Tried by the Inquisition, she was sentenced to do penance in her convent for the rest of her life.

Most stigmatics, curiously, have been women, and while male stigmatics include such luminaries as St John of God,  these were outnumbered by roughly seven to one up to the start of the 20th Century. Famous female stigmatics include St Catherine of Siena, St Rita of Cascia, St Catherine de Ricci, Blessed Lucy of Narni, St Veronica Giuliani, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, and St Gemma Galgani.

While many stigmatics were members of religious orders and although Francis himself was an ordained deacon, it’s striking too that stigmatics have tended not to be ordained – indeed, until the 20th Century no priest had ever claimed to have stigmata.

Claims of stigmata have, of course, been met with attempts at natural rather than supernatural explanations.

In the case of St Francis, for example, such theories have included speculation that his wounds were the result of having contracted leprosy, or that he suffered from quartan malaria which can lead to the development of purpura – purple haemorrhages of blood into the skin – which, one Dr Edward Hartung suggested in the 1930s, could have been punctured while the saint was fasting in the mountains.

As for Padre Pio, theories about his wounds ranged from claims that they were straightforwardly fraudulent to ones that they were due to auto-suggestion; other cases of stigmata have been, sceptics have suggested, due to self-mutilation in dissociative mental states.

Against this, of course, supernatural possibilities continue to exist, but even then an obvious question concerns why stigmata – if understood as reflections or expressions of the Passion wounds of Christ – are almost invariably ‘wrong’.

Typically, after all, stigmata appear as wounds in believers’ palms and upon the tops of their feet, perhaps also with a wound in their side – where the Roman soldier pierced Our Lord with his spear to ensure he was dead.

Tradition


However, despite centuries of artistic tradition, it is now known that Roman crucifixions generally entailed nailing through not the palms but the forearms of their victims, with the nail passing between the radius and ulna, near the wrist, and indeed at least sometimes entailed driving nails sideways through the ankle: a heelbone transfixed by a nail, found in Jerusalem’s Ossuary of Yehohanan, now in the Israel Museum, is the sole piece of archaeological evidence for Roman crucifixions.

For some, the obvious answer would be that in cases of auto-suggestion or indeed fraud, of course stigmatics would be marked where they thought Christ’s wounds had been – they had been well taught by many centuries of Christian iconography.

Others, though, might consider that when God speaks he appears to do so in words and images that people understand: when St Bernadette met Our Lady, for example, she did not meet an Aramaic-speaking Palestinian peasant, but someone who spoke her own Occitan dialect, while encountering her the following year in rural Wisconsin the Belgian Adele Brise experienced her as a fair-skinned lady with blonde hair.

The mysteries of God are beyond us, after all, but it is hardly beyond his power to communicate with us in languages – including visual ones – that we can understand.