Stigmata

The remarkableness and sanctity of Francis of Assisi is not an indication that he was immune to the same human fragility that we share. This is borne out if we refuse to settle for the piles of modern-day biography and go directly to the most important medieval source literature. In particular, Francis did not experience his stigmatization to be a confirmation of his perfect configuration to Christ, but rather a mercy from God who  was rescuing him from self-absorption.

An article written for the Mysics of the Church Website about the extraordinary life and prophecies of the "Breton Stigmatist", Marie-Julie Jahenny.  Includes her warnings for our times and new information on the promised Great Monarch of Catholic prophecy ~ Henry V, Count of Chambord.

Essay comparing the two painting of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata accredited to Jan van Eyck.  Based on my research, and the research of experts in the field, I believe that the painting placed in the Johnson Gallery is the authentic piece done by Eyck.

It is clear that unusual consciousness phenomena such as near-death out-of-body experiences (OBEs), reincarnation remembrances of children, and strange psychophysiological phenomena such as the placebo effect and stigmata cannot be explained with existing scientific theories and concepts. They provide strong evidence for the existence of mechanisms not included within our current mainstream-scientific worldview and theories. I hypothesize that the “mechanism” through which these strange phenomena can occur is the human subtle-energy system with its multiple, interpenetrating subtle dimensional bodies. The paper summarizes the information—some that can be considered evidence—supporting this hypothesis.

Van Osselaer, T.; Graus, A.; Rossi, L.; Smeyers, K. (2021).The devotion and promotion of stigmatics in Europe, c. 1800-1950. Between saints and celebrities. Leiden: Brill.

In the nineteenth century a new type of mystic emerged in Catholic Europe. While cases of stigmatisation had been reported since the thirteenth century, this era witnessed the development of the ‘stigmatic’: young women who attracted widespread interest thanks to the appearance of physical stigmata. To understand the popularity of these stigmatics we need to regard them as the ‘saints’ and religious ‘celebrities’ of their time. With their ‘miraculous’ bodies, they fit contemporary popular ideas (if not necessarily those of the Church) of what sanctity was. As knowledge about them spread via modern media and their fame became marketable, they developed into religious ‘celebrities’.

In this article, I study in depth the first vita of the Franciscan Tertiary abbess Juana de la Cruz (Vida y fin de la bienaventurada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz, written c. 1534), examining it as a chronicle that narrativizes the origins and reform of a specific religious community in the Castile of the Catholic Monarchs. I argue that Vida y fin constitutes an account that was collectively written inside the walls of the enclosure that can help us understand themes, motifs, and symbolic Franciscan elements that were essential for the self-definition of its original textual community. I first discuss the narrative of the convent’s foundation and then examine the penitential identity of the community, highlighting the inspiration that Juana’s hagiography takes from the infancy of Caterina da Siena, as described in the Legenda maior by Raimondo da Capua, and analyzing to what extent the represented penitential practices related to the imitatio Christi reflect a Franciscan Tertiary identity in opposition to a Dominican one. Finally, I address the passages in which the hagiographer(s) discuss(es) the sense of belonging to the Franciscan order rather than the Dominicans, and the mystical figure of Francesco d’Assisi as a founder, guide, and exemplar.

This article evaluates the story of one particular holy woman in the sixteenth century, Sor Maria de la Visitaciòn, known to many of her contemporaries as the “Nun of Portugal.”  For a brief period Sor Maria, a professed stigmatic, was one of the most famous women in Europe.  In the events following the defeat of the Spanish armada, however, she quickly fell from grace and was convicted by the Inquisition of fraudulent stigmatism.  Sor Maria’s trajectory, from universal religious renown to acute political disgrace, illustrates part of the changing understanding of the body  in the Renaissance.  Her story shows both the extraordinary amount of popular religious sentiment attached to the wounded human body in the early modern period and the deep cultural anxieties it could elicit.  The most influential wounds in sixteenth-century European thought were the wounds of Christ; arguments over the meaning of these wounds contributed to the great religious and political struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  Stigmatics were powerful agents in this contest because they provided sensational and visible evidence of divine favor, but their influence over popular opinion often led to anxiety and suspicion about the value of their sanctity.  The careful investigation by the Inquisition, with its foregone conclusions about Sor Maria’s fraudulence, reflects much larger anxieties about institutional authority over voices like hers.  It shows how the authentication and reproduction of these voices increasingly threatened to escape the control of the institutions that stood to profit or lose in their deployment.

Los milagros, visiones y prodigios continuaban siendo parte de la cultura católica a inicios del siglo XX y lo seguirían siendo, contradiciendo las expectativas de los positivistas que profetizaban el final de la religión (y especialmente de aquellos elementos señalados de “supersticiosos”) para el cambio de siglo; por el contrario tales expresiones religiosas habían tomado un gran auge a lo largo del XIX, haciendo de ella una época especialmente fecunda en el campo de las expresiones religiosas específicamente aquellas relacionadas con lo milagroso y lo místico. El presente texto aborda tres experiencias místicas (visiones, milagros y estigmatizaciones) como parte de la cultura religiosa del catolicismo a escala Atlántica entre Europa y México a lo largo del siglo XIX.

What is the Paranormal?
“The paranormal” is a comparative category that serves as a dumping ground for a wide variety of beliefs, experiences and claims that fall outside the normative boundaries of our culture’s notions of scientific reasoning and conventional religious doctrines. By default, both scientific and religious elites have left it to experimental psychology and psychiatry to try to make sense of these domains of human experience, and more than a century of such research has much to tell us about how to critically evaluate this material. However, psychology is not enough to grasp all of the dimensions of the paranormal. Therefore, as we develop our “tool kit” of critical thinking skills we will need to also approach this material from perspectives in philosophy, sociology, comparative religions, anthropology, history and investigative journalism. This course, then, will be multidisciplinary in its approach, with insights from psychological research providing the Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way through and out of this labyrinth. After all, we don’t really want to meet the Minotaur (or Mothman), now do we?

Flannery O'Connor writes sparely. While bare in description, the stories themselves take on the difficultly rendered actions of divine revelation and the human response. In this essay, I argue that the spare quality of O'Connor's fiction fittingly renders the human confronted with divine grace and invites her readers into their own encounters akin to the act of prayer. Drawing on the work of Rowan Williams, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and St. Bonaventure, I argue for the kinship of reading O'Connor's spare fiction concerning divine grace with painful, graced, and blessed acts of prayer. That is, we not only read about encounters with divine grace, but encounter it for ourselves.

Prendre position en documentaire. Une sociologie politique des films documentaires tournés dans le Centre-ville de Saint-Denis et à la Joliette à Marseille (2000-2010). Sous la direction de Violaine Roussel. Thèse soutenue le 11 septembre 2017 à Paris.

This paper represents a particularly 'Vineyard-flavour' exploration of my interest in disability theology, mental health, and the contemporary usage of the Letters of Paul. Textual in concept but pastoral in scope, this paper differences from my purely technical and essentially 'secular' paper that I will present in Norway.

Paul closes Galatians with a fascinating phrase, “for I carry the marks of Jesus branded upon my body”. Rich in imagery and allusion to themes in his writing, Paul echoes both understanding of the Greek term ‘τὰ στίγματα’, and the role these marks play in his apostolic ministry. The motifs of common knowledge and visible marks are powerful reflections of the effects that events and experiences can have upon the human self, with fascinating implications for the consideration of mental health issues in the church.

In this paper I briefly consider ‘τὰ στίγματα’ in Galatians 6:17, and examine whether there is, as Bruce considers, something substantive in Paul’s notion that “these proclaim who he is and whom he serves”. In the Vineyard, where many suffer in differing degrees of openness across a range of afflictions, the notion of ‘stigmata’ surrounding discussion of mental illness is often in the negative sense. A ‘stigma‘ can be attached to those who suffer in this way. Paul’s recovery then, has profound implications for today.

Changing the discussion of mental health and its effects - often long term and emotionally deep - within the Church falls fully under the scope of Paul’s understanding of the Gospel, echoed earlier in the passage. This is a question of identity. Whilst scholarship has focused primarily on the physical, I hope to recover the motif of stigmata for those who have been through mental trauma, and work towards a positive exposition of this passage for this reason.

At the end of the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul writes: “From now on, let no one make trouble for me; for I carry in my body the marks (stigmata) of Jesus”. According to most scholars, Paul refers here to scars caused by the wounds he suffered during his apostolic ministry. By calling them the stigmata of Jesus, according to many, Paul was metaphorically thinking about a tattoo or a burn mark – a sign of belonging to Jesus. However, a philological and contextual analysis suggests that by the stigmata of Jesus Paul metaphorically had in mind the wounds of crucifixion, whereas the words “I carry in my body” should not be understood literally.

International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 11-14, 2017) in Kalamazoo, MI Please circulate. Session rationale: Discussions of stigmata in the Middle Ages often begin and end with Francis of Assisi, but stigmata was a phenomenon that both preceded and postdated Francis. This session seeks to understand the diverse meanings attributed to stigmata across the span of the Middle Ages. Proposals are welcome regarding the significance of the bloody wounds of Christ, whether the marks on others are physical or metaphorical, God-given or self-inflicted, pertaining to a single individual or several, treated in a particular text or comparatively across two or more texts. Please e-mail a one-page abstract of your paper proposal (250 to 300 words) and a Participant Information Form to me (catherine.mooney@bc.edu), the organizer of this session, and copy them to Michael Cusato (mcusato@sbu.edu) and Lezlie Knox (lezlie.knox@marquette.edu) , contact persons for the Franciscan Institute, the sponsor of the session. The deadline is September 12, 2016, but submitting earlier is strongly encouraged. Directions and the Participant Information Form can be found at: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions. Feel free to contact me with any questions Catherine.Mooney@bc.edu).

Stigmatization is a multilayered religious phenomenon with a complex history of interpretation. Nowadays there seems to be a common suspicion towards the stigmata. This mistrust is founded upon nineteenth-century stereotypes of stigmatics/mystics and a negative interpretation of the pain experience. This article will first unravel the different layers of interpretation and analyse the changes that caused this negative perspective. Second, this article will give an introduction into stigmatization theology. The phe- nomenon of stigmatization will be studied as a mystical event that supports a spirituality that is founded upon the experiential knowl- edge of the love shared between God and man. This mystical theology of stigmatization can inspire and challenge the contem- porary context and its presumptions.

Margery J. Doyle retains all Intellectual Property and Copyrights © 2014 for any or all of these works.

ABSTRACT: Stigmergy is a process by which local agents acting on the environment change the environment in such a way as to change another agent’s behavior. This form of indirect communication and local interactions between agents and the environment often leads to the self-organization of system structures. We present an experiment in which robot agents act independently to move objects (blocks) about in their environment, and inspect the outcome of these actions for clusters as an indication of increased organization. Results indicate that the agents did not act stigmergically, regardless of whether their behavior was fixed or random. However, the results indicate that the starting location of the blocks did have a significant effect on the final distributions. The effect initial conditions, types of emergence, and self organization have on the global product of swarm behavior are discussed and future research is proposed.

Review of: Solanus Benfatti, Five Wounds of Saint Francis. “Another book on the stigmata?” the incredulous (and perhaps somewhat exhausted) reader might ask, after the provocative study of Chiara Frugoni on “the invention of the stigmata” (1993) unleashed a near twenty-year debate, rekindling discussions that finally seemed dormant. And yet, after the jumble of hypotheses and the more disparate, counter-intuitive, and sometimes frankly unfounded interpretations, it is precisely a study like this for which one felt the need: calm, rational, documented. A study that has good sense as its revolutionary aspect, and that nevertheless—or maybe even because of this—, building on the ideas of others, succeeds in penetrating with finesse the logic of the sources and in shedding light on the spirituality of Francis.