Guest
Paul Kengor is Professor of Political Science at Grove City College and executive director of the Center for Vision and Values. He is also the editor of The American Spectator. He is the author more than 20 books, including his most recent, The Stigmatists: Their Gifts, Their Revelations, Their Warnings (TAN Books, 2024).
Link
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
The stigmata holds a special place in history of Catholic mysticism as well as in the Catholic imagination. What exactly is this gift, and why does God give it to some people? That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, the Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it, tell people about our podcast. We appreciate everybody who has subscribed and likes the different episodes. Also, you can follow us on social media @CrisisMag. Go to our website, put in your email address, and we will send you our email newsletter once a day. That’s crisismagazine.com.
We have a Crisis writer with us today, among other things that he does. Paul Kengor, he’s a professor of political science at Grove City College and the Executive Director of the Vision for Vision and Values. He’s the Editor of The American Spectator, an excellent online publication as well, and he’s the author of more than 20 books, including his most recent, The Stigmatists: Their Gifts, Their Revelations, Their Warnings. I have it right here. And I was telling Paul right before we got on that I get books sent to me a lot, and sometimes I read them, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I kind of go through them, but I was like, “Okay, this one,” first of all, because Paul wrote it and also because the topic, I was like, “I got to read this,” and I read it about as cover to cover as you can get when you’re very busy and doing other stuff. It took me less than a week, which is pretty fast for me to get through a book and just because it was enthralling. So welcome to the program, Paul.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much, Eric, and I’m proud to be a contributing editor to Crisis, which is one of my favorite publications.
Eric Sammons:
Thank you.
Paul Kengor:
So in the morning, I check, in fact, I can see them up here on my thing, I check about six different publications. One of them is The American Spectator, which as you said, I’m the editor, so I need to check that one. I always check Crisis every day and never miss it, on vacation, whatever. So it is a great publication, and you’re really carrying on the tradition. You’ve been an excellent editor.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. Okay. So we’re going to talk about the stigmata today, and I will say that I’ve had a long fascination with this. I’m devoted to St. Francis. You can see right behind me is the statue of St. Francis, embracing the crucified Lord. When I became Catholic, I was debating between St. John the Baptist or St. Francis of Assisi for my confirmation name. I went to St. John the Baptist, which I’m happy to do that, but also St. Francis, I’ve always really been attracted to him, and of course, the stigmata is part of that. But before we get too much into St. Francis specifically, why don’t we just kind of define our terms and say what is the stigmata? What do we mean by that?
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, thanks. Your reaction, a lot like mine. So I get sent a lot of books, and frankly, a lot of them aren’t very good. We could do a whole hour on the state of publishing, right? There’s a lot of bad stuff that’s being put out there today. And if I do find a book that I like, reading it, for me, fast would be about a week, because I like to take the time to read it, go through it. This book, I would’ve had the same reaction. It’s a topic that’s always fascinated me, and I’ve always looked for a serious work on stigmata, and it’s hard to find them. It’s hard to find any books at all. In fact, a lot of how I came about doing the research on this was through biographies of the different stigmatists that I write about. But to try to find a book on stigmata, there aren’t many. There’s very, very few, there’s very few studies.
Generally defined, they would be some people, some individuals, very saintly, very holy, very pious individuals have been gifted with the markings of Christ, the stigmata. To quote from St. Paul in Galatians, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus Christ,” which some say the Greek from that, stigmata, are the marks that we’re talking about. In fact, some people think that that St. Paul might’ve been the first stigmatist. Two of the stigmatists that I quote in the book, neither is a saint, but they’re both in the process of canonization, Anne Katherine Emmerich and Therese Neumann, who are two of the most famous visionaries in the history of the church, they claim to have visions and be able to see things in the past that happened with the disciples and with the life of Jesus, with the life of Mary.
They both said that in seeing images of St. Paul, they said actually he was the first stigmatist. So when we read that in the Bible, he’s not just talking about being shipwrecked, being lashed, being put out to sea, and the other things that we think of, he’s not just speaking figuratively, he actually had the markings of Christ. And then they both said but other than Paul, the first or the next one comes a millennium later with St. Francis of Assisi. And we’re doing this, pre-recording this interview shortly after the 800th anniversary of Francis receiving the stigmata, which was September 17th, 1224. So he would’ve been the first, following Paul, if Paul was first, and then after that, there are a few down through the centuries. Catherine of Siena, she’s the cover girl on the book. She’s the one receiving the stigmata. St. Rita of Cascia, who received just one marking, she received a single crown from the thorn, the crown of thorns of Jesus. Lucy of Narni, who inspired the Lucy of Narnia of CS Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia. She was actually from the town Narni in Italy. She was a stigmatist.
There were a bunch of them in the 1400s, 1500s, and then in more recent centuries, there’ve been more. And some people might say, “Well, maybe we know about it more often today,” and what’s great is we have pictures and videos today, in many cases. But it seems, Eric, that there just are more cases. In fact, one of the few authorities that I quote, Michael Freze, who did a book that’s now 30 or 40 years old, I think he was the one that said the 20th century is probably the era of the stigmatists, there are so many. I have seven individual chapters and individual stigmatists that I profile, and it’s striking me right now as I’m saying this, I think four of them died in the 1900s. Padre Pio, Faustina Kowalska, this little Calabrian nun named Elena Aiello. Therese Neumann died in the 1900s.
So there have been more lately, and I think it’s because they have, and this is the other part of this study that fascinated me, they have things to tell us. And for me, it was fascinating enough that they were marked by Christ, studied, investigated, doubted. Vatican officials, teams of officials, priests, bishops came and visited them, secular doctors and psychiatrists, these people put people through the wringer. So for one thing, it was striking enough that these people had the markings of Christ. Now, I’m all eyes, right? Now, you have my attention.
And then when they would make these extraordinary statements about visions and prophecies, now I really want to pay attention, because if the guy down the street who lives down the street from me in Grove City is claiming to talk to the Virgin Mary or Jesus or seeing things from the first century, I could be like, “Yeah, all right, Jim. Whatever.” But if he starts bleeding from his hands and his feet and does so for 10 years, and his house is filled with examiners, and then he is having these visions, well, now I’m going to take him really seriously.
Eric Sammons:
You’re going to start listening. Exactly.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah. Now I’m listening. Now I’m listening.
Eric Sammons:
I actually meant to mention that this podcast coming out during kind of the week of stigmata, because as you mentioned, this week we have the 800th anniversary of the stigmata of St. Francis, which is actually a feast stay on the old calendar, September 17th, and the Franciscan Order still has the 17th as a stigmata. We also have the death of Therese Neumann was actually September 18th, so we have that going on this week. The anniversary of Padre Pio receiving the stigmata was September 20th.
Paul Kengor:
September 20th, 1918.
Eric Sammons:
And then his feast day is the 23rd, I believe.
Paul Kengor:
Mm-hmm. Correct.
Eric Sammons:
And so this is a perfect time, and it shows that the stigmata isn’t a singular thing. And it’s interesting what you said about some people might say, “Well, we know about more.” I feel like the stigmata is something that we would hear about if like St. Athanasius or St. Augustine or something like that had it, because it was such a big deal when Francis got it. Now, when it comes to stigmata, the classical idea everybody has is probably from Francis and Padre Pio that you have visible markings that are bleeding and painful on the hands, usually the palms, as well as on the side near the heart where our Lord was pierced, and then also on the feet. That’s kind of the classic.
But what I found from your book is that’s not always the case. There’s cases of I think them being invisible, having some, I think if I remember correctly, the visionary for Our Lady of Akita had only one, maybe. Sometimes, it’s very long. St. Francis had the last two years of his life. Sometimes it’s for decades, sometimes it’s only on certain days of the week. What would be classified under stigmata, what are all the different phenomenon that could be classified under that title?
Paul Kengor:
Another one people don’t think of, usually they can’t see it, is in the side from where Christ was speared. And so they will have bleeding from the side, but it’s most often in the palms, in the feet, sometimes around the head from the crown of thorns. And this is interesting, I didn’t know this going in, Eric, Therese Neumann, Anne Catherine Emmerich, others, they said that the one pain marking that most hurt Jesus was a shoulder wound. This was something, a number of them have had the shoulder wound and have said that’s kind of the most vexing, the most painful of all of them.
And I find that theologically very interesting, because Christ told us, “If you want to follow me, you have to pick up your cross and follow me.” So in a way, he didn’t say you have to put on your crown and follow me, you have to put nails in your hands to follow me, you need to feel like you’ve been speared in the side to follow me. You need to pick up your cross and follow me. So the one injury that is most impactful that was on him and to some of these stigmatists is the shoulder one, so you wouldn’t think of that.
Eric Sammons:
I’ve never heard that until now, so I just wonder how much of it is maybe the kind of theologically the weight of the sins kind of putting on the cross and him carrying it and it all coming on. When we talk about weight on your shoulders, how much of that is also that kind of the physical manifestation of all our sins being put on Christ?
Paul Kengor:
I know. Isn’t that interesting? Really, theologically, you can go pretty deep with that. And that just occurred to me when I heard it when I was reading their accounts, “If you want to follow me, pick up your cross and carry it.”
Eric Sammons:
Now, there have been people who claim to be stigmatists who were actually condemned by the church or said by the church, “No, we see nothing supernatural here.” Obviously, just about every stigmatist has been challenged. What are kind of the common challenges to say this is fake or it’s not a true supernatural event?
Paul Kengor:
Well, true fakers, usually, it becomes pretty clear right away, because first of all, you just can’t fake consistent bleeding from your hands, right? Padre Pio’s case for 50 years. And in Pio’s case, the first person that really attacked him was Gemelli from the Vatican who was just, I’ll tell you, awful. You read the chapter on Padre Pio, Pio said, “You want to know what causes me the most pain of all? My tormentors, my doubters in the church, the people who have attacked me.” That’s what upset him the most. And Gemelli comes in, he was a very arrogant man, and he looked down at Pio in a very condescending way, in part because he came from a family that lacked education, from a part of Italy that this guy had almost like a kind of racial bias against. Gemelli was really arrogant, and he tried to chalk it up to different psychiatric things, kind of cornball pop psychiatry of the day.
One of the accusations of Pio from one of the psychiatrists was auto-suggestion, right? Auto-suggestion? Are you kidding me? How do you sit there and make yourself bleed from the hands and feet and side for 50 years nonstop? And Pio, who had a great sense of humor, said, “Tell him to imagine that he’s a bull, and let’s see if horns protrude from his head.” And they would say he’s using acid on his hands in order to do this. Well, acid wouldn’t do that. It just wouldn’t do that. And also, you couldn’t do a consistently nonstop for 50 years. What’s remarkable about so many of them is that the things never got infected, so they would bleed without infection.
And in some remarkable cases, Pio had them consistently nonstop for 50 years until just a few days before he died, and then they disappeared, which itself was miraculous and really telling it quite a sign, but a number of the stigmatists will get the stigmata like clockwork on Thursday or Friday, like Good Friday, and they’ll them really intense at three o’clock, and then by the afternoon or later that day or on Saturday, they just disappear. They’ll be surrounded at their bed by priests, bishop, Vatican official, doctors, psychiatrists, four or five atheists. Everybody’s standing all around them, and they’re watching. Then the woman is laying there, suddenly starts having pain, starts sweating. They look at her hands, they start to notice things that happen. Then pretty soon, a few hours later, they’re perforated, they’re bleeding, blood is coming out of them. You can’t fake that, especially to a group of skeptics.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it is interesting. I think the fact that Padre Pio’s stigmata, which was noticeable, there’s pictures of it, there’s photos, people saw it when he celebrated mass and he had to take off his gloves, the fact that it disappeared before he died is a confirmation, because if he really had been doing, I don’t know how he could, but acid for 50 years on his hands, well, then that’s a permanent mark. That’s not going away. And all of a sudden it just goes away, and like you said, some of them would come and go, like the stigmata wasn’t permanent.
So there’s been literally hundreds of people through the ages who have at least claimed to be stigmatists and the Church has at least not condemned, because I know there’s cases where they said, “No, that’s not.” And so what’s the commonalities? Their life leading up to it, are they typically men or women, are they typically young people, old people, or is there just a random subset, and what do they go through before? Because the truth is if you or I, I don’t want to speak for you, but at least for I, if all of a sudden a stigmata showed up on me, I’m just not capable of handling that. I’m not spiritually or anything like that. So it’s not happening to random suburban dads like me or something like that. So what is kind of the common threads that tie all the stigmatists together?
Paul Kengor:
And this is what would get the Vatican’s attention is it happens to people who already have a reputation, typically, for holiness. And in many cases these people would have invisible stigmata first as if they were being prepared for this. They’d go through a period of trial and preparation, almost as if God, the Lord, is waiting to see if they’re capable spiritually of being able to handle this. Padre Pio, for example, was often sick, often suffering before he got the stigmata. Overall, in the course of history, about 400 to 500 people it looks like in total.
There was a doctor, a French doctor who did a study that was published in 1894. At that point, he was able to certify what he believed were about 300 altogether. And he had found in his study, Eric, that every single one of them was Roman Catholic. They were all Catholic. We’ll talk more about that in a second. Since then, there probably have been another 100 or 200 more. There’s a group in Belgium that’s done studies on this. Michael Freze has done a book. I quote a couple of other authors who’ve done books. It looks like probably about 400 to 500 in the course of history since the time of St. Francis.
About 90% of them have been women, which I find interesting because Paul might’ve been the first, probably was the first, he was male. Francis was male, Padre Pio, the most famous stigmatist, all male, but in most cases, women, they’ve been women. And from a particular region, about 70% have been Italian. And some of the people have observed, that have studied this, that the Italian people are very emotional people. They have a sort of ability to suffer, and they understand suffering more than … Also, too, a lot of probably more saints have come from Italy than any other country, so I think that’s part of it too. Second to Italy would’ve been France, and then I think Germany was third.
Now interesting today, Hilaire Belloc once said, “The faith is Europe and Europe is the faith.” Well, the faith is diminishing in Europe, and now you’re seeing more and more stigmatists from outside of Europe.
Eric Sammons:
Interesting.
Paul Kengor:
From Asia, from Latin America, from the United States, more diverse than it was before. So that’s something that’s changed. But most of them have been Catholic. You and I are both former Protestants, right?
Eric Sammons:
Yes.
Paul Kengor:
So I know some Protestants are probably thinking, “Well, this is another Catholic thing, like their Shroud of Turin, like when they get up in the morning and they make their coffee and put cream in it. Wow, there’s the Virgin Mary.”
Eric Sammons:
Right. Exactly.
Paul Kengor:
But for me, when I was a Protestant, I was really struck by it. I go, “Look at these photos of this guy who died in 1968. Look at the video.” I read accounts of it, and it was like, “This guy’s bleeding from his hands. Clearly this is happening.” There have been a few Protestants in more recent centuries, but I don’t think it’s more than about a handful. So I know one Lutheran, I think maybe one Presbyterian, but it’s been just a full … And I think this is consistent with Catholic theology versus Protestant theology. If you go into a Catholic church, in fact, Protestants will say, “Why do you guys in your church have Jesus on the crucifix? Don’t you know that he has risen? He’s risen, indeed. The cross is empty. Why are you focusing on Jesus on the cross?”
“Okay, first of all, we understand that he’s risen, that he’s resurrected. We’re not saying that we think that he didn’t, but for us, it’s important to see that suffering Christ.” And when we go into our churches, which aren’t health and wealth gospel churches, we don’t go in, when I was a Protestant, you and I, both in probably the 1990s, remember all the books coming out in Christian bookstores, evangelical bookstores, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
Eric Sammons:
Oh, yeah, right.
Paul Kengor:
“Why? Why, God? I became a Christian, and these people that I know are dying. Why? Why are you doing this to me?” But the Catholic knows that suffering is part of the calm, mortification. The first time that I was in a group book study as a Catholic with a group of old women, and we were talking about suffering, and they said, “Offer it up.” And I thought, “Offer it up? What does that mean? What do you mean offer it up?” They said, “Well, if you suffer, offer it to Jesus to do something with it.” I’m like, “Really. Like what?” “Well, maybe to take some suffering away from somebody else or to use it in some positive way.” They couldn’t really even explain it, right? Mortification, that word I had never even heard of before. Mortification. I’ll say it to my students now, they don’t understand it. Lent, sacrifice. It’s just more common to Catholic theology. The Pietà, right? All through our churches, our homes, we’ve got the suffering Jesus on the cross.
So it’s much more likely that Jesus would pick a Catholic who understands suffering and the value of suffering, and you see in the writings of the stigmatists, Catherine of Siena, Faustina, those where Jesus is telling, “Nothing pleases me more than to see somebody willing to share in my suffering.” You just don’t see that in Protestantism, especially kind of like health and wealth gospel Evangelicalism. So it makes sense that most of them would be Catholic, not because Catholics are kooky, but because Catholic …
Eric Sammons:
We are a little, right?
Paul Kengor:
Right. That’s true. But because Catholic theology embraces suffering and the suffering Christ more than Protestantism does.
Eric Sammons:
I’ve noticed it’s also true that in Catholicism, the idea of stigmata is kind of the highest level. In some ways, we look at St. Francis, Padre Pio, people like that, and if you look in the East with the Orthodox, they will have their great Saints. They will shine light, and it very much is fitting with their theology, which is more focused on theosis and kind of becoming more and more united, Godlike in a way. And this is all legitimate theology, by the way. I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m just saying it’s a different emphasis. If you look on the Catholic side, they’re much more focused on the transfiguration. We have the crucifix, like you were just saying. That’s in a lot of ways our central focus, we are looking at the crucifix. In the East, in the orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism, the focus is often the transfiguration. That’s the icon par excellence in a lot of ways.
And so you see what happens then is these great Saints in the East, often they become transfigured physically because that’s what they’re in tune with and that’s what they can receive, whereas on the West, it’s because it’s the crucifix, it’s the stigmata. I’m not discounting the supernatural aspects. It’s like what you’re saying, it’s more matter of making the way clear so that the Lord can work opening us up. You see the stigmata first really comes into effect with St. Francis of Assisi. I know St. Paul, but really St. Francis of Assisi in the Middle Ages at a time when the focus in the West became much more on meditation on the crucified Lord. Now, of course, it’s ridiculous, like Padre Pio said, to think that it’s some auto-suggestion. It’s more a matter of now, the person is more open to this, I think. And so I kind wanted to get your thoughts on that with the East and the West and kind of the different focus each side has.
Paul Kengor:
No, that’s good. I think that’s right on. And look at St. Francis. Francis was all about mortification, right? And the things that he was doing to his body, the penitential things, the penance, the suffering that he was already putting himself through, the guy didn’t live very long after he received the stigmata in 1224. And later on, later orders would have to be kind of warned by the Vatican, “We appreciate the suffering and the sacrifice, but don’t kill yourself through this, not intentionally kill yourself, but wipe yourself out so much that you harm yourself.” But Francis had so spiritually prepared himself to suffer that Christ indeed saw him as worthy.
What else was I going to say about that? But Catherine of Siena, same way. She had already put herself through the theological ringer, spiritually. And Catherine had, you probably wanted to mention this, she had hidden stigmata, and I know, I hate to even mention it, because here again, you’re going to have skeptics will say, “Hidden stigmata. Well, I don’t believe that at all.” Right? Well, read Catherine of Siena and any of the biographies of her, read her dialogues. Another woman who died at age 33 who had hidden stigmata, Faustina, read her diary, read that stuff.
These aren’t fakers. These women, believe me, they have no interest. In fact, they felt that God gave them the hidden stigmata to keep them humble. Not that they needed any more humility as it was, but in the course of their humility, Faustina had all these nuns at the convent who were always doubting her, “Oh, she’s not really sick. She just doesn’t want to work.” And so now, of all things, for her to have the extra pain of stigmata as well, and no one could even see it, it’s just an added form of suffering and kind of expiation.
By the way, theologically on that, I noticed that Protestants will say, “Are you saying that Christ has chosen these people to suffer with him in order to help expiate the sins of the world? Is Christ’s death on the cross alone, his atonement, is that not sufficient?” No, we’re not saying that. But just like Jesus could save anybody if he wants to, he still asks us to evangelize. Just like Jesus could or God could heal somebody from a disease if he wanted to, we still have doctors and nurses and first responders. There’s still a great commission. And so what would be so unusual or contradictory or wrong about Jesus picking certain extraordinary souls, victim souls, who are willing to suffer for him at all times to help join him in suffering for the sins of the world?
Yes, his atonement on the cross is sufficient. We get it. All right? But we are his hands and feet on this earth. And if you’ve got some nun in a convent in Lithuania or Poland on her knees in front of the crucifix, “Jesus, what more can I do beyond prayer? What else can I do for the sins of the world? May I please share in your passion in some way, Lord, to help for the sins of this rotten world?” And in the cases of Catherine of Siena, Padre Pio, Francis of Assisi, they’re in front of the crucifix when it happens, right? And these rays of light come out from Jesus’s markings on the cross and penetrate the markings of their hands and their feet.
Pio, who was alone in San Giovanni Rotondo at the Our Lady Chapel, when that happened, he’s struck by these wounds, and he’s laying there crying. He can’t believe that the Lord’s like, “No, Lord. No, no. Oh, don’t do this to me, Lord. No. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.” And then he drags himself back to his cell. The brothers at San, Giovanni Rotondo … By the way, again, you can’t hide this either. They see a trail of blood going back to his cell, and they’re following it back, and they’re pounding on the door. “Francesco, Francesco,” he was named Francis as well, “let us in.” “No, no. No one’s … No.” And he tries to hide them, he tries to bandage them. And at one point, the Superior and someone else comes in, and they’re like, “Francesco, let me see your hands. Let me see.” And he’s like, “No, no.” “Let me see.” And he takes the bandage off. “What is this?” And he’s crying, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want this, I don’t want this.” But they’re chosen, they’re specially chosen.
Eric Sammons:
I think I want to go a little deeper on that point, because for the modern mind, it’s insanity to think, “What kind of God do you have that he would apparently punish his best servants, he literally takes his best people,” that’s what we claim they are, “and he decides to punish them. And somehow that’s supposed to help other people?” I do think this is very foreign. I think even for Catholics, we struggle with it. There is a mystery there, obviously. We don’t fully understand. But how did these people, who received, I called it at the beginning of the podcast a gift, and that sounds insane to a lot of ears as well, that this would be a gift, but really they saw it as a gift on some level. And so what is the connection there between the suffering they receive and the salvation of souls and the connection to Christ on the cross? I do think this is something that it’s just so hard to understand, and I think people would look at God as a capricious, almost like an evil God who would do this to his best people.
Paul Kengor:
They need to read the Bible. And my evangelical friends who say, “WW, JD, what would Jesus do?” Here’s the answer. Are you ready? He would suffer. He would suffer for the sins of the world. He’s the one person who came into the world, as Fulton Sheen said, to die. His purpose was to die. No cross, no crown. He came into the world to be crucified. That was the whole purpose of it. And then he told all of his followers, “If you want to follow me, don’t have a life of being fat and happy and drinking wine and having good food every night and being the most physically fit person in the world and having a life of pleasure. If you want to follow me, pick up your cross and carry me.” If you want to follow him, you’re supposed to suffer. So really kind of the highest calling for an imitator of Christ would be somebody who’s willing to suffer like Christ and to suffer for the purpose of suffering for sin, for sinners, for the expiation of sins of the world.
So they’re not understanding this very deep theological calling, and in their defense and all of us, there are very, very, very few people who are willing to do it. So the people that we’re talking about, how many people have lived in the course of history, 10 billion, and there may be 400 or 500 have been stigmatists? So this is a rare person who’s willing to do this. This isn’t happening all over the world, right? In every state in the United States and in every country in the world to a dozen different people. This is a rare gift among those who are capable of doing it.
Eric Sammons:
And also, I think we have to remember that when you balance the scales between this life and the next, this is a very tiny, small, short suffering they undergo, and what they’re going to receive in the next life is just immense joy and happiness and pleasure and things like that in heaven. So it’s not like God is saying for all eternity, “I’m going to punish you.” It’s more just like for this temporary thing, “Take this on for me, and I will use it to save others.” And I think you were right to mention how God always uses other people for his purposes. He could directly enact, and he does sometimes in people’s lives, but typically, it’s always through us that he acts. Now-
Paul Kengor:
If I may, about the next life, St. Gemma Galgani, who’s one of the ones that I profile in the book, and she was 1878 to 1903, 25 years old, and in one of her discussions with the Virgin Mary, she said, “I’m willing to do more suffering in the next life in heaven.” And Mary says to her, something to the effect in Italian, “Oh, honey. There’s no more suffering in heaven.” I could see my Italian grandmother saying that, right? “Honey, there’s no more suffering in heaven. It ends here.” But what would’ve been her purpose? She had stigmata. She was tormented and beaten physically by demons like Padre Pio was. Now, the devil is no gentleman. He’s willing to beat up a girl as well as a guy, and Padre Pio would get beaten up by demons. And in her case, people would come into the room and see this 20-year-old Italian girl being invisibly pulled across the floor by her hair by a demon. Just chilling stuff.
And like St. Faustina, she got used to taking on the demons. In one case, Faustina is writing in her diary, and the demons are tormenting her, and she just suddenly picks up a crucifix and goes like this, and then goes back to writing. Then Gemma Galgani told her spiritual director one time, she said, “Oh, Father. You should have seen him,” talking about the devil or demon, “he tripped as he was falling out of the room. He’s so silly.” It’s like laughing at him, and the spiritual director’s like, “I’m not going to laugh. I don’t think that’s funny at all. I don’t want to mock any of them. I’m really scared by this.”
But what could have been her purpose for this? I quote in the chapter on her a half-a-dozen different modern exorcists, who have written down in writing in books, that during the course of their exorcisms, one of the most powerful intercessors has been St. Gemma Galgani. And in one case, one of the exorcists with a particularly difficult exorcism says, “Identify yourself,” to the demon, and the demon does. And then the demon says something like, “Oh, she’s here. I hate her. She’s disgusting.” The exorcist says, “Who is it?” “The woman in black. Oh, I hate her.” And the exorcist says, “You mean the blessed mother?” “No. Gemma, Saint Gemma. I hate her.” But she’s apparently become, I call her Terror of Demons to borrow from the phrase of Saint Joseph.
So you might wonder what was her purpose in all of this? It might not have been strictly to help the expiation of sins of the world while she’s alive between 1878 to 1903, but to spiritually prepare her for the next world to be this figure from heaven, this powerful intercessor who can fight demons and the devil from this other plane of existence. Now, how do I know that? And our Protestant friends, “Where’s that in the Bible?” It’s not in the Bible, dude. The Bible is written 1800 years before Gemma Galgani, but the story doesn’t stop there. All right? There’s stuff that has happened since. Is that what she’s, I don’t know, but it’s very compelling.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. One of the things I really appreciate about the book is that I knew, of course, about St. Francis of Assisi a lot. I knew about the Padre Pio, read a number of books by him, and I knew St. Catherine of Siena, familiar with her and that, but I actually didn’t know St. Faustina was a stigmatist until I read the book. But St. Gemma, what’s her last name?
Paul Kengor:
Galgani.
Eric Sammons:
Galgani, she was fascinating because I had heard of a St. Gemma a little bit, and I think there’s another one too, but I heard of her basically, but not really. And then find out what a powerhouse she is spiritually, and Padre Pio also venerated her, right? He had devotion to her, and she was pretty well known then, but she was-
Paul Kengor:
She was canonized right away. She was canonized within a couple of decades after her death. In fact, sooner than Padre Pio was. In the case of a lot of people like this in modern Italy, we’re talking 20th century, people would learn about this in the villages very quickly, and soon there were lines outside the door. Sister Elena Aiello is another one from the early 1960s in Calabria, right? People started lining up outside the door. Oh, and here’s one, she just died, Sister Agnes, Our Lady of Akita seer, who had the incredible visions in 1973, including the one October 13th, 1973, so the anniversary of the Miracle of the Son and Fatima. In fact, her Bishop, Ito, who said that these visions are indeed, he approved them, of supernatural origin, he has said that the message of Akita is the message of Fatima. It’s like an extension of the message of Fatima.
She’s the one who predicted a day of bishops fighting bishops, clergy fighting clergy, cardinals fighting cardinals, talked about a chastisement, a ball of fire from the sky. Really chilling predictions from her that may still yet becoming true in our time. I didn’t know, Eric, until I read the letter from Bishop Ito that she had the stigmata, and then I did a little bit of research on it and thought, “Oh, wow. Yeah.” No one ever mentions that she had stigmata. Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, who is one of the principal individuals known for the Three Days of Darkness concept, she had stigmata. It’s often not talked about. I think only one of her biographers, her main authoritative biographer, he mentions it, and I quote him a paragraph or two where he mentions it.
But what I found out in a lot of these cases that these blesseds and saints who had these visions of days of darkness and chastisement, ball of fire from the sky and everything. Marie Julie Jahenny is another, although she’s not a blessed or a saint, but when I found out that they had stigmata too, that’s what really struck me, because if they had those markings as well, and they were not rejected and affirmed by church officials or by their spiritual advisors, and they had these prophecies and these visions, it’s an added weight, as far as I’m concerned, to whatever it is that they were trying to tell us. It’s like an imprimatur, like a marking of approval almost.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. It’s kind of like when they find a body incorrupt years after they died. It’s like a little stamp of approval, so to speak, from heaven. Now, you mentioned the visions, and you talk about that a number of times in the book that it was not uncommon for stigmatists, particularly those the 20th century and whatnot, they have certain visions, and the themes are a little frightening to be honest. And so talk a little bit about that. Some of the stigmatists who had these visions, they seemed to have a common thread, and the thread wasn’t exactly everything is awesome. So what were some of those visions?
Paul Kengor:
That’s the main reason I wrote the book is because I noticed this commonality of so many of them, especially in the 20th century, talking about the end times, which seemed like our times. And St. Faustina Kowalska, born 1905, died in 1938, 33 years old, and we have her diary. And the first time I read her diary, I thought, “Look at all these statements about the end times.” She’s the first canonized saint of the new millennium by Pope John Paul II. That in itself is significant. And she says in her diary, in her own writing, that Jesus told her, “You will prepare the world for my second coming. You are the one who will prepare the world for my second coming.” With her message of divine mercy, her talk of the end times, the final days of marking in the sky, Jesus appearing in the sky, great chastisement. She was the one who said that, blessed Elena Aiello said it, akita said it, Anna Maria Taigi, the days of darkness, people who prophesied that. In fact, Elena Aiello. I was really struck by her because I had never heard of her.
Eric Sammons:
I had not either.
Paul Kengor:
And I tracked down her writings in Italian, any books that I could get, any writings that I could possibly get. She predicted a Days of Darkness, as she put it, of 70 hours. She actually gave some would say three days of darkness. Faustina, I believe, says Days of Darkness. I don’t think she uses the word three days, but Days of Darkness. But little Sister Elena Aiello actually used the phrase 70 hours, and that really hit me because I thought, “Well, that’s pretty specific.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right.
Paul Kengor:
Three days would be 72. I’m not going to give or take a couple of hours, be it off there. If you’re living through it, 70 hours is going to feel like three days. But I found consistency in their predictions about chastisement, end times that made me feel like if these recent stigmatists, if these prophecies that they said are legit that we should pay attention to, let’s see what they had to say.
Eric Sammons:
We need to be ready, it sounds like.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, you need to be ready.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Now, are there any stigmatists alive today where they claim to be stigmatists and there seems to be at least some evidence that this might be legitimate, that this isn’t fake?
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, there are a few today, and they’re tracked by some Catholic websites, and some of these websites, they could be very sloppy. And this is one of the things that really aggravated me because I wanted to know can I take this person’s words or not? And I would read some of the purported visions of some of these people, and they could often be very apocalyptic. They could seem like hyperbole in many cases, very dramatic. In other cases, they would sometimes make theological statements, Eric, where honestly, I would look at them. I’d say, “Wow, that seems spot on. The way this person who’s claiming to have stigmata today, what she just said about the church in our times, I don’t know. That seems like a pretty sophisticated thing for some mother of five or six in this country in Latin America to be just making up.” But it frustrates me because I’m like, “Is this real or not?”
Then again, in Padre Pio’s time, people went through this. People didn’t know for sure whether or not he was legit, and he died in 1968. They didn’t canonize him for decades after. All of these stigmatists in their time are all doubted. There’s a woman in Italy right now, her name is Gisella Cardia. I talk about her in the book. I’ve watched video online where it looks like she has maybe some type of oil or blood that’s coming out of her palms. I’m not there. I don’t know. There’s not a team of Vatican people there to confirm it. There’s a doctor there, an Italian doctor, and another clergy who’s there, and they’re watching it, and they claim that it’s true. It doesn’t look like it’s being fake, but I am just watching, saying, “Lord, could somebody go there, can somebody go investigate this? Is this true? Is it true or not?”
Eric Sammons:
Why isn’t the Vatican investigating it? Is the Bishop just kind of ignored it or what?
Paul Kengor:
In her case, she became a sensation on Italian television. And by the way, it really struck me about her. She was being tracked on the website Countdown to the Kingdom, and what struck me about her is she’s from Trevignano Romano, which I’ve been to in Italy. The first time that I was in Italy with my family in 2014, my wife tried to find a house that we could stay in. I was there for about three weeks doing research for A Pope and a President, the book that became A Pope and a President. And she did, what is it like? Home Away From Home? I forget what they’re called, that website. And so she found this village called Trevignano Romano, seemed like a nice distance, not too far away from Rome, right on Lake Bracciano. And so that’s where we stayed, and we love this place and really enjoyed it there.
And so when I heard that this woman was from Trevignano Romano, I thought, “Wow. Well, that’s interesting because where I was just there a few years ago.” So I started following her case, started reading it in Italian. I watched Italian news shows that had her on, and there would be the skeptics attacking her. She would be responding. She seemed legit, she seemed sincere. Other people claim she’s a faker. Some claim she changed her name. I don’t know, but it got to the point where the local bishop and Vatican did start investigating her, and they rejected her to some degree, which I think prompted the Countdown to the Kingdom guys to remove her from the website.
But what’s interesting about what the Vatican said about her, Eric, they didn’t rule on her stigmata, and I thought, “Can’t you guys make a statement on that?” That would seem the easiest thing of all to kind of prove or disprove. I just want to know how they ruled on the stigmata. They were arguing with certain things that she said or claimed and this and that. Send a team of the Vatican people there and tell me if she’s bleeding from her hands or not.
And it’s also a sign of our times and our secular age that you go to the website of CNN.com or Fox News, all they care about is Biden and Kamala and Trump, and who’s getting who. If there’s some woman in Italy or Latin America who claims to be bleeding from her hands right now, why aren’t you over there with your TV cameras, even as skeptics? Go check it out. Go do a story on this. It’s almost like a sign of how much Satan is in control of our secular age that no one in the West even cares about this enough to investigate it, to try to shoot it down.
Eric Sammons:
I think it’s crazy that a man had the stigmata for 50 years in full public view of everybody, and people are just like, “Eh, whatever.” That could still be a story today.
Paul Kengor:
I know. I agree. They should have demanded to sit in a room with him in 1960 for as long as they possibly could, or as long as he would allow, and just show the blood coming from his hands. Now, I know people who’ve been involved in documentaries. Drew Mariani of Relevant Radio, who I do his show a lot, and he endorsed this book, and Drew was involved in a case about a stigmatist. He said he watched her bleed from her hands. In fact, Drew even was involved in Our Lady of Akita documentary and interviewed her, of all things. At that point, Our Lady of Akita, sister Agnes, she was no longer bleeding from her hands as far as we know. I think that was a temporary thing that she had during that time. She was cured of deafness. And she just died, and from what I hear, they donated her body to science.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, I didn’t hear that.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah. The Vatican should be over there getting a hold of the body and putting it behind glass.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Paul Kengor:
Incorruptability or whatever else. This is a big deal in her case.
Eric Sammons:
I hope that’s not the case. That’d be awful.
Paul Kengor:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
Who knows? Okay, so I just want to recommend people, The Stigmatists: Their Gifts, Their Revelations, Their Warnings, great book, and it really opened up the mystery of the stigmata to me a lot. Because like I said, I knew Francis, Padre Pio, Catherine of Siena a little bit, and those are probably the big three as far as the biggest saints as far as known. But I didn’t know St. Faustina, I didn’t know about people like St. Gemma. And I will say my favorite, I think, and I ended up buying a book about her, was Therese Neumann.
Paul Kengor:
Oh, yeah, amazing.
Eric Sammons:
You didn’t have a whole chapter on her, because I understand she’s a servant of God, she has not been beatified, all that stuff, and so there needs to be some reserve in the sense of we allow the Church to make final decisions on this, not us. At the same time, I ended up buying the book. I think you would reference the book in your book, and then Vogel, I think his last name is, and oh, my gosh, her story is just insane as far as just how outlandish, I’m not saying this in a bad way, I just mean out of the ordinary, I guess, extraordinary. She didn’t eat or drink for the last 35 years of her life. She had-
Paul Kengor:
Except for one thing, the Eucharist.
Eric Sammons:
Right. That’s the most important part, the Blessed Sacrament obviously.
Paul Kengor:
Isn’t that a crazy thing? And gained weight.
Eric Sammons:
I actually posted on X this week about this, and some people were like, “Oh, I fasted for 40 days, and I lost 40 some pounds. There’s no way it’s possible.” Of course, it’s not possible. We’re not saying it’s naturally possible. You can’t live for 35 years on only the Sacrament. That is impossible. That’s the whole point.
Paul Kengor:
And they would often, including Catherine of Sienna and Anne Catherine Emmerich, if they were given real food, they would vomit it up. They couldn’t hold it down. The only thing that they could hold down was the Eucharist. Now, they have medical doctors next to these women, and they gain weight too, Therese Neumann gained weight, and you can’t do that and you can’t fake that. All right? When you’re being followed and monitored.
Eric Sammons:
You can fake that for a few days, a week or two, but you cannot fake that for 30 some years. Somebody’s going to see you picking up a burger someday. It’s just going to happen. The truth is because there’s always skeptics of these people, it makes it very difficult to do this for any extended period of time. There are people who wanted to catch Padre Pio. There are people who wanted to catch Therese Neumann. The Nazis were after her. You don’t think they would’ve had a way to discredit her if they could?
Paul Kengor:
Exactly right.
Eric Sammons:
So I want to recommend the book very highly. It introduces you to a lot of people who are amazing and were gifted by God in a special way. And I do think, at least for me, it also did remind me of the importance of ourselves taking on, accepting suffering and penance and mortification in our life. We’re not going to have the unique craziness of the stigmata, but we’re all called to it a level of mortification, penance based on our state of life and things of that nature. So I really do appreciate you writing the book, Paul.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Eric. It was good to write on something like this rather than the Devil and Karl Marx, right? Finally, something spiritually edifying and uplifting about people. Marx was all about himself and his greed and his obsession with capital and money and your property. These are people who truly gave it all up, gave their bodies totally over like they’re Jesus.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, absolutely. Amen. Okay, Paul, I will put a link to where you can buy the book from TAN publishers. I’ll put a link to that. Anywhere else, people can find, obviously American Spectator, probably find a lot of your writing as well, right?
Paul Kengor:
Yeah. Follow me. So I’m the Editor of The American Spectator, spectator.org, and we do a weekend Spectator podcast there, myself and Grace Riley, and read me a Crisis Magazine, which I like to write to more often. I wish I should, I should write for you more often.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, you should.
Paul Kengor:
And I write for National Catholic Register every now and then as well.
Eric Sammons:
Great, awesome. Well, thanks, Paul. I appreciate it.
Paul Kengor:
Yeah, thanks for the great work you do at Crisis, Eric.
Eric Sammons:
Thanks a lot. Okay. Until next time, everybody. God love you.