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And welcome back George Noria with Christoph Spears. As we were talking about his latest work Supernatural Bodies, Stigmata and Modern Britain and Ireland. Christoph, to those who do not know what stigmata is, would you explain it please?
So stigmata are the wounds that were inflicted on Christ when he went up on when he was crucified. So we're talking about the nails that went through his hands and feet sometimes, the pinpricks of the crown of storms that was put on his head, and the wound in his side when the Roman soldier pissed his side with a spear.
I do recall the late Padre Pio apparently had the stigmato, did he not?
He did, yes, and he's probably one of the most famous people with the stigmata that throughout history. Actually he was mostly known for having the wounds.
Now, the people who would have the stigmata wounds, they would just appear all of a sudden and then disappear just as quickly, would they not?
That was the claim? Yeah, so, and if it was as authentic as possible, it would happen at the moment when historically Christ went upon the cross, So we're talking about Friday afternoon. On Good Friday, really around three o'clock in the afternoon, the wounds would allegedly appear supernaturally so spontaneously on people's bodies as they went through the passion of Christ. With Christ.
Roughly how many people since the beginning of time have come down with the stigmata.
Well, that would be many hundreds. The first person who was recorded to have Christ's wounds on his body given to him by supernatural powers Saint Francis of the cz in twelve twenty four, So that was the founder of the Franciscan order in the Catholic Church, who walks up the mountain, sat down to pray and was visited by an angel who wounded him supernaturally to have rights wounds on his own body, and he basically kicked off a trend, you could say, since then, since the thirteenth century, it's
been hundreds of people.
Well, now, the hundreds of people that have had stigmata, are they all righteous people?
Definitely not so. Really, one of the core problems with stigmata is that it's a phenomenon that happens on people's bodies,
and it's relatively easy to fake it. So the question of is it authentic, is it supernatural, or is it done through human hands has always been a big problem throughout the history of the phenomenon, and there are many many examples of people who have inflicted it on themselves, you know, or have had someone else inflicted on them for personal gains, but to be put in a position of spiritual authority to make money out of it very often as.
Well, or they're mentally unstable.
That as well. Yeah, a lot of people with stigmata who claimed to have the stigmata were examined by doctors, but also by as the nineteenth century went on, by psychologists and psychiatrists, and were often also like the people we were talking about earlier that the people who were possessed very often put in in care in psychiatric Asylunce.
Now, why did you keen on Britain and Ireland for your investigation as opposed to Italy, for example, where most of them are predominantly Catholic.
Well, it's always bothered me a little bit when people talk about phenomena like this as something that only happens in Catholicism because it doesn't ring true to me. Something like stigma se is significant for people outside Catholicism too, I always thought. So I went to look for it in a country that is mostly protest and Britain, and I found that people also had these wounds. They could also lead like Christ. But what you do see is that that happens and for very different reasons, and the
profiles of these people are so different. Some of them become prophets, become cult leaders, some of them become faith healers, so they heal with their leading hands, they can heal other people's illnesses. So these stories are very very divergent, very different from each other, and it's just so much richer than people have thought. It's not just the Catholic phenomenon.
Do the people who have the stigmato know what it means?
In some cases, when you look at what we were talking about earlier with possession, when we say predominantly young women, that's also the case of this phenomenon. And then we are talking about women who are in their twenties or early thirties who are very often not very well educated, also not theologically educated. So this is something that happens to them and it overwhelms them, and they often don't know what it means specifically. Apart from that, they feel
like they are with Christ. And then a priest steps thin and becomes what they call a spiritual guide I guess, a spiritual confessor who helps them and educates them, but it also sometimes coaxes them on, and then they becomes sometimes a bit like a mystical duo. I guess, because obviously what happens as soon as someone has these wounds is and it's visible, people start coming into the room.
People want to see this because for many people, this is a manifestation of God's power on someone's body is for many people something very sacred, something very yeah, like physical evidence of God's presence, so they want to see it up close. Some people want to take some of the blood with them as a relic or as something that they can use as a talis amount to ward off evil or to heal others with. So there's a lot of it brings a lot of promotion. I guess.
While your investigations, Christophe, what would you say is the strangest thing you've come across so far?
Oh? Well, that's one of the things that surprised me is going back to exorcisms and possession for a moment, is in the nineteenth century, there was a town here in Belton, not far from the big city of Antwerp, where a group of so called sorcerers appeared and cursed pretty much a whole neighborhood to be possessed at once. I found that very very That was a very overwhelming story for me, because I didn't I always thought it was about individuals, not about whole communities at once becoming
possessed and requiring an exorcism. That was a very powerful story. And then those those sorcerers were tried in court, not so much for cursing or a cursing or causing causing possession, but for causing social disruption because always possessed people couldn't function anymore in society. So there's this whole this whole town is in uproar suddenly because of spiritual unrest, you could say, and the town becomes a battlefield or cosmological powers.
Briefly, how did you go about researching supernatural bodies? How did you even begin that?
It's the nice thing about studying phenomena like this in the nineteenth and TWENTIETHH century is that newspapers were already around, and we're talking about a lot of different types of newspapers, the local newspapers, little magazines. There's a lot of print material out and people were always fascinated by these types of phenomena because, like you said earlier, we don't really know,
we can't know exactly what's going on. Yet people were struggling with trying to figure out what it is they're seeing everywhere, so they're write about it all the time. And those types of documents are really useful at starting points because then I go into the archives, I go to court records for example, like what I just mentioned about that town. Five fine spiritual diaries of priests of the people who have the stigmata, for example, they tend to write down how they feel when it happens, so
those sources are extremely rich in detail. Talk is a very powerful things. I was reading a spiritual diary of a woman in Leeds, So Northern England, who at the stigma for every week, and she keeps a diary about it and she describes as she goes through it how she bleeds. This happens during the First World war, and how her bleeding and suffering is a symbol of the war of the soul, the suffering that happens in the whole world, and people can come to her for comfort,
and that's what happens. People who have lost someone in the war come to her for comfort. So she becomes a very powerful social figure of community healing.
How long are these people bleed, Christoph? Obviously not long enough to bleed out right.
Well, it varies as well. Some of them don't bleed at all. They are more like wounds that don't heal. So you see either hope, you see a hole opening up in the skin, in the skin without blood coming out. Some of them do bleed quite profusely, but then we're talking about maybe half an hour an hour before the wounds close up again or become scar tissue.
What makes the wounds stop bleeding? Prayer?
That is the hardest question, because more striking to me than the wounds opening spontaneously or supernaturally, it's the fact that they close by themselves and sometimes disappear entirely. Again, that doesn't I'm struggling with that a bit, because it's not prayer about its stopping, because being allowed to suffer with Christ in such a way as for many of
them privilege. So it's something that is it's a it's a source of ecstasy almost, it's a pain that elevates your existence, you could say, because you gets you really close to Christ and to God. So you don't necessarily want it to stop.
I suppose do they happen at will or during certain times?
There is as far as there is any medical consensus about this. We're talking about psychopathological phenomena. So it's the idea that by focusing your will and your consciousness on particular parts of your body, you can invoke physical wounds. That's that's a medical theory that might explain what goes on, and that would mean that you can have them at will if you if you focus strong enough on it.
I was going to say, what is modern medicine said about this with the legitimate cases? Are they baffled?
Yeah, there is no consensus. So yeah, what what I just said, for example, that the psychopathological explanation of it is that you can focus your you can focus your mind as the power of the mind over the body. But historically, also there's been a strong trend in medical science that all these phenomena are part of some kind of religious delusion, So it's a it's a mental it's related to mental illness.
Did anybody try to see if padre Pio was faking it?
That's a very controversial case. Yes, So the main story about padre Pio is that he potentially used some kind of acid to keep his wounds open, rather than that he was blessed by something, and there are there are some conspicuous elements about his story, like how he would very obviously hide his the wounds in his hands with these gloves that you could then get as relics, and the kind of commercialized it a little bit, you could say.
So when you talk about authenticity, it's difficult to say because so much for him depended on gaining a foretold and reputation and authority because of the stigmata that he claimed to have. So we don't know if they were authentic or not, or if they were obviously faked, but there are hints that it might not be completely authentic and absolutely take into account he's a saint, but the
stigmata were never part of the whole canonization process. So the stigma are not a miracle, they're not they're not a convincing argument in favor of making someone a saint.
Has the Church ever come out with a statement about stigmato something official?
No, No, And that's that's in itself is very interesting. I think the fact that they don't want to say anything.
About it, you would think they would, Yeah, but it's.
So controversial, and historically there have been so many cases of people who suddenly had the wounds and they became mystical figures that were quite threatening to the church. So I think they rather want to stay away from it a little bit.
If they are if these are real, If they are real, why do you think the individual was selected by God, let's say, to do this.
Or one meaning a lot of them give or the people around them give to the person bleeding. Is that they are suffering for the sins of others, just like Christ that on the cross, on the cross, So that that is the reason that they are blessed with these wounds, is so that they can take up a position in which other people can come to them and be relieved of their sinfulness through that body. It's like they become a bit like the living bodies on which Christ appears.
You can say that they're little Christ.
Is the blood special? I mean if you touch it, do you get anything mystical or anything like that.
As well that a lot of people seem to believe that, Yeah, they take it home with them. You can get there are little files of stigmatic blood, for example, that people have taken home from the body. There are some stigmatics have a tendency to bleed on devotional cards for example, for people so that they can take the blood with them as well, because it's the sense of healing sometimes or of keeping the evil away. So yeah, that blood
is special. It is also special because there are theories that say that it's not actually the blood of the person bleeding coming out of the wounds, it's actually Christ's blood. Interesting, and that would be a way to find out out what Christ's blood tie is as well.
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