The Stigmatists: Their Gifts, Their Revelations, Their Warnings by American Spectator Editor Paul Kengor will be published on September 3, 2024. You can purchase the book here.
The date was September 14, 1224. For the Catholic Church, it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross — the cross of Jesus Christ, whose bleeding wounds made expiation for the sins of the world. On that date, something extraordinary happened to a remarkable man in his early forties named Francesco di Bernardone, who would one day be known worldwide and through the annals of history as Saint Francis of Assisi.
The penitential friar had taken a liking to a retreat spot nestled in the beautiful Umbrian region mountain of La Verna, where he and other Friars Minor would frequently pray. In 1224, Francis hiked to La Verna for a forty-day fast to imitate Christ’s own forty-day fast in the desert. Francis was no stranger to mortification and self-sacrifice, but what happened next would astonish even him.
Suddenly, while in deep prayer and contemplation, Francis experienced an intense pain in both his hands and feet; perforations had materialized in both, and blood poured from the wounds. His hands and feet were pierced, as if by nails. He was stunned, overwhelmed, and shocked.
And yet, despite the relentless pressure into his flesh that left him in constant agonizing, debilitating pain, Francis pressed on, preaching the Word and offering up his sufferings. His already weakened frame grew only weaker; although he was still in his early forties, he felt much older. He would endure the pain for two more years before he died.
Brother Leo, Francis’s closest companion, witnessed the saint’s suffering. Such first-person witness was crucial because the humble Francis refused to write about the phenomenon himself and forbade fellow friars from discussing it. This included those few who touched his subsequent wounds and cared for him during the final years of his life.
Of course, once Francis died, they would no longer keep silent. How could they? Many pilgrims gathered around the friar’s corpse and stared in awe at the visible wounds.
Brother Elias, leader of the Order of Friars Minor, immediately sent a formal letter to the order and to the world describing the spectacular wounds. He issued his encyclical letter on the very day of Francis’s death, October 4, 1226. He wrote jubilantly: “I announce to you a great joy, a miracle of a new kind. One has never heard tell of a similar wonder in the whole world except in the person of the Son of God, Christ our Lord.” As Elias described it, Francis bore “in his body the five wounds which are truly the stigmata of Christ…. In fact, his hands and feet had had something like perforations made by the nails, front and back, that retained scars and showed the blackness of the nails. As to his side, he seemed to be pierced and blood often flowed out.”
Brother Elias did not hesitate to affirm that these markings were of supernatural origin. In life, the humble servant could try to hide the wounds he had received at La Verna, but, in death, it was time for his associates to shout the news from the mountaintops.
Incredible? Certainly. That’s why eyewitness testimony was so significant. To that end, three years later, in 1229, Thomas of Celano produced the first biography of Francis that went into further detail. He likewise affirmed of Francis:
His hands and feet seemed to be pierced by nails, with the heads of the nails appearing in the palms of his hands 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. In the same way the marks of nails were impressed on his feet and projected beyond the rest of the flesh. Moreover, his 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.
That miraculous event occurred eight hundred years ago. That time is so long ago, truly into medieval times, that contemporary readers today will be inclined to doubt it. Less easy to doubt, however, is the experience of another Italian Franciscan some seven hundred years later. His name was also Francesco. Like Saint Francis, he one day would attain worldwide renown.
Padre Pio’s Passion
The thirty-one-year-old Francesco Forgione, better known as Padre Pio, received the stigmata on September 20, 1918, while alone in front of a crucifix in Our Lady of Grace chapel, the church of the Franciscan friars in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Like Francis, the humble Pio felt thoroughly unworthy to share in these sufferings and attempted to conceal them. However, much like Francis, this was a secret plainly impossible to keep. Fellow friars and parishioners began to notice, and word spread to the town, the bishop, Rome, the Vatican, and the pope.
Under the order of obedience, the bandaged Pio spoke about the moment when he received the stigmata. His testimony occurred in a formal deposition at 5 p.m. on June 15, 1921, as part of the Vatican’s official investigation into his wounds. He said this to the Holy See’s official apostolic visitor, who filed this verbatim transcript:
On September 20, 1918, after celebrating the Mass, I stayed in the choir for the due thanksgiving prayer, when suddenly I was overtaken by a powerful trembling, then calm followed, and I saw our Lord in the posture of someone who is on a cross (but it didn’t strike me whether he had the Cross), lamenting the ingratitude of men, especially those consecrated to him and by him most favored. This revealed his suffering and his desire to unite souls with his Passion. He invited me to partake of his sorrows and to meditate on them: At the same time he urged me to work for my brothers’ salvation. I felt then full of compassion for the Lord’s sorrows, and I asked him what I could do. I heard this voice: “I unite you with my Passion.” Once the vision disappeared, I came to, I returned to my senses, and I saw these signs there [Pio shows his stigmata], which were dripping blood. I didn’t have anything [markings] before.
The Lord had chosen an intimate moment when the young friar was alone to bestow His wounds upon him. Father Benedetto, Pio’s superior, had left town for several days for a mission trip. Brother Nicola, who would have been in charge in Benedetto’s absence, was out making his rounds. Students at the friary were outside in the courtyard. In the sanctuary, it was just God and man, alone.
The young Franciscan was, of course, astonished. The markings he had received immediately began to bleed profusely. Pio struggled to drag himself back to his cell; no one saw him, though his fellow brothers were soon alarmed by the sight of a trail of blood leading from the choir through the corridor and, ultimately, to Pio’s closed door. There inside, in pain and weeping with mixed emotions of joy and distress, Pio frantically and futilely nursed his wounds, wrapping them in whatever makeshift bandages he could pull together. He tried to stop the hemorrhaging but only managed to soak the handkerchiefs, which he would find impossible to hide. The friars as well as Pio’s superiors soon saw the bloodied clothing.
Pio begged the Lord to hide his wounds, but that was not God’s plan. The news spread like wildfire. People flocked to tiny San Giovanni Rotondo. Everyone wanted to see the miracle for themselves.
Indeed, by the end of Pio’s life fifty years later, in September 1968, countless souls — pilgrims, parishioners, European visitors, World War II servicemen, friars, outside clergy, high-level Church officials, doctors, psychologists, scientists, believers, skeptics, and atheists — ventured out to see and touch his wounds, which were photographed and documented. There are numerous pictures and videos of the phenomenon, none of which (of course) exist from the time of Saint Francis.
Sure, moderns can easily shrug off Saint Francis’s alleged marks from the thirteenth century, but they can’t do the same for Pio’s from the twentieth century. The evidence of Pio’s wounds remains widely viewable.
‘Transformed Into a Living Crucifix’
What I’m describing here is a miraculous phenomenon known as stigmata. Stigmata are physical marks reflecting and representing a participation in the sacrificial Passion of Jesus Christ at His Crucifixion. The marks are wounds, and they are granted to the rarest victim soul as a spiritual gift. These specially blessed individuals are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sins of others, as their Lord did at Calvary.
“The stigmata is not given to the stigmatic for his or her benefit but for the benefit of others,” writes Deacon Albert E. Graham in his Compendium of the Miraculous. “The stigmatic represents the Crucified Christ to a world continually in need of a loving sacrifice that atones for our sin.” The stigmatic, “transformed into a living crucifix who shares in the Lord’s Passion for the redemption of the world,” becomes a sacrifice unto himself or herself.
From a Christian theological perspective, it is important to emphasize that the phenomenon of stigmatism does not suggest that the stigmatist replaces Christ or imply that His atonement is insufficient for us. Francis and Pio certainly would never say that, nor would any Church-approved stigmatist. The chosen stigmatists are intensely holy souls who are willing to give themselves entirely to Christ to help atone for the sins of the world.
Is the phenomenon difficult to believe? Of course. That’s why miracles are, well, miraculous.
Personally, I always found claims of stigmata fascinating but hard to believe. I was an agnostic for many years; like Thomas the Apostle, I needed to see to believe. As Thomas said to the other disciples after Christ’s crucifixion, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:24).
That was me, too.
And yet, over the years, I have seen photos of various stigmatists and read at length about stigmatic saints, including those from the twentieth century who were thoroughly scrutinized by medical authorities. I eventually compiled so much material that I felt I had to write a book about stigmatists.
It is widely said that Saint Francis of Assisi was the first stigmatist. However, some have argued, not unjustifiably, that Saint Paul might have been the first, many centuries earlier, in the first century AD. Note Paul’s words in Galatians 6:17: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”
We do not know for certain if Paul was referring to what we today call stigmata. It is possible that he was speaking more figuratively, asserting that he suffered as Christ did. As Paul made clear elsewhere in the Scriptures, he endured a multitude of hardships: he was flogged, imprisoned, stoned, left adrift at sea, beaten three times with rods, shipwrecked three times, lashed five times, forced to go without food and water and sleep, and still more (2 Corinthians 11:23–27). Paul in his Epistle to the Romans urged his fellow Christians to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice to God. He certainly did the same — perhaps to the point of stigmatic sacrifice.
Throughout the centuries, countless stigmatists have continued to follow in the footsteps of Francis, such as three well-known stigmatists born in the fourteenth century: Saints Catherine of Siena, Rita of Cascia, and Frances of Rome. All three of those women became major figures in the Church. Then, to cite just a few examples spanning the coming centuries, there were Blessed Lucy of Narni, born in the fifteenth century; Saint Catherine Dei Ricci, born in the sixteenth century; Saint Veronica Giuliani, born in the seventeenth century; and Blesseds Anna Maria Taigi and Anne Catherine Emmerich, both born in the eighteenth century. They were followed by four prominent stigmatists born in the nineteenth century: Saint Gemma Galgani, Saint Padre Pio, Blessed Elena Aiello, and Therese Neumann. In my book, I focus on a handful of stigmatists who each receive individual chapters: Francis, Catherine of Siena, Gemma Galgani, Padre Pio, Elena Aiello, Therese Neumann, and Saint Faustina Kowalska. Of these, Galgani, Pio, Aiello, Neumann, and Faustina all died in the twentieth century. Faustina, the so-called Divine Mercy messenger, was the first canonized saint of the new millennium, sainted by her fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II.
Importantly, these names represent only a fraction of the men and women reported to have borne the wounds of Christ. The actual list is far more extensive and numbers in the hundreds. So, how many stigmatists have there been?
One notable work on the subject is a 1989 book by Michael Freze titled They Bore the Wounds of Christ, which was published by Our Sunday Visitor. Freze’s work is valuable and inspiring, and, similarly to my own study, he struggled to find reliable, up-to-date estimates on stigmatists. There is no authority, other than perhaps the Vatican, that keeps a running tab of alleged or even Church-approved stigmatists. Freze quotes the renowned Parisian scholar, Dr. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, who achieved groundbreaking research on the subject a century earlier. In his monumental two-volume work La stigmatisation, Imbert-Gourbeyre reported that there have been 321 authentic stigmatists in Church history. But, alas, that work was published back in 1894. It is long outdated. As Freze acknowledges, since that time, “numerous others” have borne the marks of Christ.
In fact, there have been so many since that Freze suggests the twentieth century might rightly be called the “era of the stigmatist.” Freze notes more than two dozen reputable cases of stigmatism that were reported and investigated in that century. The rising number of cases does make one wonder why there are seemingly more stigmatists than ever before. Some might argue that we simply know of more cases today because of the mass media, but the reality is quite the opposite. The vast majority of these individuals receive little to no media attention — and, when they do, they are often subject to ridicule.
Quickly noticeable when examining lists of stigmatists is the predominance of women, who compose nearly 90 percent of the cases. In addition, a significant majority, around 70 percent, hail from Italy. And nearly all have been Catholic.
The fact that so many stigmatists have been women is intriguing. It also seems odd that the first stigmatist, whether it was Saint Paul or Saint Francis, was male, and that the most famous stigmatist, Padre Pio, was male. Nonetheless, Imbert-Gourbeyre calculated that of his 321 authentic stigmatists, 280 were female. Why so many women? Fr. Ulrich Veh, a German Franciscan-Capuchin who was the vice postulator for the cause for beatification for stigmatist Therese Neumann, offered one explanation. “Women have been called to love in a more sensitive way than most men,” said Veh. “They seem to be able to suffer more at the same time they love.”
As for why more stigmatists have been Catholic than Protestant, that doesn’t seem to be a great mystery. Modern evangelicals puzzle over questions such as: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” (I’m a former evangelical myself.) Catholics, however, fully understand that bad things happen to good people all the time, from the Old Testament’s Job to Christ Himself. Jesus told His followers that if they truly want to follow Him, they need to pick up their cross. Look at the sufferings captured in Catholic art. Look at the Pietà. Suffering is captured in Catholics’ omnipresent portrayals of Christ’s bleeding, beaten body nailed to the crucifixes displayed in their parishes and homes. Many Protestants criticize Catholics for having Christ’s corpus on their crosses, as Protestants instead prefer an empty cross that symbolizes Christ’s glorious resurrection.
Catholics uniquely embrace the Christ of the cross.
Compared to Protestants, Catholics are plainly more willing to accept suffering, fast, honor Lenten sacrifices, and even undergo mortification. When they suffer, they often willingly “offer it up” — meaning they willingly present their suffering to their Savior for a heavenly purpose.
In fact, in many cases of Catholic stigmatists, they begged Christ to permit them to join in His suffering. That is not something commonly heard among evangelical Protestants, especially those who adhere to the “health-and-wealth” gospel.
Stigmatists Today
That brings us back to the central question: How many stigmatists have there been throughout history? Indeed, how many such victim souls — living crucifixes — exist today?
Freze’s research was published in 1989, and Imbert-Gourbeyre’s dates back to 1894. More recent research has been conducted by the Ruusbroec Institute of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, which specializes in academic research on religion and mystical spirituality. Even this data is outdated, however. The institute has compiled a database that lists stigmatists from the period of 1734 to 1934 and estimates just over 200 legitimate cases from that period.
A very contemporary source is Deacon Graham, author of the 2013 volume Compendium of the Miraculous, which I mentioned earlier. Graham shared his research on stigmatists with me and my publisher, TAN Books.
Regarding twentieth-century stigmatists, Graham identified eighty-nine in total. Among them, eighty-two were women and only seven were men. All but two were Catholic.
As for stigmatists currently living or who lived into the twenty-first century, Graham identified forty-five individuals as of 2021. Once again, most of these individuals were Catholic and female. Quite different, however, was the diminished representation of stigmatists from France, Germany, and Spain. This seems to be a fitting reflection of the aggressive secularization in those countries today. More prominently represented than in previous centuries were stigmatists from South America, Africa, India, the United States, Syria, and South Korea.
In other words, stigmatists are now more widespread, reflective of the truly universal nature of the Church. I discuss in my book several cases of claimed living stigmatists, some of them controversial, such as Luz de Maríade Bonilla and Gisella Cardia. I also look closely at Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, the Our Lady of Akita seer, who is still living in Japan.
In all, when looking at the data, the list of known stigmatists since the time of Saint Francis of Assisi seems to run in the range of four to five hundred, and it is still growing today.
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With all of this said, do we have more to learn from these stigmatists? Specifically, have they left messages that speak to us today?
Yes, absolutely, and that may be the most significant part. What really strikes me about so many of these individuals is that they were (and are) not only stigmatists but also visionaries. It is quite intriguing, revealing, and, I would venture to say, no coincidence — and, above all, something not to be ignored — that almost all Church-approved stigmatists have been just that: visionaries.
My study gives special attention to Church-approved stigmatists — especially those declared blessed and saints — and their visions, revelations, messages, and warnings. In some cases, the prophetic warnings dramatically relate to the end times and the Second Coming of Christ. The messages of Saint Faustina, for instance — that first saint of our new millennium — are downright apocalyptic. She speaks of the end times that may well be upon us.
Yes, that’s a very dramatic statement. Take it or leave it. Or, maybe better put, wait and see.
The sobering reality is that many stigmatists have issued dire prophetic warnings that they claimed were given to them by Christ Himself, or His Blessed Mother, regarding a final-days fire from the sky that will chastise man for his sins, purify the earth once again, and initiate the Second Coming. And, as I see it, one might rightly interpret the mark of the stigmata as a heavenly affirmation of these saints’ authenticity, in turn adding credibility to their expressed visions. Personally, I’m inclined to take very seriously the words of warning from a saintly man or woman who visibly bears the wounds of Christ. That person has my attention. How about yours?
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