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 In St Francis of Assisi we have the first example of the alleged miraculous infliction of stigmata. (For an earlier instance pronounced by the Church to be an imposture see Fleury, Hist. Eccl. lxxviii. § 56, ann. 1222.) While meditating on the sufferings of our Lord, in his cell on Mount Alverno in 1224, we are told by his biographers, Thomas of Celano and Bonaventura, that the Lord appeared to Francis as a seraph and produced upon his body the five wounds of Christ ; of these we are told that the side wound bled occasionally, though Bonaventura calls it a scar, and the wounds in the feet had the appearance and colour of nails thrust through. After his death St Clare endeavoured, but in vain, to extract one of these. Pope Alexander IV. and other witnesses declared that they had seen these marks both before and after his death (Raynaldus, ad ann. 1255, p. 27). The divinely attested sanctity of their founder gave to the newly established order of Franciscans a powerful impulse, so that they soon equalled and threatened to overshadow in influence the previously founded order of St Dominic.

The reputation of the latter order was, however, similarly raised in the next century by the occurrence of the same wonder in the case of a sister of the third rule of St Dominic, Catherine Benincasa—better known as St Catherine of Siena. From her biographer’s account, we gather that she was subject to hystero-epileptic attacks, in one of which, when she was twenty-three years old, she received the first stigma (see v. 230). In spite of her great reputation, and the number of attesting witnesses, this occurrence was not universally believed in. Pope Sixtus IV. published a bull in 1475 ordering, on pain of anathema, the erasure of stigmata from pictures of St Catherine, and prohibiting all expressions of belief in the occurrence. Pope Innocent VIII. similarly legislated “ne de caetero S. Catherina cum stigmatibus depingatur; neve de ejus stigmatibus fiat verbum, aut sermo, vel praedicatio ad tollendam omnem scandali occasionem” (see references in Raynaud, De Stigmatisme, cap. xi. 1665). In the years which followed cases of stigmatization occurred thick and fast—now a Franciscan, now a Dominican, very rarely a religieuse of another order, showing the marks. Altogether about ninety instances are on record, of which eighteen were males and seventy-two females. (There are about thirty other cases sometimes included in the catalogue, of which there are no particulars recorded.) Most of them occurred among residents in religious houses, after the austerities of Lent, usually on Good Friday, when the mind was intently fixed on our Lord’s Passion; and the possibility of the reception of the marks was constantly before the eyes and thoughts of the members of the two orders to which St Francis and St Catherine belonged. The order of infliction in the majority of cases was that of the crucifixion, the first token being a bloody sweat, followed by the coronation with thorns; afterwards the hand and foot wounds appear, that of the side being the last. The grade of the infliction varied in individual cases, and they may be grouped in the following series:—

The instances of masculine stigmatization are few. Benedict di Rhegio, a Capuchin at Bologna, had the marks of the crown (1602); Carolus Sazia, an ignorant lay brother, had the wound in his side. Dodo, a Praemonstratensian lay brother, was fully stigmatized, as also was Philip de Aqueria. The marks after death were found on the heart of Angelos del Pas, a minorite of Perpignan, as also on Matheo Carery in Mantua, Melchior of Arazel in Valentia, Cherubin de Aviliana (an Augustinian), and Agolini of Milan. Walter of Strassburg, a preaching friar (1264), had the heart-pain but no mark, and the same was the case with a Franciscan, Robert de Malatestis (1430), and James Stephanus. On Nicholas of Ravenna the wounds were seen after death, while John Gray, a Scotsman, a Franciscan martyr, had one wound on his foot.

Several later instances have been recorded. Anna Katherina Emmerich, a peasant girl born at Minister in 1774, afterwards an Augustinian nun at Agnetenberg, was even more famous for her visions and revelations than for the stigmata. Biographies,