Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/687

Rh blood flowed from the side, great pain was suffered, and she also "felt herself transformed into our Lord. Her stigmata were accepted as genuine gifts of God by the Inquisition, Pope Pius VII beatified her, and Gregory XVI canonized her on the 26th of May, 1839.

Anna Catharine Emmerich, a nun of Dülmen, after long previous illness, experienced full stigmatization in 1811, was repeatedly examined by the authorities, endured great pain, and always emitted blood on Fridays. The same thing is affirmed of Maria von Mörl, at Kaltern, in southern Tyrol, who after illness received the stigmata in 1833. More than forty thousand visitors went to see them. Maria Domenica Lazzari, of Capriani, is said to have borne the marks of Christ's passion on her forehead, hands, feet, and side from 1834 until 1850, and to have felt from them the most terrible physical pain.

Palma d'Oria, an Italian woman of sixty-six, visited by Dr. Imbert Gourbeyre in 1871, is or was confessedly another diabolically tormented, angelically visited Individual, and was also an expert prestidigitateuse whose performances were too blasphemous and shocking to be used for purposes of scientific information. Her stigmata left no scars to indicate the places whence the blood had flowed. She insisted that she had not eaten anything for seven years, but had been obliged to drink a great deal because of the fierce internal heat which consumed her. This was so intense that the water swallowed was ejected at boiling temperature.

The latest and most celebrated instance of stigmatization is Louise Lateau, born in the deepest poverty at Bois d'Haine, Belgium, January 30, 1850. Chlorotic, unhealthy, and hysterical from childhood, subject to visions of saints and the Holy Virgin, and wont when in ecstasy to utter very edifying things of poverty, charity, and the priesthood, her stigmatizations have occurred after passing through her paroxysms. On Fridays she bled from the left side of her chest, blood escaped from the dorsal surfaces of both feet, and from the dorsal and palmar surfaces of both hands. Finally, other points of exit appeared in the forehead and between the shoulders. In her seizures she was insensible to all external impressions, and acted the passion of Jesus and the crucifixion. She also declared that she did not sleep, had not eaten or drunk for four years, and that the ordinary excretory processes of the body had been wholly suppressed.

America, of course, can not be excluded from the list of the lands of wonders. Fortunately, it presents but one example of the stigmatized. This is said to be Vitaline Gagnon, in the diocese of Quebec, a young woman whose early piety was demonstrated by the repetition of Ave Marias among the tombs, and who loved the souls in purgatory so much that they often made themselves