After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Wounds of Christ: Macabre History of Stigmata

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

The wounds that Christ received on the cross - the stigmata - have had a strange afterlife, reappearing on the flesh of followers from St Francis of Assisi right through to the present. The stigmata are most commonly found on young women and are often accompanied by other miracles. What can this strange history teach us?Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined today by Kristof Smeyers author of Supernatural Bodies: Stigmata in modern Britain and IrelandEdited and produced by Freddy Chick and Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

At a place called Golgotha in Hebrew, which is to say the place of the skull, they crucified him. Pontius Pilate wrote a sign and put it above his head. Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. And sitting down, they watched him there. From the sixth to the ninth hour, there was darkness over all the land. At about the ninth hour, the man we call Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying,

Eli, Eli, Lama lama, sakbaktani, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Jesus, when he cried aloud once more, passed from this world to the next, so the story goes. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake. The image of Christ's crucifixion has been burned into the minds of Christians, blood dripping from the crown of thorns from his side and above all,

from the wounds in his palms and feet where he was nailed to the cross. I know, because as a little boy, I would spend time staring at the ever present, crucified Christ, that those bloody wounds are haunting. And so, perhaps, it is not so surprising that they have taken on a life of their own. In May 1841, in the sanctified wilderness of Tyrol, Italy, an English aristocrat is stooping inside a dark cottage, a hovel, some might call it. There, he comes face to face with what he called

the most extraordinary object in existence, the supernatural personification of the sufferings of the Redeemer. For, lying in her bed was young Maria Lazeri, 25 years old, her palms bleeding visibly where the wounds of Christ had miraculously appeared on her flesh. This is the story of Christ's wandering wounds. This is the history of the stigmata. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie.

And I'm Anthony. And today it is the history that you never knew you needed. The stigmata, the wounds of Christ that have appeared miraculously on people's bodies from the Middle Ages until today. Now, our guide for this topic is Dr. Christophe Smears, who is the author of Supernatural Bodies Stigmata in Modern Britain and Ireland. Christoph, we've been friends on Twitter, I think, for quite a while now, but it's nice to finally meet you almost in the flesh. We're doing this remotely. Welcome to After Dark.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. We're absolutely thrilled to have you here. Now, let's take a moment and go into this topic at a very basic level so that we're all on the same page. Can you explain to us what stigmata actually are? That's immediately an incredibly complex question because yes, Christ goes on the cross and he is wounded with nails and with a spear. The nails go through his hands and his feet, spear goes into his side, he has a crown of thorns on which makes his forehead bleed. Those would be the wounds of Christ, those are called stigmata, which then have a history

of manifesting on the bodies of humans throughout history from, indeed, about the 13th century on. Anyway, that's the very narrow definition of what stigmata are. There is a much wider definition, which means all kinds of pictorial skin markings that have something to do with Christ's life. So flowers that appear as if they are drawn with blood on someone's arm.

I've seen pictures of backs where there are whole flower decorations which are bleeding, which refer to roses in the tulips and all other flowers that have specific devotional significance for Christians. So stigmata is not it. Yeah, there's a lot of different types you would say. Now I was explaining to Christoph before we started recording that I have some first-hand experience of this, not as a receiver of the stigmata, but there was a woman who lived up the road whose name I'll omit for now, but she claimed to have the stigmata and I have seen this, well, I have seen gloves over the hands, bloodied gloves over the hands that claimed to

have the stigmata and actually I've just also remembered that members of my family would, older members of my family, would have given her credit for healing who was an ill member of my family at one point but certainly that person did recover. But that's very very local to me but can you tell us about who is the first person to receive the stigmata? How does this start? It starts in the 13th century with a monk called Francis of Assisi who walks up Mount Laverne, needs a rest, sits down on a rock, and an angel appears in the clouds and pierces his hands and feet. And he is stigmatized.

And that happens in 1222, on the 17th of September, two years before his death. And he's the first one to be blessed in such a way with angelic intervention, because before then there were people who did it to themselves. I think a couple of years before there was a church council just outside Oxford, actually, where a guy appeared who had crucified himself, basically, and said he was Christ reborn and he was punished for it, according to some accounts, even punished by crucifying him a second time, which I feel is a little bit too on the nose to be true. But anyway, once Francis of Assisi is stigmatized, dies, he sets a tradition in motion, which

makes stigmata very devotionally significant because they are immediately recognizable. You know, Christ on the cross is one image every Christian knows. You could say it's the very center of the whole religion. So for people to emulate that and almost be an embodiment or a physical way of connecting to Christ directly is hugely significant. It changes the way people experience Christianity,

you could say. And I mentioned, Christoph, that in the specific case that I'm aware of, there was this additional miraculous element to what this person claimed they could do. And in this case, it was healing, as far as I'm aware. I'm not sure if there was any others, but certainly that one, I know I can can remember was attached to it. Are miracles something that are associated with the stigmata all the time, or do they sometimes just occur for the sake of occurrence? Usually it's one symptom of many, I would say. And usually it's also the culmination point of a series of mystical and mysterious things happening to a person. So it usually starts with diabolic or demonic attacks. That's usually how supernatural suffering begins.

If I just think of a concrete example, there was a Victorian school teacher called Theresa Higginson, who for years was tormented by demons and the devil himself before that changed. And she started fasting also supernaturally. So claimed to go without food and drink for weeks, months. And eventually, through all that suffering, at the end Christ intervenes and says, that type of suffering is over now.

Here is some proper redemptive suffering. Take the wounds of Christ and share in that and become something more meaningful to your neighbors as well who've been suffering along with Teresa Higginson, because to be honest, being assaulted by demons every night, it's kind of a nuisance if you live right next door, because the furniture bashes around and there's a lot of screams.

I've had neighbors like that before, definitely. But yes, there's also like what you say about healing, that's quite stereotypical, it happens quite often. Things like becoming clairvoyant, being able to prophesise things. So you become a community figure in those types of ways as well. And do you think it's fair to say Christophe that your body then becomes part of the community in a way that hasn't necessarily been before? And I'm thinking specifically, you've mentioned a part, well, obviously we have Francis of Assisi, but the other examples that we're going to talk about and that you've just mentioned there are of women.

And I wonder if there's something about access to women's bodies in that community. And indeed with Anthony's example, it's a woman as well, right? So is there something about gender and body and religion intersecting here? What's going on there? That's the one million dollar question. Because when you look at, so I've been part of a team for a couple of years now that have looked at stigmata across Europe, mostly for the 19th and the 20th centuries and what we see across hundreds of cases is that about 95% of them are women, are young women as well. Once puberty starts, usually girls start having stigmata and they indeed they become a focal point or their bodies become a focal point for the communities. Mostly because in the period that we study,

we're not talking about nuns anymore, but we're talking about lay Catholics or lay Christians who experience these things at home. And that becomes known very quickly. And people tend to travel into people's bed, into a stigmatic's bedroom, basically, to see these things with their own eyes, and also demanding access to the miracle. So there are many cases where the woman in question while

she is bleeding supernaturally is told or forced to show the wounds even if she doesn't want to. That's problematic in all kinds of ways. On the other hand you could also stigmatize the body becomes part of a community also in a different way because you could almost call it a transnational republic of stigmatics. These people were in spiritual contact with each other sometimes across national boundaries. On a Friday afternoon, usually around three o'clock, when a stigmatic starts bleeding, when the wounds open, some of them go into a sort of trans and connect with someone else, for example in Italy, who's experiencing the same thing at the same time connect with someone else, for example, in Italy, who's experiencing the same thing at the same time.

And they communicate on a different plane altogether. I will say there's also a world in which it's a nice little side hustle, because I know there was a charge that the lady that I'm referencing, she definitely had a little pot that you had to pop some money into to avail of the visual or the healing from what I remember. But let's talk about another younger girl, because we want to talk about that kind of overarching example. And we spoke about Maria Lazari in Italy. Can you tell us a little bit about her case? Because we start to see the idea of a stigmatic change slightly in the 19th

century, and this is a good example of that, isn't it? Yeah. So even though stigmata have been going on for centuries since in Francis, it really becomes a public phenomenon in the early 19th century after the Napoleonic Wars, when travel, not coincidentally, I think, when travel becomes a little bit safer, people tend to move around the continent a bit more, you get pockets, especially near national borders, I would say. So as the map of Europe is being redrawn, you're in Northern Italy, for example, which is contested territory between Italy and Austria, etc. But it's also quite a remote area.

So you're talking about the Alps, there are little villages. They're quite isolated. They're hard to get to. And the idea very quickly emerges that in those pockets of European civilization, the pure Catholicism still exists. It's untouched by modernity. In these, again, not coincidentally, in these villages around the 1830s, several young girls suddenly appear to have stigmata. And one of them is Maria Domenica Lazzieri, who experiences it in a really visceral way. There are gradations of suffering

and there are gradations of blood loss throughout stigmatization. She's definitely in the higher, on a higher tier, I would say. So she bleeds a lot. She's incapacitated, she's bedridden. And every week on Fridays, she bleeds. And very quickly, she is visited by romantic poets, by Catholic doctors as well, physicians, writers writers who see her as a type of romantic ideal

as well, because she's there among the jagged peaks of the Alps, bleeding Christ's wounds and attracting more and more devotees that have this quite medieval, there's a medieval sense in the air. So she becomes an international phenomenon very quickly because people traveled to her, also from Britain. British Catholics after 1829, so when Catholicism becomes emancipated, are very eager, and I would say are potentially even more Catholic than the continental Catholics

in that they go looking for this type of thing as a confirmation that their faith has been true all along, and it's justified, and it shows it's proof that their faith has been true all along and it's justified and it shows, it's proof that their God still can work, his work in the material world. So you have a whole series of diary accounts of British families traveling into the Alps, looking at people like Lazzieri, forcing their children into these bedrooms as well, and going on their knees and praying, basically, and asking the stigmatic to pray for England, because England needs help. And like you say, there is a business aspect to it, because very quickly people are, painters and illustrators are setting up in the bedroom, are illustrating

her, it becomes an iconography, I guess, of what stigmata are supposed to look like in the early 19th century. I'm looking at one of those images now actually, Christophe, of young Maria. And she's, it's a 19th century print. She's in bed, she's sat up against a pillow. She's in this quite rudimental wooden bed in what looks like a wooden panelled room in a fairly mundane lower class house. This doesn't look like a particularly theatrical space, and yet there is something theatrical about this. At the end of the bed, her sheets have been pulled

back and you can see the stigmata on her feet. I think I'm appearing close to it now, but I think at least one hand, if not both, of her hands are visible at the other end. Do you find that there is an element of choreography about these scenes when people are coming into these spaces? I've just been doing a lot of work on the Cochlein ghost case of the 1760s and thinking about, again, young girls in particular hitting puberty and that experience of poltergeist and of hauntings. This seems like a very similar thing and in both instances, people, adults, certainly in the case of the Kotlin ghost, it's mostly men are coming into the space, the bedroom of this young girl, to see her do some kind of performance and to have access to her

experiences and her body to a certain extent. Is that a similar thing happening here? Do you see there's any sort of theatrical choreographed crossover? There is certainly, even at the point of access, this is a choreographed event or phenomenon, yes. Mostly because someone like Lazeri would have been instructed to do so by her spiritual director who stood at the door and basically decided when people could go in. And he was the one who would pull back the sheets. So there is that choreography. It goes as far as making sure that the lighting is right, or not too bright rather, so that the curtains would be shut, the window would always be closed, so that it's a multi-sensory experience as well. There's a build-up of expectations to the point that when you go through the

door, you kind of know what to expect, but it's still supposed to overwhelm you in all possible ways. Not that long after, there is a case in Ireland, in a Magdalene asylum, for example, where the director of the asylum instructs people to queue for ages in the corridor while you can hear the suffering going on in the room. So he's, he's deliberately building up those types of expectations. If you are that overwhelmed, you're also more likely to experience religion in the, in the appropriately intense manner.

Yeah, and it's very easy, I think, isn't it, for us to think about these things in contexts that are, you know, 12th century, 19th century, but even moving into the 20th century, we have an example of some of these events, stigmata events, and our next narrative will give us a little bit of an insight into that. The stigmata marry together the devout and the sensational. Nowhere is that clearer than in the life of the most famous receiver of stigmata of all, Padre Pio. On September 20th, 1918, only two months from the end of World War

One, a young priest called Francesco Furgioni, otherwise known as Padre Pio, On September 20th, 1918, only two months from the end of World War I, a young priest called Francesco Furgioni, otherwise known as Padre Pio, was at a church in the Italian village of San Giovanni Rotundo. In the middle of prayer, he was overtaken by a powerful trembling. Then came a feeling of great calm, and he saw a vision of Christ on the cross. The vision disappeared, and when Padre Pio returned to his senses, he saw wounds on his hands and feet from which fresh blood was flowing. Fast forward to 1943, and the world is at war once more.

An American bomber is flying over Italy, beginning its bombing run. They're not far from the village of San Giovanni Rotundo, home of the world's most famous stigmata bearer. Suddenly, through the clouds, the crew see a friar flying in the sky, his robes flapping wildly in the wind. He's extending wounded hands towards them, trying to signal them to turn back, not to drop their bombs.

Confronted with this sight, they turn their aircraft around and abort the mission. When they get back, they learn the flying friar with the wounds of Christ is none other than Padre Pio, a priest whose life had become a succession of miracles, each more sensational than the last. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janega. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and Popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And Crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm absolutely obsessed with this story. It's incredible. There are so many elements here

that I want to get into. But Christoph, first of all, please tell us who is Padre Pio? Well, Padre Pio was a Capuchin friar who became stigmatized in 1918 and very quickly became a public sensation because not only did he have the stigmata, but he also had clairvoyancy. He could fly, he could bilocate, he had the whole package, I could use you could say. And significantly again, if we talk about gender, it's interesting that 95% of all cases in this period are women and the one that stands out is Padre Pio, who very also if you listen to the story of his stigmatization very consciously I would say invokes the same miracle story of Saint Francis and if you look at pictures of Padre Pio holding a lamb it's not that hard to think that's

that's actually Francis of Assisi the big animal lover. So he becomes a popular sensation and he immediately becomes extremely suspect in the eyes of the church because the Vatican throughout the centuries, the Vatican has never really been that keen on stigmata. It's not, it doesn't count as a miracle. It is a bit problematic because bodies are dangerous things. They are difficult to control as well. And Padre Pio's body is out of control in many, many ways if the rumors can be believed.

But also they have the problem that he's basically treated as a saint already by the community, by Italy and increasingly globally. And the church in the end can't do that much about it. They forbid him to say mass for a while, I think, but he's too much of a sensation. And it's a very good, it's probably the most powerful story of a stigmatic

escaping the control of the church that they're a part of through the supernatural bodies. One thing that I want to highlight here, I suppose, just to bring it back to the, to the idea that we deal with a lot of, you know, myths, misdeeds, and the paranormal is in the subtitle of our, of our podcast, but we are essentially a history podcast and I'm just very aware as somebody who has grown up in a very Catholic society and was surrounded by images of Padre Pio and we had numerous relics of fragments of his gloves in the house, you know, that tiny little piece of white material that were supposedly part of Pio's gloves. A lot of this, it's just worth bearing in mind, doesn't live up to historical scrutiny, not that these people weren't exhibiting signs of the stigma, of

course they were, but the causation is, we're talking about it here in very religious terms and very Christian terms, as we've said, but of course, there is an awful lot of other things going into this beyond terms, as we've said. But of course, there is an awful lot of other things going into this beyond religion. And we've talked about money, we've talked about power, we've talked about influence, we've talked about bodies, we've talked about sex. All of this is influencing what we are experiencing. But as a child, all you see is a bleeding man holding a lamb, as you say. And these are very evocative, very dramatic images. And they're something that stick with you.

But now as an adult, there's also something very unsettling about them. I don't know what you found in your research, Christophe, but is this something that people tend to talk about? Or is it very much just devotional and they just believe everything quite blindly? No, I think blind belief has never really been there in historical sources. The fact that it is such an embodied phenomenon and that it's something that, you know, I think of the Caravaggio painting of doubting Thomas being invited to poke his finger into Christ's sidewind. That kind of stuff, that's what I'm seeing in sources. People want to see it up close because they want to make sure that it's actually real. And even, I mean, there are doctors going

into these bedrooms to ascertain or to make sure that, you know, what they're seeing is actually supernatural or not. Who knows? But the pathology of the whole thing has throughout history been as important to the history of stigmata as the religious aspect of it. Even with St. Francis, after he dies, his body is examined and turns out where are these stigmata really, and it becomes, especially in the 19th and the 20th century, as, as new medical disciplines appear, especially psychiatry and psychology, all these disciplines, they turn to stigmata and stigmatized bodies because they want to figure out what's really going on, what lies at the core of it. And there is no real medical consensus well into the 20th century.

What you do get is that people like the physicians of the La Salpeteriere in Paris use this hysteria diagnosis to try and explain what goes on, but then are confronted with things that don't match the diagnosis. Dermatologists also get involved, try to figure out with skin analysis what is exactly going on, on which layer of skin this is actually happening. Padre Pio had x-rays taken, for example. So science is extremely interested in this

until about the mid-20th century, and then they lose interest also because they're starting to feel like they might make themselves or they might undermine their own credibility if they sustain their interest in the paranormal. And by then, you know, side sciences have appeared that do want to keep going. So everything so far has been focused on the Catholic faith, but let's move on now to talk about an individual called Dorothy Kerrin. She is not a Catholic, but she is associated with stigmata, isn't she?

The really interesting thing once you start looking at stigmata outside countries that are predominantly Catholic is that the phenomenon is there as well, just not where you expect it. And when I started looking at the history of stigmata in Britain, you find them across denominations, you find them everywhere. I've found Methodists, I've found obscure cults, leaders with stigmata. I've also found Dorothy Caron, who is contemporary of Padre Pio actually, who also developed the stigmata, she was an Anglican,

who during the First World War fell very ill, was considered to be incurable, and was then healed through intervention of an angel. And she wrote down her memoir of that and after that she was visited by Christ who gave her the stigmata. She called it an embarrassing thing to be blessed with and decided not to talk about it too much, so she wore gloves for a while and then also kind of made it irrelevant stigmata. She called it an embarrassing thing to be blessed with and decided not to talk about it too much. So she wore gloves for a while and then also kind of made it irrelevant to the rest of her mystical career. So even though she became a global phenomenon by the way, she was a faith healer who traveled the world till her death in 1963 and she drew thousands and thousands of people,

did faith healing with her stigmatized hands, but the stigmata were never really at the at the center of the conversation. So they were just never brought up. And it's a case, in a way, as a counter example of women taking control over their own narrative and over their own body, because she seems to manage to do so. To some initial hiccups where she was staying in the house of a spiritual director who did pull back the sheets so to say and invited a lot of people over to come have a look. But very quickly she becomes too much of a sensation to be in that house and from then on it's she's got control and the stigmata are just irrelevant but they are there till her death. Fascinated by this idea of

the supernatural I think coming into this conversation, I would have associated stigmata with religious experiences only. I'm interested in your framing of them as something more broadly supernatural. Just thinking about Dorothy Kerrin, one thing that I know about her is that in the First World War, am I right in thinking that she actually is able to transport herself supposedly? Is it in no man's land, I think, during trans warfare? We've got Padre Pio flying, we've got Dorothy Kerin moving through time and space. Is that something that we see across cases associated with religion and cases that are not necessarily Catholic in their bent? And is that broadly supernatural or is it something specific

to the stigmata idea? I think it's not even specific to stigmata as an idea, but very specific to stigmata as an idea in that period. Because the way Dorothy Keran speaks about her stigmata is very literally the way mediums describe being in touch with other planes of existence. So it's almost no surprise that she bilocates to No Man's Land alongside other stigmatics, but I don't think Padre Pio went there, but some other stigmatics actually went spiritually or physically, depends on who you read, to different places in different times. meant there, but some other stigmatics actually went spiritually or physically, it depends

on who you read, to different places and different times. And I think I'm an advocate of approaching a phenomenon like stigmata from a supernatural point of view, precisely because otherwise you're telling a story of a lot of very colorful anecdotes that may seem very outlandish and difficult to explain. But I think Dorothy Caron is someone you can contextualize in this period when mediums were very active, also in central London where Caron was based, and were trying to establish a communication line with the front line in the war. You see it again in the Second World War, where mystics appear at every front line.

It's also, it means that you can look at the way occult scientists or occult practitioners or magnetists and spiritualists were interested in phenomena that, you know, we would think of as only really meaningful for Catholics. Madame Blavatsky from the Theosophical Society was very interested in stigmata. Aleister Crowley chased a frog that he called Jesus through the woods of New Hampshire and crucified and stigmatized the animal before eating it. So that's about the whole story, I think. But anyway, you know, those are illustrations of how meaningful stigmata are outside Catholic devotional culture, but also to the universality of something like a crucified Christ.

Let's bring this right up to the brink of the 21st century then, and we end in our own time. Father Sudac is a priest on the Croatian island of Lošin, with long dark hair swept back behind his ears, who looks, let's face it, a little bit like the image they have invented for Jesus. There's a video of him preaching on YouTube. His face is intense as he sweeps the crowd with deep furrows on his forehead. It was on that forehead, in fact, in 1999, when he was in his late twenties, that a wound in the shape of the crucifix appeared.

A year later, on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi no less, the wounds of Christ appeared in Sudat's wrists, feet and sides. In the video, blood-stained bandages cover his wrists as he urges his audience to realize that they are not living in the internet age, but in the age of the Holy Spirit. That miracles of healing and knowledge are still being given to the world, but that everyone is too distracted to see them. From St. Francis of Assisi through Maria Lazeri in 19th century Italy,

from Dorothy, Karen, to Padre Pio and Father Sudac on the Croatian island, the supposed wounds of Christ continue to wander through history. Will they ever stop appearing on the limbs of believers? And what would it mean if they did? I think it's unsurprising, given the longevity of the stigmata tradition that you've spoken about, Christophe, that these ideas, this reality, however you want to take it, is still continuing today and that people are still talking about stigmata. What do you think it means for our modern world today that people are still supposedly experiencing this?

I think in the end it doesn't mean that much different from what people were saying in the 19th century. Back then people were also saying, look at how we've industrialized and how we've entered the age of the machine. But look, there's also that happening there in that village in the Alps. And I mean, in a way, they became mobilized then as symbols of something purer, as something transcendental, or as evidence of the power of something transcendental, just as they were then, just as St. Francis has been since the 13th century as well. But there's always been the idea that once you experience the stigmata on someone's body, that body then becomes a useful instrument in all kinds of rhetoric, you could say.

And that's not changed. The rhetoric is actually very similar to what it was in the 19th century or in the, let's say, 17th century. But what has changed, and I disagree with our creation stigmatic there, is that we are entering the age of, that the age of the internet has very much changed the way phenomena like these spread and are perceived. You could say that we've entered a more diffuse sense of Christianity, I guess,

and that people like him have to brand themselves in a more explicit way to be able to be perceived as a mystic of their own time. But that's also, you know, the means have changed and the technologies have changed and the ways you brand yourself have changed. But in a way, Lazzaria was also doing that with the means available to her or someone like Dorothy Keran and Padre Pio, definitely. I want to finish then, Christoph, on one final question. I'd love to get your insight into this and see how this unravels in the work that you've been doing with your research. Rather than talk about belief and religion and symbols and Christ and all of this, I'd like to talk about lies and fakery and forgery and deliberately misleading, often vulnerable people. And yeah, something that's quite deliberately manufactured by man to fool people. How does this element of stigmata, how does that present itself in the archive? As far as I try to dismiss the question of truth or authenticity of supernatural phenomena when I come across them,

because it's a rabbit hole you can't get out of anymore, there are sources that make it very plain that fraud or fakery has happened. I mean, and sometimes it's almost too convenient or too obvious to the point where you think that it's a counter narrative that's being created in the sources to dismiss the phenomenon in general. I'm thinking of a British Jesuit in training in Malta, I think, who suddenly had the stigmata and they turned out to find the bucket of chicken blood just behind the door. You know, the stories are represented in

such a way as if to say, look at what Catholicism does, tries to deceive you, I guess. But there are many cases where it's not so obvious. And you know, when we talk of young women who are being very often put in a position where they are subject to someone who doesn't only have spiritual authority, but also social authority, and is just a person of considerable status, whereas she is very often almost a nobody.

Someone who has had very little education, someone who has very poor health very often almost a nobody, someone who has had very little education, someone who has very poor health very often, is completely in the hands of the priest because he's stepped in to take on that role. And there are cases available, there are cases as well where it's very obvious that the priest is inflicting the wounds on the woman, also to strengthen his own reputation, I guess,

as someone who's in touch with God or to make money out of it. But to generalise this, or to say something about the phenomenon as a whole, I really can't. Because I've also seen cases, also contemporary cases, where I just have no idea what's going on. A bit like what you describe down the road. Oh, I think I do know what was going on down the road. I saw what I saw, but I think I do know what was going on down the road. Okay, what I saw, but I think I do know what was going on. Okay, well, I have to think of a different example. Christophe, thank you so very much for coming on this journey with us today. It's been truly fascinating and I think it's left us with a lot of food for thought. We've got a lot to digest there and I love where this conversation has gone in terms of these ambiguous areas

and this question of belief and evidence and faith. It's something that we do come up against continually on this podcast. And I think this is the perfect topic for exploring that. So thank you very much. If people want to find more of your work or to hear about what you're doing next, where can they do that? That's a very good question. I am still on Twitter. Yeah, I'm just, it's a bit like a ghost, like a no man's land there now. Yeah, that's probably the right place. My book comes out soon. So I expect to be present in some capacity over the next couple of months in different places.

I can't wait. I honestly can't wait. It's going to be that is right up my street. I'm going to absolutely devour that. I feel like I need an epilogue about about a certain case now. Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. And thank you for listening to After Dark. If you want to explore our back catalogue. If you've been listening, please leave us a five star review. Leave it wherever you get your podcasts. It really, really helps other people to find the show. It helps to grow it. And it's just really nice to hear that we're doing a good job and that you are enjoying yourselves. So about savings, we've made this ad 20% shorter. That means you get 6 seconds back. Just enough time to visit Shopify.com slash POS20.

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