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Speaker 2: And welcome back George Noria with Christoph Spears. As we
Speaker 2: were talking about his latest work Supernatural Bodies, Stigmata and
Speaker 2: Modern Britain and Ireland. Christoph, to those who do not
Speaker 2: know what stigmata is, would you explain it please?
Speaker 3: So stigmata are the wounds that were inflicted on Christ
Speaker 3: when he went up on when he was crucified. So
Speaker 3: we're talking about the nails that went through his hands
Speaker 3: and feet sometimes, the pinpricks of the crown of storms
Speaker 3: that was put on his head, and the wound in
Speaker 3: his side when the Roman soldier pissed his side with
Speaker 3: a spear.
Speaker 2: I do recall the late Padre Pio apparently had the stigmato,
Speaker 2: did he not?
Speaker 3: He did, yes, and he's probably one of the most
Speaker 3: famous people with the stigmata that throughout history. Actually he
Speaker 3: was mostly known for having the wounds.
Speaker 2: Now, the people who would have the stigmata wounds, they
Speaker 2: would just appear all of a sudden and then disappear
Speaker 2: just as quickly, would they not?
Speaker 3: That was the claim? Yeah, so, and if it was
Speaker 3: as authentic as possible, it would happen at the moment
Speaker 3: when historically Christ went upon the cross, So we're talking
Speaker 3: about Friday afternoon. On Good Friday, really around three o'clock
Speaker 3: in the afternoon, the wounds would allegedly appear supernaturally so
Speaker 3: spontaneously on people's bodies as they went through the passion
Speaker 3: of Christ. With Christ.
Speaker 2: Roughly how many people since the beginning of time have
Speaker 2: come down with the stigmata.
Speaker 3: Well, that would be many hundreds. The first person who
Speaker 3: was recorded to have Christ's wounds on his body given
Speaker 3: to him by supernatural powers Saint Francis of the cz
Speaker 3: in twelve twenty four, So that was the founder of
Speaker 3: the Franciscan order in the Catholic Church, who walks up
Speaker 3: the mountain, sat down to pray and was visited by
Speaker 3: an angel who wounded him supernaturally to have rights wounds
Speaker 3: on his own body, and he basically kicked off a trend,
Speaker 3: you could say, since then, since the thirteenth century, it's
Speaker 3: been hundreds of people.
Speaker 2: Well, now, the hundreds of people that have had stigmata,
Speaker 2: are they all righteous people?
Speaker 3: Definitely not so. Really, one of the core problems with
Speaker 3: stigmata is that it's a phenomenon that happens on people's bodies,
Speaker 3: and it's relatively easy to fake it. So the question
Speaker 3: of is it authentic, is it supernatural, or is it
Speaker 3: done through human hands has always been a big problem
Speaker 3: throughout the history of the phenomenon, and there are many
Speaker 3: many examples of people who have inflicted it on themselves,
Speaker 3: you know, or have had someone else inflicted on them
Speaker 3: for personal gains, but to be put in a position
Speaker 3: of spiritual authority to make money out of it very
Speaker 3: often as.
Speaker 2: Well, or they're mentally unstable.
Speaker 3: That as well. Yeah, a lot of people with stigmata
Speaker 3: who claimed to have the stigmata were examined by doctors,
Speaker 3: but also by as the nineteenth century went on, by
Speaker 3: psychologists and psychiatrists, and were often also like the people
Speaker 3: we were talking about earlier that the people who were
Speaker 3: possessed very often put in in care in psychiatric Asylunce.
Speaker 2: Now, why did you keen on Britain and Ireland for
Speaker 2: your investigation as opposed to Italy, for example, where most
Speaker 2: of them are predominantly Catholic.
Speaker 3: Well, it's always bothered me a little bit when people
Speaker 3: talk about phenomena like this as something that only happens
Speaker 3: in Catholicism because it doesn't ring true to me. Something
Speaker 3: like stigma se is significant for people outside Catholicism too,
Speaker 3: I always thought. So I went to look for it
Speaker 3: in a country that is mostly protest and Britain, and
Speaker 3: I found that people also had these wounds. They could
Speaker 3: also lead like Christ. But what you do see is
Speaker 3: that that happens and for very different reasons, and the
Speaker 3: profiles of these people are so different. Some of them
Speaker 3: become prophets, become cult leaders, some of them become faith healers,
Speaker 3: so they heal with their leading hands, they can heal
Speaker 3: other people's illnesses. So these stories are very very divergent,
Speaker 3: very different from each other, and it's just so much
Speaker 3: richer than people have thought. It's not just the Catholic phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Do the people who have the stigmato know what it means?
Speaker 3: In some cases, when you look at what we were
Speaker 3: talking about earlier with possession, when we say predominantly young women,
Speaker 3: that's also the case of this phenomenon. And then we
Speaker 3: are talking about women who are in their twenties or
Speaker 3: early thirties who are very often not very well educated,
Speaker 3: also not theologically educated. So this is something that happens
Speaker 3: to them and it overwhelms them, and they often don't
Speaker 3: know what it means specifically. Apart from that, they feel
Speaker 3: like they are with Christ. And then a priest steps
Speaker 3: thin and becomes what they call a spiritual guide I guess,
Speaker 3: a spiritual confessor who helps them and educates them, but
Speaker 3: it also sometimes coaxes them on, and then they becomes
Speaker 3: sometimes a bit like a mystical duo. I guess, because
Speaker 3: obviously what happens as soon as someone has these wounds
Speaker 3: is and it's visible, people start coming into the room.
Speaker 3: People want to see this because for many people, this
Speaker 3: is a manifestation of God's power on someone's body is
Speaker 3: for many people something very sacred, something very yeah, like
Speaker 3: physical evidence of God's presence, so they want to see
Speaker 3: it up close. Some people want to take some of
Speaker 3: the blood with them as a relic or as something
Speaker 3: that they can use as a talis amount to ward
Speaker 3: off evil or to heal others with. So there's a
Speaker 3: lot of it brings a lot of promotion. I guess.
Speaker 2: While your investigations, Christophe, what would you say is the
Speaker 2: strangest thing you've come across so far?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, that's one of the things that surprised me
Speaker 3: is going back to exorcisms and possession for a moment,
Speaker 3: is in the nineteenth century, there was a town here
Speaker 3: in Belton, not far from the big city of Antwerp,
Speaker 3: where a group of so called sorcerers appeared and cursed
Speaker 3: pretty much a whole neighborhood to be possessed at once.
Speaker 3: I found that very very That was a very overwhelming
Speaker 3: story for me, because I didn't I always thought it
Speaker 3: was about individuals, not about whole communities at once becoming
Speaker 3: possessed and requiring an exorcism. That was a very powerful story.
Speaker 3: And then those those sorcerers were tried in court, not
Speaker 3: so much for cursing or a cursing or causing causing possession,
Speaker 3: but for causing social disruption because always possessed people couldn't
Speaker 3: function anymore in society. So there's this whole this whole
Speaker 3: town is in uproar suddenly because of spiritual unrest, you
Speaker 3: could say, and the town becomes a battlefield or cosmological powers.
Speaker 2: Briefly, how did you go about researching supernatural bodies? How
Speaker 2: did you even begin that?
Speaker 3: It's the nice thing about studying phenomena like this in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth and TWENTIETHH century is that newspapers were already around,
Speaker 3: and we're talking about a lot of different types of newspapers,
Speaker 3: the local newspapers, little magazines. There's a lot of print
Speaker 3: material out and people were always fascinated by these types
Speaker 3: of phenomena because, like you said earlier, we don't really know,
Speaker 3: we can't know exactly what's going on. Yet people were
Speaker 3: struggling with trying to figure out what it is they're
Speaker 3: seeing everywhere, so they're write about it all the time.
Speaker 3: And those types of documents are really useful at starting
Speaker 3: points because then I go into the archives, I go
Speaker 3: to court records for example, like what I just mentioned
Speaker 3: about that town. Five fine spiritual diaries of priests of
Speaker 3: the people who have the stigmata, for example, they tend
Speaker 3: to write down how they feel when it happens, so
Speaker 3: those sources are extremely rich in detail. Talk is a
Speaker 3: very powerful things. I was reading a spiritual diary of
Speaker 3: a woman in Leeds, So Northern England, who at the
Speaker 3: stigma for every week, and she keeps a diary about
Speaker 3: it and she describes as she goes through it how
Speaker 3: she bleeds. This happens during the First World war, and
Speaker 3: how her bleeding and suffering is a symbol of the
Speaker 3: war of the soul, the suffering that happens in the
Speaker 3: whole world, and people can come to her for comfort,
Speaker 3: and that's what happens. People who have lost someone in
Speaker 3: the war come to her for comfort. So she becomes
Speaker 3: a very powerful social figure of community healing.
Speaker 2: How long are these people bleed, Christoph? Obviously not long
Speaker 2: enough to bleed out right.
Speaker 3: Well, it varies as well. Some of them don't bleed
Speaker 3: at all. They are more like wounds that don't heal.
Speaker 3: So you see either hope, you see a hole opening
Speaker 3: up in the skin, in the skin without blood coming out.
Speaker 3: Some of them do bleed quite profusely, but then we're
Speaker 3: talking about maybe half an hour an hour before the
Speaker 3: wounds close up again or become scar tissue.
Speaker 2: What makes the wounds stop bleeding? Prayer?
Speaker 3: That is the hardest question, because more striking to me
Speaker 3: than the wounds opening spontaneously or supernaturally, it's the fact
Speaker 3: that they close by themselves and sometimes disappear entirely. Again,
Speaker 3: that doesn't I'm struggling with that a bit, because it's
Speaker 3: not prayer about its stopping, because being allowed to suffer
Speaker 3: with Christ in such a way as for many of
Speaker 3: them privilege. So it's something that is it's a it's
Speaker 3: a source of ecstasy almost, it's a pain that elevates
Speaker 3: your existence, you could say, because you gets you really
Speaker 3: close to Christ and to God. So you don't necessarily
Speaker 3: want it to stop.
Speaker 2: I suppose do they happen at will or during certain times?
Speaker 3: There is as far as there is any medical consensus
Speaker 3: about this. We're talking about psychopathological phenomena. So it's the
Speaker 3: idea that by focusing your will and your consciousness on
Speaker 3: particular parts of your body, you can invoke physical wounds.
Speaker 3: That's that's a medical theory that might explain what goes on,
Speaker 3: and that would mean that you can have them at
Speaker 3: will if you if you focus strong enough on it.
Speaker 2: I was going to say, what is modern medicine said
Speaker 2: about this with the legitimate cases? Are they baffled?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is no consensus. So yeah, what what I
Speaker 3: just said, for example, that the psychopathological explanation of it
Speaker 3: is that you can focus your you can focus your
Speaker 3: mind as the power of the mind over the body.
Speaker 3: But historically, also there's been a strong trend in medical
Speaker 3: science that all these phenomena are part of some kind
Speaker 3: of religious delusion, So it's a it's a mental it's
Speaker 3: related to mental illness.
Speaker 2: Did anybody try to see if padre Pio was faking it?
Speaker 3: That's a very controversial case. Yes, So the main story
Speaker 3: about padre Pio is that he potentially used some kind
Speaker 3: of acid to keep his wounds open, rather than that
Speaker 3: he was blessed by something, and there are there are
Speaker 3: some conspicuous elements about his story, like how he would
Speaker 3: very obviously hide his the wounds in his hands with
Speaker 3: these gloves that you could then get as relics, and
Speaker 3: the kind of commercialized it a little bit, you could say.
Speaker 3: So when you talk about authenticity, it's difficult to say
Speaker 3: because so much for him depended on gaining a foretold
Speaker 3: and reputation and authority because of the stigmata that he
Speaker 3: claimed to have. So we don't know if they were
Speaker 3: authentic or not, or if they were obviously faked, but
Speaker 3: there are hints that it might not be completely authentic
Speaker 3: and absolutely take into account he's a saint, but the
Speaker 3: stigmata were never part of the whole canonization process. So
Speaker 3: the stigma are not a miracle, they're not they're not
Speaker 3: a convincing argument in favor of making someone a saint.
Speaker 2: Has the Church ever come out with a statement about
Speaker 2: stigmato something official?
Speaker 3: No, No, And that's that's in itself is very interesting.
Speaker 3: I think the fact that they don't want to say anything.
Speaker 2: About it, you would think they would, Yeah, but it's.
Speaker 3: So controversial, and historically there have been so many cases
Speaker 3: of people who suddenly had the wounds and they became
Speaker 3: mystical figures that were quite threatening to the church. So
Speaker 3: I think they rather want to stay away from it
Speaker 3: a little bit.
Speaker 2: If they are if these are real, If they are real,
Speaker 2: why do you think the individual was selected by God,
Speaker 2: let's say, to do this.
Speaker 3: Or one meaning a lot of them give or the
Speaker 3: people around them give to the person bleeding. Is that
Speaker 3: they are suffering for the sins of others, just like
Speaker 3: Christ that on the cross, on the cross, So that
Speaker 3: that is the reason that they are blessed with these wounds,
Speaker 3: is so that they can take up a position in
Speaker 3: which other people can come to them and be relieved
Speaker 3: of their sinfulness through that body. It's like they become
Speaker 3: a bit like the living bodies on which Christ appears.
Speaker 3: You can say that they're little Christ.
Speaker 2: Is the blood special? I mean if you touch it,
Speaker 2: do you get anything mystical or anything like that.
Speaker 3: As well that a lot of people seem to believe that, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they take it home with them. You can get there
Speaker 3: are little files of stigmatic blood, for example, that people
Speaker 3: have taken home from the body. There are some stigmatics
Speaker 3: have a tendency to bleed on devotional cards for example,
Speaker 3: for people so that they can take the blood with
Speaker 3: them as well, because it's the sense of healing sometimes
Speaker 3: or of keeping the evil away. So yeah, that blood
Speaker 3: is special. It is also special because there are theories
Speaker 3: that say that it's not actually the blood of the
Speaker 3: person bleeding coming out of the wounds, it's actually Christ's blood. Interesting,
Speaker 3: and that would be a way to find out out
Speaker 3: what Christ's blood tie is as well.
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