Finally she found one, the Dominican Convent of San Vincenzio. She was highly regarded and was appointed to many offices. She received the stigmata in February, The stigmata would appear weekly from Thursday at noon till 4 p.
The stigmata occurred in this way for twelve years. Padre Pio was born in as Francesco Forgione. At the age of 15 he became a Capuchin monk and took the name Pio of Pietrelcina. He became a priest at the age of He is most renowned for being the first and only Catholic priest to ever recieve the stigmata. He bled from his hands feet and sides every day for fifty years. Shortly before his death the wounds and any trace of scar disappeared.
It is said that he lost about a cup of blood every day. The following is from a letter written in from Padre Pio to his spiritual director. It concerns how he received the stigmata. All the internal and external senses and even the very faculties of my soul were immersed in indescribable stillness. Absolute silence surrounded and invaded me. I was suddenly filled with great peace and abandonment which effaced everything else and caused a lull in the turmoil. All this happened in a flash.
While this was taking place, I saw before me a mysterious person similar to the one I had seen on the evening of 5 August. The only difference was that his hands and feet and side were dripping blood. The sight terrified me and what I felt at that moment is indescribable.
I thought I should die and really should have died if the Lord had not intervened and strengthened my heart which was about to burst out of my chest. The vision disappeared and I became aware that my hands, feet and side were dripping blood.
Imagine the agony I experienced and continue to experience almost every day. The heart wound bleeds continually, especially from Thursday evening until Saturday. Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment I feel in my soul. I am afraid I shall bleed to death if the Lord does not hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition. Will Jesus, who is so good, grant me this grace? Will he at least free me from the embarrassment caused by these outward signs?
I will raise my voice and will not stop imploring him until in his mercy he takes away, not the wound or the pain, which is impossible since I wish to be inebriated with pain, but these outward signs which cause me such embarrassment and unbearable humiliation" Letters 1, No.
Notice that at the end of the letter Padre Pio notes that he does not wish to be relieved of the pain. This is reflective of the denial of the body through pain, suffering, starvation and so on that is practiced by a select number of believers. These believers hold that, through the denial of the body they will transcend the body and live only on a spiritual plane. Padre Pio's life was marked by suffering, both by the pain of the stigmata, but also by a torturous "wound in his heart.
Other miracles are attributed to Padre Pio. Witnesses of his wounds testified that the blood coming from them had the scent of perfume or flowers.
Another was the ability to be in two places at one time bilocation. This is said to have occured when he was both in a monastery and administering the last sacraments to a soldier on a battlefield simultaneously. He listened to confession for between ten and twelve hours a day. Those who confessed to him claim that he could recite for them every sin they'd ever committed in their lives by reading their souls.
After confessing to him, these people would feel incredibly spiritually uplifted. A discussion of Stigmata in regards to Blood, Power, and Gender:. In a miracle which has so much to do with the sufferer being very connected to Jesus Christ, it is interesting that the vast majority of those who experience stigmata are women. Additionally, of the twenty six stigmatic saints which the Catholic church considers best known, only two are male, St.
Francis and St. In all, Francis found that he bore five marks: two on his palms and two on his feet, where the nails that fixed Christ to the cross were traditionally believed to have been hammered home, and the fifth on his side, where the Bible says Jesus had received a spear thrust from a Roman centurion.
Thus was the first case of stigmata—the appearance of marks or actual wounds paralleling those Christ received during Crucifixion—described. Later stigmatics and there have been several hundred of them have exhibited similar marks, though some bear only one or two wounds, while others also display scratches on their foreheads, where Christ would have been injured by his crown of thorns.
Through the centuries, stigmata has become one of the best-documented, and most controversial, of mystical phenomena. The extensive record makes it possible to compare cases that occurred centuries apart.
Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood.
Indeed, the contemporary obsession with the marks of crucifixion may best be demonstrated by an incident that occurred in Oxford, England, two years before St. In court it was discovered that his body bore the five wounds; but the record includes no suggestion that these were spontaneously generated, and it seems he may actually have allowed himself to be crucified, either because he genuinely believed he was Christ, or because he wanted others to believe he was.
Therese Neumann, the controversial German stigmatic, claimed to have lived for years on nothing more than Communion wafers and wine. Photo: Bundesarchiv via Wikicommons. It is unlikely news of this strange case ever reached Francis in Assisi.
At least ten more were recorded in the 13th century, and a recent estimate by the former BBC religious correspondent Ted Harrison sets the total number reported since at just over These include such noteworthy cases as that of Johann Jetzer, a Swiss farmer who displayed the stigmata in , and Therese Neumann, a controversial German stigmatic on whom the marks appeared on Fridays from until her death in though never convincingly in the presence of scientific observers.
Padre Pio, a Capuchin monk who is probably the best known of all stigmatics, is also supposed to have experienced a number of other strange phenomena and to have effected numerous miraculous healings. Stigmatics are often associated with other miraculous events. Until the twentieth century, reports of stigmata were confined to Catholic Europe, but the most recent count of contemporary cases, made about a decade ago, included about 25 cases scattered around the world, including one in Korea and one in Japan.
This in itself is a remarkable development, but there has also been a dramatic change in the ratio of male to female stigmatics. Overall, the vast majority have always been women: , compared to just 54 men, a ratio of almost seven to one. Among the 44 cases reported since , it is 2. There have been about stigmatics since then, and about 25 remain bleeding today.
Most are women and virtually all are Catholic. Wounds appear most commonly on the hands and feet, but also on the sides of the body - where Jesus was speared while on the cross - and on the forehead, representing the crown of thorns. Most stigmatics bleed little, though some squeeze out up to a pint at a time.
The personality profile of the typical stigmatic is not a happy one. Many contemporary subjects have been victims of abuse and suffer low self-esteem.
Most stigmata are deliberately self-inflicted, or follow more complex patterns of self-harm, like those of Munchausen's syndrome.
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