The stigmata – bodily marks resembling the wounds of the crucified Christ – usually manifest themselves in female subjects. One of the more renowned women to suffer the experience was Therese Neumann, a poor peasant girl born in Konnersreuth, Bavaria, in 1898.

Neumann’s childhood seemed normal, even mundane. She worked as a domestic on neighbouring farms, until a series of inexplicable illnesses rendered labour impossible. Then during the Lenten season of 1926, she saw Jesus and her current illness was cured. In its stead, however, her body was wracked with the Passion – the give traditional wounds associated with Christ’s crucifixion, as well as whip lashes across the back and thorn pricks on the head.

Neumann’s wounds would open every Good Friday and during Lent for the next 32 years, sometimes gushing as much as a pint of blood and causing her to lose as much as 8 pounds during the course of a single affliction.

Neumann spent a largely reclusive life, passing much of her time in bed shrouded in white linens. She was examined extensively by the medical profession of the day, but no hint of a hoax or trickery was ever remotely entertained.

Almost as startling as Neumann’s stigmata was her ability to go without food or water for extended periods of time. She survived on wine and Communion wafers for the last three and a half decades of her life. Giver her circumstances, Neumann remained reasonably healthy. She continued to have visions and ecstatic trances until her death in 1962.

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The spontaneous appearance of stigmata, the replication of the wounds Jesus Christ suffered on the cross, on a seemingly normal person is considered a holy occurrence. A most remarkable case was reported in the Italian town of Loggia. A Capuchin monk known as Padre Pio was not only marked by the stigmata, but also able to heal the sick and injured by simply laying his hands on their bodies. On one such occasion, a 9-year-old boy, so hunchbacked that he could only crawl through the streets, was suddenly able to stand up straight after one touch of the monk’s bleeding hand.

Padre Pio, born in 1887, first felt pain in his hands, feet and side when he was 28 years old, but doctors were unable to determine the cause. Three years later, he was praying at the alter when he collapsed in pain. Fellow monks found him unconscious some time later, bleeding from his hands, feet and side with no apparent reason. The monks immediately realised that he displayed the stigmata of Christ.

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