Marks

Definition

In the religious meaning, marks is always a plural male name, unlike the significances medical (wound, scar), legal (mark of infamy), soldier (mark made on the recruits in the Roman Empire), botany and others (see Stigmate).

To the imitation of Jesus, various people presented, in the history of Christianity, the marks similar to those of Christ on various parts of their body:

on the hands or the wrists, pointing out the wounds caused by the nails,
on the feet or the ankles, pointing out the wounds caused by the nails,
on the head, pointing out the wounds caused by the crown of spines,
on the back, recalling the whiplashes,
on the side, pointing out the wound caused by a lance.

The people presenting these marks are called “stigmatized (E) S”. They are almost always women.

History

Not very reliable sources give Etienne Langton like stigmatized first; it should however be noticed that this archbishop of Canterbury forever be canonized, even by Jean-Paul II, which would have been surely the case if it had been the first to receive this kind of distinction. To the remainder the Catholic Encyclopedia does not even devote a particular article to him and the Kirchenlexikon , if it is more generous, does not say a word of these marks.

More official, if not more veracious, is the case of François d' Assise which, remaining on the mount Alverne (Verna?) in 1224, would have seen a seraph with six wings floating in the airs whose body was fixed at a cross, like that of Christ. Once the disappeared vision, François d' Assise would have noted the appearance on its own body of marks similar to those which were done in Jesus, marks which remained indelible. Its body was thus carrying two marks which, according to the versions, would have been discovered only after its death.

Among the others stigmatized famous, one can quote Catherine of His, Saint Jean of God, holy Marie of the Incarnation, Anna Katharina Emmerick, famous for his visions, Therese Neumann, Marie Nazzour and Padre Pio (1918-1968). One should forget neither Marthe Robin whose site, which is said held to the “informed Christians”, advances that it “is perhaps the woman who will have had the most influence over this century”, nor holy Gemma Galgani (1878-1903) which was canonized in 1940. In 2007, the Elie brother of the convent of Calvi dell' Umbria, to 50 km of Rome, receives the signs of Passion every year during the Lent.

Interpretations

These demonstrations were differently interpreted. The incrédules speak about imposture, but the recent cases seeming proven, certain experts put forth the assumption that they were hysterical demonstrations while the believers see there a form of theopathy . Analyzing the book of Jean-Pierre Albert, blood and Sky. Holy mystics in the Christian world , Claudine written Leduc: “And Jean-Pierre Albert to put forth the assumption that the holy one, because of the impurity of the menstrual blood which runs out of the body of the women, is in the obligation to unceasingly reconquer its holiness while making escape from its body a sublimated blood. ”.

Feminists even wrote: “A doctor, J. Lhermitte, established that the majority of the women (holy or not) are stigmatized only between 15 and 50 years, period during which the woman has her rules. The marks are them also subjected at cyclic intervals: “Natuzza Evolo (born in 1924) saw them appearing each year during the Lent, Gertrude d' Oosten (1358), each day at the canonical hours the most usual formula is that they bleed Friday with more abundance, or exclusively this day, and are hardly visible the remainder of time”. If it is added that the hagiographal ones often specify that the blood of the marks is scented and that the holy ones do not have any more their rules, one is led to think that stigmatization is a conversion of menstrual blood: to an impure blood, equipped, one says, of an odor strong and noxious, a blood is substituted whose perfume announces the purity. Female holiness seems thus one of revealing privileged the imaginary one of the woman in Christianity. To be of desire, to be carnal, the woman must, to reach holiness, to deny her femininity: to give up all that could make it tempting and refuse maternity.

Culture

Cinema

Stigmata (film, 1999), which speaks about one had stigmatized.

Literature

marks of Holy François d' Assise

In its novel The Franciscan Conspiracy , published in 2005, (" The Plot of Franciscains" , 2006 in French), John Sack erects scaffolding an assumption. With died of the saint, his skin was buried in a secret place which will be discovered only 550 years after its death, in order to preserve the myth of the marks of François saint which took part in the reputation of the saint and the expansion about Franciscains.

The author is based on the fact that Francois, he poverello , forever spoken itself about marks and always repeated the same formula: My secrecy belongs to me , and that it was also called Francesco lebbroso (François the leprous one): according to him, it would be necessary to take this expression with the clean direction. François d' Assise carried strange marks on the hands and the feet, a mark at the side and suffered from blindness.

The marks on the hands do not correspond to the wounds of Christ for physical reasons: the nails of the crucifixion were placed in the wrists because the hands would quickly have torn with the weight of the body. The saint did not carry either the marks of the crown of spines on his head nor the marks of the whiplashes on his back.

For the author the marks of François saint would be simply the indelible marks of an acute crisis of leprosy.

Random links: