1 of 2

The Italian poet Dante, in his Divine Comedy, said of Francis, “He received from Christ the last seal, which his members bore for two years.” By “the last seal,” Dante meant the Christ-like wounds that appeared on Francis, which Dante interpreted as a confirmation of Francis’s life of Christ-like suffering.

Francis was the first to claim to have received such “stigmata.” But did he actually receive such wounds? What kinds of wounds were these? What caused them? What did they mean? Christian History put these questions to Dr. Lawrence S. Cunningham, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of St. Francis of Assisi (Harper & Row, 1981).

The basic facts about which the early sources on the life of Saint Francis agree are these: Two years before he died, Francis went on retreat with three of his long-time companions, to a mountain called La Verna. He was tired, sick, nearly blind, a person who no longer headed the movement of little brothers he had founded.

On or about the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14), he had an ecstatic experience. He saw a vision of a six-winged seraph (compare Isa. 6:2) embracing a crucified man, and the crucified man seemingly pierced Francis’s body.

Afterward, until his death in 1226, Francis carried on his body what appeared to be wounds on his hands, feet, and side. An early account described the wounds as dark scars that would periodically bleed.

In announcing Francis’s death, the head of his order, Brother Elias of Cortona, wrote a circular letter to all the friars. Elias said that those who were with Francis at his death inspected the wounds, which Elias called, for the first time, stigmata.

The Greek word stigma means “brand mark” or “scar.” The word occurs in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “I carry the brand marks (ta stigmata) of Jesus on my body” (6:17). The same word was carried over by Jerome in his Latin Vulgate version; Elias was simply using Paul’s vocabulary to describe the bodily marks of Francis.

This strange phenomenon, which Elias said was “unheard of in our time,” seems not to have been a fiction. It is well attested in the earliest sources.

The early Franciscans collected notarized statements from those who saw the marks on Francis, both during his life and after his death. In less than a decade after Francis’s death, a painting (the Berlingheri altarpiece at Pescia) depicts the wounds on the hands and feet of Francis.

Francis had the stigmata: that seems defensible given the historical evidence, even though, in his own day, there were doubters.

Scholars of the stigmata, even Catholic believers like the late Herbert Thurston, S.J., almost unanimously agree that such phenomena are best explained as bodily reactions to intense ecstatic and psychological experiences.

In Francis’s case, the early biographers of Francis clearly connect the stigmata to his intense devotion to the crucified Christ. All of Francis’s preaching about poverty and self-denying love were intimately linked to his understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.

Of course, whether a profound experience has ultimately been brought on by God is not in the purview of science to decide. Yet Francis’s demeanor after the experience suggests to some that his was a genuine miracle. He bore his stigmata without becoming obsessed by them or allowing them to become an object of curiosity. After the events on La Verna, and for two years until his death, he still went on preaching tours, despite his ill health.

next page... |  1 of 2

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help