five wounds In 1899, those of the crown of thorns being added in 1900, and of the scourging in 1901 — the external signs, in her case too, being subsequently removed in answer to her prayers.34 A. Imbert-Gourbeyre35 has noted 321 in- stances in all, only 41 of which have been men, along with 280 women; the nineteenth century supplies 29 of his in- stances. Only 62 of the 321 have received the official recog- nition of the church in the form of canonization or beatifi- cation ; and, indeed, it is sometimes hinted that the church is not absolutely committed to the supernatural character of the stigmata in more than two or three instances — in that of Francis of Assisi, of course, and with him per- haps also only in those of Catharine of Siena and Lucie de Narnia.36 A disposition is manifested in some Romanist writers, in fact, to speak with great reserve of the super- naturalness of the stigmata. A. Poulain, who writes the article on the subject in The Catholic Encyclopedia, for ex- ample, will not distinctly assert that they are supernatural in origin, but contents himself with declaring that they have not been shown to be natural. Others remind us that37 "the learned pope, Benedict XIV, in his Treatise on the Canonization of tlie Saints, does not attach capital importance to stigmatization, and does not seek in it a demonstration of sanctity; but himself notes that nature may have some part in it as well as grace" ; or that Ignatius Loyola, when "consulted one day about a young stigmatic, responded that the marks described to him might just as well have been the work of the devil as of God." 38
The writer of the article on this subject in Migne's Dic- tionnaire des Propheties el des Miracles39 seems to speak with Loyola's warning ever in mind, and to be above all things anxious that it should not be forgotten that these stigmatic marks are no safe indicia of supernatural action. He ap- pears almost to bewail the multitudinousness of the in- stances, lest by it we should be betrayed into confusing the good and the bad. Francis and Catharine, he says, "are
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in fact the two most ancient examples related by history . . . but since then," he sighs, "how many stigmatics has the world not seen !" "It is a great pity," he goes on to object, "that the ignorance of the people, always benev- olent and pious in their judgments, should take for divine favors natural marks resulting from certain maladies which it is scarcely decent even to name, or from the artifices of fraud ; and it is a very horrible thing that fraud should have a place in a matter so respectable and so holy." "The Charpy of Troyes," he exclaims, "was stigmatized; the Bucaille of Valogne was stigmatized; Marie Desrollee of Coutance was stigmatized; the Cadiere was stigmatized; and how many others besides ! We have known of those who have deserved nothing so little as the name of saint which was attached to them by a mocking or a credulous public ; there were convulsionnaires of St. Medard who were stigmatized. But let us allow the curtain to fall on these ignoble actors of sacrilegious comedies; the list is neither short nor edifying." If any one wishes to know anything more about the ladies he has just mentioned, he says, let him go where the biographies of such ladies are wont to be found. Meanwhile, speaking of the stigmatics of our own day: "We know personally some of them," he says,40 "and we leave them in the obscurity from which it has not pleased God to draw them. This phenomenon, natural or divine, is not as rare as might be supposed. But natural as it may be in many persons, it sanctifies itself, and divini- tizes itself, so to speak, by the use which they" (the fem- inine "they") "know how to make of it, and the increase of faith, of love divine, of patience, and of Christian resig- nation which it produces in them" (feminine "them"). "And permit me here a reflection which arises from our subject but is applicable to many others. On the Day of God, who knows all, and who judges all, there will be a great disillusionment for many people who have thought that they recognized the divine cachet where it was not,
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