The Other Mystical Phenomena

Three reference works are authoritative on these questions: the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique by Joachim Bouflet — the work includes a third, Les Anges et leurs Saints (2003), devoted to angels and extraordinary perceptions in religious contexts, outside the scope of this portal^[5] —, Métanoia by Aimé Michel, and Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires by Adolphe Tanquerey, an extract from his classic Précis de théologie ascétique et mystique. The cases selected are chosen for the quality of their documentation — named witnesses, precise dates, medical or judicial checks — and not merely for their spectacular character.

Two volumes, a single vigilance

Bouflet himself explains the architecture of his encyclopedia at the opening of the second volume, and this explanation serves as a master plan for the whole subject:

"After a volume dealing with the extraordinary objective phenomena that sometimes mark mystical experience, this second volume presents and studies subjective phenomena: those in which the will, desire, or a mere inclination seem to favor the occurrence of certain prodigies, which would be in some way the concretization of the more or less explicit wishes of the subjects concerned or of those around them. Precisely because of the (partly) subjective character of these unusual manifestations, discerning them is all the more delicate, even though the objective element is never lacking, which anchors the facts in reality." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 5^[6]

"Subjective" therefore never means imaginary. Bouflet immediately specifies that these phenomena remain bodily and datable:

"However subjective they may be, the phenomena addressed in this second volume still concern the physical, bodily activity of those who experience them: inedia affects the organic functions of nutrition and excretion; telekinetic transfers [...] take place on the subject's spatio-temporal plane, as does bilocation; power over the elements is exercised [...] within the concrete framework of their lives, in the reality of the incarnation." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 5^[7]

Five stages before speaking of a miracle

At the end of his first volume, Bouflet summarizes the process of discernment that must be applied to each case:

"In matters of discernment and assessment, the objective reality of the event cannot be a sufficient argument: the criteria of coherence and meaning are of at least equal importance. [...] A positive judgment on their supernatural origin and authenticity cannot be issued unless this question has found an answer free of all ambiguity." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 214^[8]

He then details the division of competence between science and ecclesial authority:

"It belongs to ecclesiastical authority alone to define and recognize the miraculous character of a sign, the medical and scientific bodies being empowered merely to verify and attest its naturally inexplicable character." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 261-262^[9]

Stated before the Norms of the Dicastery of 17 May 2024, this principle remains — the Church alone judges in the last resort — but the ordinary form of its conclusion has changed: these norms no longer normally include a declaration on the supernatural character of the discerned event, and the nihil obstat authorizes a devotion without certifying the origin of the phenomenon (see "What the Church says today")^[10].

Bouflet summarizes on the same page the criteria that make it possible to say that "the finger of God is there": an "objective reality perfectly inexplicable from a scientific point of view, transparency, meaning and fruitful integration into the lived experience of the people of God"^[11]. He draws from this a consequence that foils hasty readings: when the Church refuses to attribute any miraculous character to a prodigy, "this does not necessarily imply that the fact is a priori explicable by natural causes alone"; several facts whose objective reality has been accepted were not recognized, for lack of an obvious meaning or lasting fruits^[12]. Adolphe Tanquerey, in his classic extract from the Précis de théologie ascétique et mystique, adds a rule of cumulative weight:

"In general, one will not be satisfied with a single proof; several will be required; and one will ask whether they are cumulative and convergent, whether they confirm one another: the more numerous they are, the greater the assurance." — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 26^[13]

Starting from doubt, not credulity

Aimé Michel sets out the most useful methodological posture for approaching all of these facts:

"My starting position will be that of doubt. I will consider that my only knowledge and my only methods are those of science, modest, limited and always open to question." — Aimé Michel, Métanoia. Phénomènes physiques du mysticisme, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 18^[14]

He clarifies further on what a testimony is, and is not, worth:

"If it is a question of stigmata, I want a doctor, a biologist, I want several of them, of opposing opinions, having if possible an interest in asserting that the prodigy did not take place. Even then, perhaps I will not be convinced. But at least it will seem to me that the fact deserves to be known and meditated upon." — Aimé Michel, Métanoia. Phénomènes physiques du mysticisme, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 149^[15]

Competence, plurality, possible contradiction of the witness: these three requirements make it possible to separate, in the cases that follow, established facts from unmasked frauds.

Seven phenomena already have their own Ignispedia article: five are summarized here — four fall under the objective phenomena of Bouflet's first volume, the fifth, inedia, opens his second volume devoted to subjective phenomena — and two others, stigmata and bilocations, are merely referred to their detailed file.

Levitation

The elevation of a body or a sacred object without visible support counts among the most anciently attested prodigies of hagiography. The Jesuit Herbert Thurston listed more than two hundred cases, whose evidence, for a third of them, "is at the very least respectable"^[16]. Olivier Leroy, who confined himself to the first ten months of the Acta Sanctorum, counted about 60 levitators out of 14,000 saints, or about 0.43% — barely half a percent; examining the 305 people who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beatified up to June 2001, martyrs excluded, Bouflet counts 26, or 8.5%, retaining only the cases "reported by numerous and unquestionable testimonies"^[17]. For several ancient examples, he writes that one "could not without bias or bad faith dispute the reality, so decisive are the number, the value and the convergence of the testimonies relating to it"^[18]. Tanquerey distinguishes three forms: ascensional ecstasy, where the body is held above the ground; ecstatic flight, at great heights; and "ecstatic walking", where the body "seems to run swiftly while skimming the ground"^[19].

The phenomenon does not belong to the past alone. Bouflet cites the testimony of Saint Luigi Orione (1872–1940) about one of his religious, Cesare Pisano, in religion Brother Ave Maria, whom Bouflet describes as venerable:

"I could swear that I saw Brother Ave Maria raised from the ground, at about this height [about 40 cm], while he was reading the Imitation of Christ. I had entered his cell silently, the door was half open, and I surprised him in this situation [...] I waited a little, admiring the extraordinary phenomenon, then I left without Brother Ave Maria noticing anything." — Saint Luigi Orione, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, p. 14^[20]

The most documented case remains that of Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663), whose first levitation took place on 4 October 1630, in the church of Copertino, at vespers of Saint Francis^[21]. The dedicated article Levitations develops the entire dossier, the typology of the phenomenon and its counter-examples.

Luminous phenomena

Bodily radiance, halos or unexplained brightness surrounding certain mystics at prayer constitute a second well-attested family, which Bouflet documents for cases as varied as Saint André Bessette^[22] or Saint Charbel Makhlouf, above whose body Brother Élie Mehrini saw hovering a light that had sprung from the tabernacle, on the night following his death, 24 December 1898^[23]. Tanquerey, summarizing Benedict XIV, gives its criteria: the timing and brightness of the light, its duration, its connection with a religious act, its effects of grace and the holiness of the person; he sees in it, in the saints, "a kind of anticipation of the brightness that will illuminate the glorious bodies"^[24]. The article Luminous phenomena presents the complete dossier.

The incendium amoris

The incendium amoris, or burning of love, refers to a mystical hyperthermia reported in subjects in deep ecstasy, to the point of bursting thermometers — the best-known case being that of Padre Pio: in Naples, during his military service, the thermometers "rose to the maximum or burst", and a bath thermometer placed under his arm indicated 48.5 °C^[25]. The article Incendia amoris deals with this dossier as a whole, including the cases in which the Church discerned a counterfeit of the phenomenon rather than an authentic grace.

The incorruption of bodies and the signs accompanying death

Bouflet devotes an entire chapter to the "phenomena accompanying death": preserved warmth and flexibility, post mortem movements, outpourings of blood or tears, fragrances, absence of rigor mortis, and then properly so-called incorruption^[26]. His guiding case is that of the blessed Maria Giuseppina Catanea, a Neapolitan Carmelite who died on 14 March 1948, after multiple sclerosis and fulminant gangrene had reduced her body "to a state of ruin"^[27]. Professor Generoso Colucci, a specialist in nervous and mental diseases, who examines her for the second time nine days after death, writes:

"I must report that so many days after death, one notes in the visible parts of the corpse neither cadaveric spots nor hypostatic spots. [...] Sister Giuseppina still appears to us today as a sleeping and smiling person." — Professor Generoso Colucci, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. 348^[28]

The body remained exposed for thirteen days without odor or decomposition; the canonical exhumation of 24 March 1950 found it intact, and the blood drawn two years before her death, placed in ampoules in the coffin, was found still liquid — as attested by Dr. Luigi De Lucca and the witnesses of the exhumation^[29]. Bouflet judges this case "remarkably documented": it brings together almost all the signs that can follow the death of a person reputed for holiness^[30]. He then formulates the principle that governs the entire dossier of incorruption: the prodigy, if it exists, is never permanent.

« The miracle of incorruption is a one-time event: it consists in the suspension, for a period of time more or less long, of the natural and irreversible process of bodily putrefaction. [...] Incorruption is not a "continued miracle", but a one-off prodigy that has the value of a sign. » — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 424^[31]

A later decomposition therefore does not invalidate the anomaly previously observed. The article Incorruptible bodies covers the whole dossier, including the distinction between incorruption, mummification and saponification, which the Church refuses to confuse with a miracle^[32].

Bouflet immediately clarifies the scope of these objective facts linked to death, which observation, and sometimes even medical science, can establish: they may well be so many signs of hope, but « these are not proofs of survival, but incidents that signify an order of realities other than those inscribed in our dimensional universe »^[33].

Inedia

Inedia is, according to the definition that opens Bouflet's second volume, « the absolute deprivation of all food, liquid or solid », distinct from fasting and unrelated to anorexia^[34]. The Church has never allowed a vow to be made of it: this would be, he writes, « presumption on the part of the faster »^[35]. The best-controlled case remains that of Thérèse Neumann. At the request of Bishop Anton von Henle of Regensburg, Dr. Seidl, chief surgeon of the hospital in Waldsassen, had her watched day and night by four nuns of Mallersdorf from 13 to 28 July 1927: during those fifteen days she took nothing other than the fragment of the Host of her daily Communion and had no excretion whatsoever — an observation that Bouflet describes as « a model of its kind »^[36].

A refusal of supervision, conversely, rules out any talk of proof: of Marie-Rose Ferron, whose parents always opposed a medical protocol, Bouflet concludes that « there is no proof of the reality of this ten-year inedia »^[37]. And the Portuguese visionary Amélia Rodrigues, placed under observation at the hospital of Coimbra by Professor João Porto, was caught with the instruments of her fake stigmata — two small rosary crosses, a mirror, a vial of corrosive liquid — and confessed that one of her sisters fed her at night^[38].

The article Inedias details the best-controlled modern cases, notably those of Thérèse Neumann, of the Blessed Alexandrina of Balazar and of the case of Madame R.

The fragrance perceived around certain mystics, their relics or their shrines forms one of the oldest categories of mystical phenomenology. Bouflet explicitly links it to the ecclesial, and not purely individual, dimension of the sign:

« Phenomena of inexplicable scents sometimes mark the public apparitions of the Virgin Mary, independently of the person of the seer(s). They would be the sign of the union existing between Christ and his mystical Body, a union that the Mother of the Church comes to recall and of which she occasionally makes herself the instrument. » — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 153^[39]

For the perfumes emanating from the bodies of saints, during their lifetime or after their death, Tanquerey summarises the three verifications requested by Benedict XIV: the persistence of the odour; the absence of any explanatory cause near the body or in the ground; the miracles eventually obtained through the use of water or oil taken from the body. These criteria concern the discernment of the sign, beyond the mere observation of a pleasant scent.^[40]

Among the places of Marian apparitions where perfumes have been reported, Bouflet retains only one as truly convincing:

« In short, the places of Marian apparitions where authentic fragrance phenomena occur are very rare [...] Only Le Laus constitutes a truly convincing example, perhaps unique in the world. » — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 156^[41]

This judgement has since received ecclesial confirmation: the apparitions of the Virgin to the shepherdess Benoîte Rencurel, at Le Laus, from 1664 to 1718, were proclaimed of supernatural origin on 4 May 2008 at the sanctuary by the Bishop of Gap and Embrun, Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Léandri (decree dated 5 May 2008)^[42].

At the Carmel of Lisieux, Camille Burette reports an episode in which perceptions diverge. Marie de la Trinité smelled incense near a damp, worm-eaten board whose origin she did not know. Warned, Mother Agnès of Jesus smelled nothing; a novice perceived the incense, then Sister Thérèse of Saint-Augustin, called without explanation, smelled it too. When the community, this time warned of the phenomenon, examined the board during recreation, the other sisters perceived only damp and mould. Dr. La Néele later recognised a fragment detached from Thérèse's coffin during the exhumation of 6 September 1910, which he had attended as an expert. A cemetery worker had previously hidden this wood in the undergrowth to retrieve it for devotional purposes. The account therefore preserves the negative observations and the prior handling of the object; it does not describe an experiment conducted under continuous supervision.^[43]

A simple test unmasks a fake fragrance

The false mystic from Lorraine Catherine Filljung (1848-1915) was convicted of fraud and of simulating ecstasies and stigmata, and had to answer in the courts for lies, slander and misappropriation of funds^[44]. She passed off the odour perceived in the morning in her oratory as the trace of a nocturnal visit from the angels. One of her companions secretly burned small incense candles there, bought in Saint-Avold:

« The next morning, the "sisters", who knew nothing of this purchase, were amazed by the exquisite odour of the oratory. Catherine was absent. On her return, the sisters spoke to her of this odour. She blushed, said not a word and, seized with anger, walked away. » — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 158-159^[45]

After this blind test, no "angelic scent" was ever again observed in the convent^[46]. This case shows that a simple test — discreetly introducing an ordinary perfume — is sometimes enough to unmask a phenomenon that has nothing supernatural about it, and reminds us that the agreement of several witnesses on a real odour never proves, by itself, its origin.

Natuzza Evolo: every form of the odour of sanctity

The most complete case of modern mystical fragrance studied by Bouflet is that of the Calabrian Natuzza Evolo. Professor Maria Mantelli, of Catanzaro, reports what she observed with her brother at the end of a medical examination:

"At the end of the medical examination, an intensely fragrant perfume spread through the room, a blend of flowers, citron, amber and lemon verbena. My brother stood there in wonder and searched the whole house to discover the source of this scent; he wanted to see whether Natuzza carried it on her person, but she uses no perfume." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, t. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 160^[47]

Another observer, Ida Marino, received by post a handkerchief stained with Natuzza's blood and described a phenomenon of transmission to objects:

"I multiplied the experiments, to verify the origin of the perfume. [...] I placed these objects in one room or another, closed the door, and came back a little later; and then I would smell this intense, penetrating perfume, enough to make you dizzy. The phenomenon lasted three days." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, t. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 161^[48]

Another testimony collected by Valerio Marinelli concerns a rosary entrusted to Natuzza and then returned after she had touched it: during the return journey, the travellers perceived an intense perfume in their car and identified its origin in the object. Professor Diego Menniti, chief orthopaedist at the civil hospital of Nicastro, confirmed having smelled on several occasions an odour reminiscent of turpentine on this rosary, which was then placed at the sick man's bedside. This is a reported olfactory observation, with no chemical analysis mentioned. Bouflet's note states that Natuzza did not bless the objects herself: she prayed inwardly while presenting them to the blessing of Christ.^[49]

For Bouflet, this dossier has "the advantage of illustrating all the forms taken by the odour of sanctity^[50]": perfume emanating from the person, blood-stained cloths that give off fragrance, touched objects that retain the scent, perfumes perceived at a distance. In passing, he corrects a frequent confusion between this last form and genuine bilocation:

"Surely it is excessive to speak of bilocation in this case. [...] At most it is a question of spiritual presence, even of remote viewing, or telepathy. Bilocation, strictly speaking, is a prodigy of another order." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, t. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 164^[51]

The fragrance of the stigmata

The fragrance can also accompany a stigmata wound directly. In the case of Padre Pio, Dr Romanelli notes it as early as his letter of 7 November 1920 to the Capuchin provincial; it is his colleague Dr Festa who established the link with the blood of the wounds, in his third report, dated 7 April 1925 — himself deprived of his sense of smell, he relies on the testimony of Romanelli and of numerous visitors^[52]:

"The blood that flows drop by drop from the wounds Padre Pio bears on his body has a subtle and penetrating fragrance, which a great many people who have approached him have been able to smell [...] Padre Pio neither uses nor has ever used any kind of perfume." — Dr Festa, third report, 7 April 1925, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, t. 1, p. 132^[53]

The physician emphasises how contrary to biology this fact is:

"Those concerned with the preservation of animal tissues know well that, in order to achieve their aim, it is necessary to bleed the flesh thoroughly, blood being among organic tissues the one that decomposes fastest. [...] Thus, far from gratifying the olfactory mucous membrane with a pleasant fragrance, the pieces of cloth soaked with the blood flowing from Padre Pio's wounds [...] ought at the very least to have been subject to a process of decomposition, and certainly not to be a source of fragrances." — Dr Festa, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, t. 1, p. 133^[54]

The dedicated article The Stigmata of Padre Pio develops this medical dossier in its entirety.

Bouflet devotes one of his longest chapters to statues, icons, and paintings from which liquids — tears, blood, sweat, oil — flow without any apparent cause. He opens with "seven recent miracles": in the twentieth century, he writes, several events concerning sacred effigies "were held to be miraculous by the competent ecclesiastical authority, once scientists had declared them naturally inexplicable"^[55]. The table below compares, for these seven cases, the established material fact and the ecclesial act that followed it:

Sources: Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 189–201 and 262.^[56]

The Syracuse case offers the best scientifically documented example. Professor La Rosa's report addresses the hypothesis of simple condensation head-on:

"A superficial condensation of moisture would have spread uniformly over the entire surface and could never have determined, in the eyes alone, the slow, very slow, phenomenon of tears falling. [...] The liquid emitted by the eyes of the 'Madonnina' has a composition analogous to that of human tears." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 194, citing the report of Doctors La Rosa and Marletta, 29 November 1953^[57]

In Faussaires de Dieu, Bouflet sets out the human context of the sign at Syracuse: the plaster bas-relief was hung at the head of a young pregnant woman who was seriously ill. He reports her healing, and then those of other people, through contact with cotton pads soaked in the tears, and sees in it the expression of the Virgin's compassion for human suffering. He associates two investigative elements with this interpretation: the presence of witnesses and the exclusion of any manipulation of the image.^[58]

The case of Akita, for its part, had to rule out a parapsychological hypothesis. The blood collected in 1973 on the statue's hand being of group B, like that of Sister Agnès Sasagawa, some investigators attributed to her a power of "ectoplasmic projection": she was thought to have projected her own blood onto the wood by the sheer force of thought. The sweat collected on 29 September 1973 proved to be of group AB; then, after an initial negative conclusion from the diocesan commission, a counter-analysis by the Gifu faculty of forensic medicine identified human tears of group O+ — whereas the nun was sometimes absent from the convent when the statue wept^[59].

Counter-cases: when fraud is exposed

Bouflet never presents these seven cases as representative of all the alleged events. He documents, on the contrary, numerous fraudulent or naturally explicable cases. At Schwandorf, in Germany, two independent commissions concluded that an infiltration was due to a roofing defect:

"The changes appearing on the paper or on the support of the photographs submitted for examination result from the effects of damp and the subsequent proliferation of mould and bacteria." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 233^[60]

At Ladeira, in Portugal, the chemical analysis was unequivocal despite solemn testimonies:

"The analyses carried out demonstrated in the most categorical way that it was chicken blood! [...] And yet, witnesses were found who affirmed under oath that they had seen blood gush from the wounds of Christ." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 241^[61]

This last case is a valuable counter-example to the argument that "several witnesses state that they saw the phenomenon begin" would suffice to establish its authenticity: here, the material fraud is certain, and the eyewitness testimonies make no difference to that.

The case of Assemini, in 1993, reveals a different kind of fraud, described by Bouflet on the authority of Giovanni Panunzio: a hollow statue poured liquid by means of a remote-controlled device, and was then replaced by an untampered double on which the same traces had been reproduced. The search revealed the substitution. An expert examination of the replacement statue alone could therefore have noted the absence of any mechanism without ever examining the object seen weeping. The cessation of the outflows under observation does not, in itself, prove the fraud: here, that proof comes from the device and the double that were discovered.^[62]

The most massive case of the period remains that of Teresa Musco, in Italy, where Bouflet records 623 phenomena over 226 days, between February 1975 and August 1976^[63]. He draws from it a methodological conclusion valid for the whole chapter:

"Such are the facts, in their objective, undeniable reality. What is their meaning? For it is at this level that, all explanation by illusion or fraud having been ruled out, the question lies for the Church." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 255^[64]

Bouflet finally warns against the danger specific to this type of phenomenon, that of one-upmanship:

"A process of escalation sets in: by its sensational character, the sign takes precedence over the message, when it does not take its place." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 259^[65]

Volume 2 of Bouflet opens, after the chapter on inedia, with the phenomena linked to the consecrated host reaching a communicant without the ordinary intermediary of the priest. The technical term, taken from Herbert Thurston, is precise:

“The alleged transport of the host through the air, by some unexplained agency, from the altar or the hands of the officiating priest to the lips of the communicant ready to receive it.” — Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, pp. 117-118^[66]

Bouflet distinguishes three modalities which he refuses to conflate: the host that remains suspended without moving, the host that actually moves from the altar or the ciborium, and the host that appears directly on the tongue with no observed journey. He reserves the strict term of telekinesis for the second case:

“In this case, as in the previous ones, not only does the host hover without any support, but it moves: one may then speak strictly speaking of telekinesis.” — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 124^[67]

Yet Bouflet refuses to reduce these facts to a mere transport of objects. To reduce the host received in this way to a hallucinatory image, he writes, is to “make little account of the materiality of the facts, established beyond dispute in numerous cases,” and to forget that the eucharistic species veil the very Person of Christ:

“If the telekinetic bringing of any kind of object remains nothing more than a bringing, however prodigious, telekinetic communion must by contrast be considered as the encounter of two persons — the communicant and the Person of Jesus — which gives concrete form, in a particular manner, to the encounter of two wills.” — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 118^[68]

The most detailed account reported by Bouflet concerns the stigmatist Magdeleine Morice, observed by six witnesses equipped with a control light:

“We were six in number to see this spectacle; we examined things closely, one and all, passing a light all round to see whether the host was not stuck on. [...] About three and a half hours went by. During this time we did not cease observing the sick woman [...] giving no sign of life save a slight breath that fell directly on the host, without however making it waver.” — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, pp. 120-121, citing Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation^[69]

Bouflet specifies that the phenomenon always plays out on a double register: the interior vision of the subject, and the materiality of the host accessible to third parties:

“The phenomenon unfolds on a double plane, the subjective one of the vision, and the objective one of the materiality of the host, which the witnesses can see, sometimes touch, and which the subject ingests and assimilates according to the natural process of mastication and swallowing proper to every ‘normal’ sacramental communion.” — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, pp. 137-138^[70]

The case of Raffaella Lionetti (1918-1991) illustrates an appearance of the host with no observed journey. Bouflet cites her biography published by her prayer group: during her ecstasies, a host, sometimes several, would materialise in her outstretched hands, before numerous witnesses and in varied circumstances. In her vision, she received the host from Jesus in the presence of Mary; when several hosts appeared, they were intended for the faithful who prayed with her. The account thus distinguishes the mystic's vision from the object visible to those present; it also reports fragrances and testimonies of returns to confession and the Eucharist.^[71]

The Curé d'Ars, a first-hand witness

The most direct testimony comes from a canonised priest. Saint Jean-Marie Vianney himself recounted, before two Protestant pastors who doubted the Real Presence, what had happened to him while giving Communion to a man who was praying the Virgin to obtain faith for him:

“Listen carefully to this: I am not saying that this happened somewhere, I am saying that it happened to me. At the moment this man came forward to receive Communion, the holy host detached itself from my fingers, while I was still a good distance away; it went of its own accord to rest upon the tongue of that man.” — Saint Jean-Marie Vianney, reported by Alfred Monnin, Le curé d'Ars, Paris, Douniol, 1861, vol. II, p. 394, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, pp. 125-126^[72]

Bouflet links to the same tradition the Visitandine of Albi Marie-Angélique de La Grave, who, questioned after a similar prodigy on the eve of Christmas 1683, replied that Jesus Christ “loves abasement”^[73].

Marthe Robin: back to the attestations, not the embellishments

The most popular case — that of Marthe Robin — receives from Bouflet a critical and proportionate treatment, neither dismissive nor indulgent:

“A few testimonies, entered in the file of the cause of beatification, leave no room for doubt as to their reality, but here again the biographers have often exaggerated the frequency and the scale of the phenomenon; at most one notes, in the thousands of pages of the summarium, a good ten attestations from priests who felt the host escape from their fingers at the moment they were about to give Communion to the stigmatist.” — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, pp. 125-126^[74]

One of these attestations, collected on 13 July 1992 for the cause of beatification, gives the measure of the fact without embellishment:

“In the half-light of her room, I feared I would not manage to find the mouth of our ‘little Marthe’ and moved closer, holding the holy host between my fingers. I was deeply moved to see it detach itself from my fingers to enter of its own accord into Marthe's mouth. Father Finet then lit up Marthe's face, and I saw her in ecstasy (I had never seen anything more beautiful).” — Testimony of a priest, Summarium of the cause, XIX, p. 5521, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, p. 126^[75]

Fatima: a remote communion integrated into a recognised apparition

The most solid case, because it belongs not merely to a private biography but to the recognised whole of Our Lady of Fatima, remains Sister Lucia's account of the angel's apparition in 1916:

“We saw the Angel, holding in his left hand a chalice over which was suspended a Host, from which a few drops of blood fell into the chalice. [...] He gave the Holy Host to me, and the Blood of the chicle he shared between Jacinta and Francisco.” — Sister Lucia, Lucie raconte Fatima, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 145^[76]

When the case is negative

A material fact invoked in support of a miraculous communion may also prove to be entirely fabricated. Because it concerns the Body of Christ, theologians hold the manipulation of hosts intended to simulate such prodiges to be "gravely disrespectful, if not sacrilegious"; in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition acted with severity against Magdalena de la Cruz and María de la Visitación, accused of frauds of this kind^[77]. In the nineteenth century, Pius IX ruled without ceremony on the case of the stigmatist Palma Matarelli, of Oria:

"What Palma does is the work of the devil, and her so-called miraculous communions with hosts taken from Saint Peter's are a pure hoax. All of it is false, and I have the proofs here, in the drawer of my desk. She has deceived many pious and credulous souls." — Pius IX, cited by Herbert Thurston, taken up by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 119^[78]

Among those credulous souls was Doctor Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, who had devoted enthusiastic pages to one of these communions^[79]. Bouflet likewise files under the heading of "sacrilegious hoaxes" the alleged communions of the seers of Heroldsbach, in Bavaria (1949-1952), and of El Palmar de Troya, in Spain (from 1968 onwards)^[80]. The case of Our Lady of Naju, in South Korea, falls under a different ecclesiastical heading: the Archbishop of Gwangju ruled, on 1 January 1998, that the supernatural origin of the phenomena was not established; on 21 January 2008, his successor, Bishop Andreas Choi Chang-mou, declared the excommunication latae sententiae of the faithful and clerics who preside at or attend, contrary to his prohibition, the celebrations held in the oratories of Naju, a measure confirmed in April 2008 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith^[81].

Bouflet devotes two separate chapters to two neighbouring families: apports, where a material object — food, money, flowers — appears or is transported to a mystic, and multiplication, where an initial quantity increases without natural cause^[82]. He dismisses the explanation by subjective impression alone. Jean Guitton told him in 1992 that in the aftermath of the Second World War, in a village in the Midi, a woman dressed in black had handed his wife a fresh loaf before disappearing; the philosopher, who was satisfied by it, saw in it an "oniroplastie," a "pseudo-materialisation of the object of desire"^[83]. Bouflet replies:

"In any case, among the various forms taken by the phenomenon of the prodigious apport of material goods, there are manifestations too complex — by the number of persons involved, by the preservation post eventum of the objects brought, etc. — to be explained by the force of impression alone, and therefore of imagination." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 164^[84]

Bouflet also reports the apports received by Maria Concetta Pantusa (1894-1953): fruit and flowers that she received from her guardian angel or the Virgin and shared with those close to her. The testimony he cites places between 1940 and 1952 repeated arrivals of peaches, mandarins, pears, apples, grapes and apricots, in season and out of season alike. The author files these facts among the materialisations linked to ecstasy that he describes as extreme and exceedingly rare. He immediately distinguishes them from simulated apports: this assessment concerns that particular case file, and does not authenticate similar accounts by mere resemblance.^[85]

The most useful criterion of discernment is not only the inexplicability of the fact, but its coherence with the subject's vocation:

"In this extraordinary existence, the telekinetic phenomena appear as so many manifestations of transforming union [...] perfectly coherent and harmonious with one another, which is far from being the case when they present themselves as isolated, erratic elements." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 200^[86]

Bouflet finally recalls that multiplication is never a mechanism at the mystic's disposal. In Majorca, one day when wine was running short, Blessed Francisca Ana Cirer invited a sister to draw again: there was enough for lunch, and even some left over, which the religious kept for the next day — when she found the cask dry. "The miracle," the Mother replied with a smile, "must be taken when it comes, and not imagined to bend to our will!"^[87]. The article The multiplication of provisions develops this dossier, in particular those of Don Bosco and of the Lord's Ranch in El Paso, whose director, Father Rick Thomas, himself acknowledged that, for want of rigorous critical study, the multiplications had been the subject only of "improvised testimonies"^[88].

A family founded on the Gospel

Bouflet opens this chapter with the calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee and defines "power over the elements" not as a personal ability of the mystic, but as a sign ordered to a precise end:

"Creatures serve the glory of God and the supernatural good of man, and the two are one: the prodigies that man works upon them are meant to recall this, by serving charity, strengthening hope and encouraging the faith of those who witness them." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 314^[89]

His typology covers atmospheric phenomena and fire, water, inanimate objects, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom^[90]. Bouflet imposes on himself a rule: to classify and select, rather than string anecdotes together.

"The study of this kind of prodigy would risk turning into a somewhat motley and uninteresting nomenclature, if one lost sight of the underlying motive of what would at first sight appear to be a series of exploits more spectacular than edifying." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 331^[91]

Walking on water

Tradition distinguishes several modes: walking directly on dry feet, a cloak used as a skiff, preservation amid the ice, and rain that does not wet^[92]. Bouflet sees in them a punctual mastery exercised over the element:

"Whatever the case in point, walking on the waters or invulnerability to the rain [...], in prodigies of this kind we witness a genuine mastery of the servants of God over the elements: the water is, in a sense, tamed." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 276^[93]

The case best supported by judicial records is that of Saint Francis of Paola (1416–1507). The boatman Pietro Coloso having refused to take him aboard for lack of money, he spread his cloak on the water, propped one edge up on his staff like a sail, and thus crossed the Strait of Messina — in 1460 according to Bouflet, in April 1464 according to the chronology adopted by the Diocese of Messina^[94]. The depositions gathered for the canonization report the scene as seen from the opposite shore:

"The witnesses who testified at the canonization trial affirmed, under oath, that from the port of Messina something strange was seen approaching by sea, and that many curious onlookers came down to the quays." — Alfredo Bellantonio, San Francesco di Paola, Rome, General Postulation of the Minims, 1973, based on the depositions of witnesses IX and XXII of the Calabrian trial, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, pp. 281-282^[95]

The same prodigy is attested, by a sworn account signed before a notary, in the Capuchin Gesualdo da Reggio Calabria (1725-1803)^[96]. Of these dossiers, Bouflet writes that the number of depositions, their convergence and the quality of the witnesses "do not allow these miracles to be brushed aside with a wave of the hand or a dubious pout, for they took place not in the supposedly obscurantist period of the Middle Ages, but in the heart of the modern era"^[97].

A more recent dossier concerns the Franciscan Blessed Frederick Janssoone (1838-1916), a missionary in Canada. On 15 April 1893, returning from a visit to a dying woman, he crossed the St. Lawrence alone, at night, at a point where it is about 2.4 kilometres wide, just as the ice breakup was beginning and the current was carrying ice floes^[98]. To the parish priest who expressed astonishment, he replied:

"I crossed over on the ice. — But the breakup has begun! — Oh yes! And I don't know how I got here. I commended myself to the Blessed Virgin, and here I am!" — Blessed Frederick Janssoone, according to Romain Légaré and Constantin Baillargeon, Le bon Père Frédéric, Montreal, Éditions Paulines, 1988, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 284^[99]

Bouflet judges that it is "rather difficult" to admit that the missionary reached safe harbour "without the help of a providential, if not miraculous, intervention," and that "it is not excluded that he actually walked on the waters among the ice floes": the religious never denied the popular rumour, contenting himself with replying, when pressed, that "the good God can do things far greater than that"^[100].

Power over the atmosphere, fire and volcanoes

The most detailed case of this sub-type concerns the Barnabite Saint Francesco Saverio Bianchi, who stopped a lava flow at Torre del Greco in 1804, during an eruption of Vesuvius accompanied, on 22 November, by an earthquake. His biographer Felice Sala reports the scene:

"Coming out of his room, very serene, he urged calm [...] and, accompanied by those present, he went out onto an open terrace. Joining his hands, he prayed, then raised his right hand towards the rushing lava and ordered it, in the name of God, to stop. Those around him watched, stupefied: the lava stopped at once and advanced not an inch further. Torre del Greco was saved." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 318^[101]

Bouflet reports two later renewals of the same prodigy, which earned the religious the nickname of "saint of the volcano"^[102]. A dated canonical dossier concerns the Malagasy Blessed Victoria Rasoamanarivo (1848-1894): in 1934, a bush fire fanned by violent winds threatened an entire village and had already set a thatched roof ablaze, when a young catechist came out brandishing her image and imploring her; the wind turned and the fire stopped. This miracle is one of those that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints retained in the procedure for her beatification^[103].

The Blessed Joseph Gérard, a missionary in Basutoland (present-day Lesotho), himself kept a diary of the prayers for rain during an extreme drought:

"For months it has not rained; extraordinary drought; the streams have dried up. A multitude of people [...] have come. We held the prayer [for rain]. All were very pleased [...]. The rain began to fall after the prayer." — Joseph Gérard, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 329, based on Aimé Roche, Clartés australes, 1951^[104]

A travelling companion, Paulus, testified at the diocesan trial to a zone spared by hail for nearly half an hour: "This hail, I saw it with my own eyes: it made way for us, then began falling again behind us."^[105]

Power over objects, plants and animals

Objects: the column of Paola

Francis of Paola once asked a patrician of Paola, Nicola Picardi, to carry alone, from the quarry to the building site, a granite column two metres long and twenty-five centimetres in diameter. As the man laughed and asked for a team of draught animals, the saint lifted the column and placed it under his arm: Picardi carried it without difficulty. Three witnesses of the Cosenza trial, whose depositions are numbered XVII, XLV and LXXXVII, report the episode^[106]. "All this would not be credible," Bouflet notes, "had there not been dozens of witnesses, who testified at the various trials conducted with a view to his canonization, only a few years after his death"^[107].

Plants: roses without thorns

In the plant kingdom, Bouflet sums up the purpose of these prodigies with the last words of the Capuchin saint Veronica Giuliani: "It was love that did everything!"^[108]. The most recent case concerns Symphorose Chopin (1924–1983), whom he considers "one of the greatest French mystics of the twentieth century"^[109]. In the spring of 1971, a young man brought her a bunch of roses bought at the market — he had even pricked himself on a thorn. Bedridden, she held the flowers against her during the visit; retracing his steps, the visitor examined the stems one by one: not one of them bore thorns any longer^[110]. She then said to him:

"Little Jean, the thorns are for me, the roses for my brethren, the cross for me, the joy for God." — Symphorose Chopin, spring 1971, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 358^[111]

Blessed Francisca Ana Cirer offers another dossier of botanical prodigies. Bouflet reports, on the authority of Francisco Fornés, that a parish priest and a sacristan who had come begging at the convent of Charity asked her for flowers: the pebbles she handed them turned into flowers, and then a withered branch of wild olive in turn became covered in flowers.^[112]

The animals: the eels of Santa Lucia

In the animal kingdom, the best-documented dossier concerns the Franciscan brother Saint Egidio Maria di San Giuseppe, in Naples. One April morning in 1786, in the fishermen's quarter of Santa Lucia, the fisherman Antonio Di Grazia approached him, distraught: the day before, he had bought fourteen baskets of live eels in Terracina, all of which had died during the return crossing. The brother spread his relic of Saint Paschal over the seawater basin while repeating: "Wake up, animals of the good God, do not let this man despair!"; only the eels he had attended to came back to life, those already unloaded ashore remaining dead. The fisherman's son, Gaetano, testified at the trial:

"All of us, of this people of seafarers, were kneeling, and we saw with our own eyes these eels come back to life, which we had seen before lying dead, without a single one remaining dead." — Gaetano Di Grazia, Summarium of the beatification trial, Rome, 1844, p. 484, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 372-373^[113]

Bouflet does not hide the embarrassment such facts arouse. They constitute, he writes, "a real conundrum for the austere theologians of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints":

"On the one hand, the facts appear so extravagant that they risk being ridiculous and bringing religion into disrepute; on the other hand, it is impossible to brush aside with a wave of the hand the sworn testimonies gathered in the course of canonization proceedings." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 374^[114]

Yet he closes his panorama with these accounts, whose reading, he says, "speaks to the humble, who are astonished by nothing so long as they believe that God is All and capable of everything"^[115].

Catherine of Siena: insensibility and invulnerability

One day while she was rapt in ecstasy in the house of her sister-in-law Lysa, a dyers' house where a large fire was kept burning to boil the dyes, Saint Catherine of Siena collapsed onto the glowing coals. Lysa pulled her out and found her body and clothes intact, with no trace or smell of burning, not even any ashes, when the saint had, according to calculations made afterwards, remained on that fire for several hours^[116]. Bouflet distinguishes here two things that are often confused:

"In this alteration of the state of consciousness [...], insensibility of the subject is joined by invulnerability, two elements inseparable from the prodigy." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 297^[117]

A person may fail to feel a burn without their tissues being spared for all that; the strong phenomenon demands the conjunction of both observations. The saint's confessor and biographer, Blessed Raymond of Capua, gives its meaning:

"Do you understand, reader, what the virtue of the interior fire hidden in the soul of this virgin must have been, for it to be able completely to annihilate the virtue of the exterior fire? Does it not seem to you that the miracle of the three children in the furnace is, as it were, revealed here?" — Blessed Raymond of Capua, Life of Saint Catherine of Siena, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 297^[118]

Bernadette Soubirous: observation before and after the ecstasy

The most famous case in France remains that of Saint Bernadette Soubirous. During the seventeenth apparition, on 7 April 1858, she held a long candle whose flame she enveloped with both hands. Doctor Pierre-Romain Dozous, present at the grotto, examined her hands after the ecstasy; his words, recorded by the police commissioner, were as follows:

"It is a supernatural fact, to me, to see Bernadette kneeling before the grotto, in ecstasy, holding a lit candle and covering the flame with both hands, without her appearing to feel the slightest impression from the contact of her hands with the fire. I examined them. Not the slightest trace of a burn." — Doctor Pierre-Romain Dozous, according to René Laurentin, Vie de Bernadette, Paris, Desclée De Brouwer, 1978, p. 95-96, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 297-298^[119]

A counter-test followed: outside the ecstasy, when the flame of a match was brought near her hand, Bernadette started and withdrew it quickly^[120]. This observation before and after links the phenomenon to the ecstatic state, without making it a permanent insensibility to fire.

Francis of Paola: the densest dossier

For the "miracle of the lime kiln" of Saint Francis of Paola, Bouflet relies on Father Alfredo Bellantonio, Procurator General of the Minims, "a priest very rigorous in historical matters, and rather critical regarding miracles," yet compelled to bow before the documentation of the four informative trials of the canonization^[121]. The kiln in which the convent's lime was fired threatened to collapse; according to "the anonymous biographer and very numerous witnesses":

"Having raised his eyes to heaven and murmured a brief prayer, he made the sign of the cross, then entered the furnace amid the flames and, with his bare hands, repaired the cracks, then came out again, absolutely unharmed in his person and his clothes." — Alfredo Bellantonio, San Francesco di Paola, 1973, cited by Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 300^[122]

The Jesuit Herbert Thurston notes that the saint "appears also to have possessed the faculty of communicating this same immunity to others": a young hermit, Fra Santolino, entered at his order a flaming kiln to prop up a stone that was giving way, and came out unharmed — an episode reported by an eyewitness at the Calabrian trial^[123]. During the investigation ordered in 1470 by Pope Paul II, a canon investigator, who doubted his miracles, objected to him that such austerity was easy for a peasant used to hardship; the saint filled his hands with glowing coals and answered him: "You see, I could not do this, were I not a peasant." The canon fell to his knees^[124].

A non-religious counter-case counsels caution

Bouflet also documents a case of thermal immunity entirely foreign to the religious context, reported by Thurston on the basis of an 1872 journal: a Maryland blacksmith, examined by three doctors, applies to the soles of his feet a white-hot shovel with no burn observed, then keeps molten lead in his mouth and incandescent coals in his hand^[125]. Bouflet draws from this the conclusion that imposes itself:

"Nothing, a priori, distinguishes this case from that of Saint Francis of Paola, save the religious context and the meaning the Calabrian thaumaturge attributed to his feats."

— Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 305^[126]

The objection does not overturn the case: the blacksmith attributed his immunity to a disposition proven since childhood, whereas Francis of Paola communicated it to others, such as Fra Santolino; and even on the hypothesis of a natural gift, Bouflet concludes, the fact constitutes in the saint "a sign, ordered to the glory of God"^[127]. The materiality of a thermal immunity is therefore not enough, by itself, to establish a miracle: the context, the meaning, and the judgment of the Church make the difference. Bouflet illustrates this with a Belgian case: at Onkerzele, in 1933, the ordeals of fire undergone by a visionary were more spectacular than at Beauraing, but the doctor who studied them rejected the supernatural explanation, having noted in the protagonists signs of neuropathy and, on other points, of simulation and lying; the apparitions of Beauraing were recognized, those of Onkerzele denounced as false visions^[128]:

"The judgment of the Church concerns the origin and nature of the ecstasy, and not its characteristics: an ADC [altered state of consciousness] can perfectly well be demonstrated in a person without being of divine origin." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 299^[129]

The leading case: Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi

Aimé Michel devotes to the Florentine Carmelite Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi (1566-1607) the richest chapter of Métanoia on this phenomenon. He distinguishes two opposite forms of ecstasy in it:

"Thus most of her frequent ecstasies [...] presented themselves in two equally surprising forms that I shall call respectively the rigid form and the agile form. Both occurred suddenly, often under the effect of a single word serving as a triggering stimulus: love, Jesus, God, or others like these." — Aimé Michel, Métanoia. Phénomènes physiques du mysticisme, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 122-123^[130]

The rigid form immobilizes the saint in the posture in which the ecstasy surprises her. The agile form, by contrast, produces running, stair climbing, and leaps. Father Virgilio Cepari, her confessor and biographer, bears witness to this:

"She would go at an incredible speed from one place to another, going up and down the stairs with such agility that she seemed to fly rather than touch the ground with her feet. She leapt with certainty to the most dangerous places." — Father Virgilio Cepari, cited by Aimé Michel, Métanoia, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 123^[131]

The same witness reports that on 3 May 1592, on the feast of the Finding of the Cross, she ran into the choir and, with no ladder at all, leapt up to the cornice to take down the crucifix, which she then presented for the nuns to kiss. The Latin of the Acta Sanctorum places this cornice at "fifteen cubits" from the ground (altam ulnis quindecim); depending on the value adopted for the cubit, Aimé Michel calculates seven to eight metres, Herbert Thurston nine to ten, Olivier Leroy eighteen^[132].

A narrative of unexpected coherence

Aimé Michel tests the coherence of these testimonies by a reasoning of mechanics. To run at a mad speed, the young Carmelite can only lose part of her mass and inertia, or see her strength decupled; and the two hypotheses leave opposite visible traces:

"If mass and inertia alone change, the movements of the prodigious sister will take place without much noise, without damage to the objects she may touch [...] If, on the contrary, it is her strength that comes to be multiplied, one will be struck to see people and objects carom off at her contact." — Aimé Michel, Métanoia. Phénomènes physiques du mysticisme, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 125^[133]

Now the witnesses never describe the second situation: never did anyone see this poorly fed religious vie in strength with the most robust of her companions. They note, however, a detail that is anything but edifying: when she fell during her runs, "she rolled and bounced oddly, but without hurting herself", exactly as a body relieved of its inertia would do — a notion that scientists would formulate only with Galileo, a few years after the saint's biographers. Michel had stated it at the outset: "Let us not think that it is easy to invent a physically coherent miracle."^[134]

Discernment concerns the soul, never the feat

The most significant episode of the case, for the theology of discernment, concerns the reaction of Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi's superiors to her own phenomena:

"The answers given to her were inspired not by the nature of the phenomena, but by what was happening in her soul when they occurred. She was made a duty to reduce their manifestations to a minimum and not to use them, except for a pious purpose and with the authorization of her superiors." — Aimé Michel, Métanoia. Phénomènes physiques du mysticisme, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 129^[135]

Concretely, she was forbidden to leap and rise into the air during her ecstasies: if her work obliged her to climb somewhere, she was to use a ladder like everyone else^[136]. Obedience and the non-seeking of the prodigy thus take precedence over the spectacular. The secret of the saint, Michel concludes, is not in these feats, which in no way interested her: "it is love, the love of God"^[137]. During her ecstasies, she would cry out:

"O Love, you destroy me, you dissolve my being, you consume me, you burn me! Oh! come to me, and love, love!" — Saint Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi, cited by Aimé Michel, Métanoia, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 130^[138]

Mystical agility and the agility of the glorified body: two distinct senses

The term "agility" in fact covers two different theological realities that must never be confused. Adolphe Tanquerey, summarising Benedict XIV on levitation — of which "ecstatic walking", where the body seems to run skimming the ground, is one form — relates this phenomenon to a property of the risen body:

"In the Saints, this phenomenon is like an anticipation of the gift of agility that befits glorious bodies." — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 30-31, summarising the teaching of Benedict XIV^[139]

Thomistic theology indeed classifies agility among the four "dowries" or qualities of the glorious body, alongside impassibility, subtlety, and clarity:

Theological reference: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum Tertiae Partis, q. 82-85.^[140]

The Supplement moreover specifies that this promptness is not a strictly instantaneous displacement: the movement is accomplished in so brief a time that it may be imperceptible (q. 84, a. 3)^[141].

The agility described in living mystics is therefore, in this Thomistic reading, only an analogical and passing anticipation of a property destined for the resurrection of bodies — never its fully realised equivalent on earth.

A neighbouring phenomenon: alleged bodily elongation

A separate, rare and less well-established dossier, to be confused with agility properly so called: the elongation of the body during ecstasy. Every Friday, Blessed Stefana Quinzani relived the Crucifixion in trance; lying on the ground, she was seen with her arms stretched « well beyond her natural length », and twenty-one people signed concordant depositions at the trial for these five years of Fridays^[142]. For Venerable Veronica Laparelli, who died in 1620, her companions claimed to have seen her body lengthen « until it reached twice its normal size »; the Devil's Advocate judged the phenomenon « improbable in itself » and unable to serve « any purpose of edification or utility »^[143]. Aimé Michel turns the objection around: « the less edifying these prodigies are, the more they disconcert the pious authors who report them and their readers, and the stronger the presumption that the witnesses did not invent them »^[144]. The absence of an edifying meaning therefore does not nullify the testimony; it merely forbids making it a proof of sanctity or a spiritual message.

What Saint Thomas says

The subtlety of the glorified body denotes, in Saint Thomas, its perfect submission to the soul, without abolishing its bodily nature. The starting point is the Gospel: on the evening of Easter, « while the doors of the place where the disciples were, were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst » (Jn 20, 19). The Supplement of the Summa Theologiae nevertheless refuses to explain this fact by subtlety alone, which abolishes neither the dimensions of the body nor the necessity of occupying its own place:

« Subtlety does not take away from the glorious body its dimensions, nor, consequently, the necessity of having its place distinct from that of every other body. It does not therefore allow it to be in the place already occupied by another body. But divine power can work this miracle and grant it this privilege as an increase of glory, just as it granted Saint Peter the privilege of healing the sick by his mere presence, in confirmation of faith in Christ. » — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement, q. 83, a. 2^[145]

The Risen One's entry through closed doors was therefore not the effect of the subtlety of his body, the same question explains, but of « divine power », as at his virginal birth^[146]. The theological meaning does not reduce to an ability to walk through walls.

Doors that open

In mystical narratives, Bouflet himself raises the question regarding Blessed Chiara Agolanti of Rimini, reputed to pass through the walls of the cell in which she was locked up: « Did she really cross the partitions, or did the doors mysteriously open before her? » The better attested dossiers do indeed describe locked doors that open: before Saint Martin de Porrès, nurse at the Rosary convent in Lima, despite the keys kept by the sub-master; before the young Anne-Catherine Emmerich, then a farm servant, at the door of the church of Coesfeld, which the sacristan locked every night, before the eyes of her master and a manservant who had followed her at night; before Symphorose Chopin, in August 1978, at a chapel permanently kept locked^[147]. Bouflet relates these facts to the first Christian account of the kind, the deliverance of Peter, where the iron gate leading to the city « opened of its own accord in front of them » (Acts 12, 10)^[148]. A door opened without a known cause is not, in itself, a compenetration of bodies; none of these accounts describes a body observed passing, under control, through a closed wall.

Hierognosy denotes the faculty of distinguishing, without any sensory clue, a blessed object from a profane one, a true relic from a false one, and above all a consecrated host from an unconsecrated one. This charism itself requires discernment, as the best-known case shows, that of the stigmatist of Konnersreuth, Thérèse Neumann, to whom this gift was attributed during her ecstasies. In 1929, when brought before an image of the Sacred Heart linked to the bleeding prodigies of Mirebeau-en-Poitou, she reacted as before true relics of the Passion and asserted that Abbé Vachère, their promoter, was « in heaven » — whereas the affair had been judged by the Holy Office, which never reversed its condemnation, and the Church had refused the priest a religious funeral^[149]. Bouflet comments:

« One must not attribute to Theres Neumann a privilege of infallibility: she was sometimes mistaken in her supernatural discernments. » — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 1, Le Jardin des Livres, 2nd ed., p. 225^[150]

Bouflet considers three explanations for this error: a genuine mistake, a telepathic perception of the convictions of the abbé's faithful, or a reaction to the very subject of the image, the Sacred Heart, to which the stigmatist was sensitive in ecstasy, without validating the dossier to which it was linked^[151]. Adolphe Tanquerey formulates, regarding the signs of possession enumerated by the Roman Ritual, a principle that also applies to the recognition of the sacred: a reaction to holy objects proves something only if it is obtained without the person's knowledge:

« One may add to these signs those that result from the effects produced by the use of exorcisms or of sacred things, especially when this use takes place without the knowledge of the persons [...] But this sign is certain only when this is done without their knowledge; if they do indeed notice it, they may fly into a fury, either because of their horror of all that is religious, or through simulation. » — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 48^[152]

The Jesuit Auguste Poulain adds that such a sign, if it stands alone, is not enough: in hospitals one observes hypnotized patients who, on the operator's order, take on a character « as an actor would »^[153]. The rule that emerges is simple but demanding: a reaction to a blessed object has value only if the subject is unaware of its presence, with at least one unblessed object serving as a control. A visible reaction or an impressive sentence, without this protocol, is never enough to establish hierognosy.

The discernment of spirits is one of the charisms listed by Saint Paul: "to another the ability to distinguish between spirits" (1 Cor 12:10). Saint John makes it a commandment for all: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God" (1 Jn 4:1). Tanquerey gives the classic definition:

"The discernment of spirits, or the infused gift of reading the secrets of hearts and of discerning the good spirit from the evil one." — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 29^[154]

Three levels not to be confused

Tanquerey immediately specifies that all charisms, including this one, remain "well below charity and sanctifying grace"^[155]. Spiritual theology distinguishes three levels: acquired discernment, the fruit of prudence, doctrine and experience, which every confessor or director must exercise; the infused charism, a free grace granted to certain people for the good of the community, which often manifests itself through the reading of hearts; and the judgment of the Church, alone empowered to pass judgment on a phenomenon. The article What is the discernment of spirits? develops the spiritual practice; the cases below illustrate the charism and its opposite, illusion.

The reading of hearts in Saint Vincent Ferrer

The Petits Bollandistes report that a pilgrim in the troop following the Dominican preacher inwardly doubted his miracles and conversions, and watched his words to catch him out:

"One day Vincent approaches him, looks at him intently, and begins to reveal to him through his words all the thoughts of his heart, all the criticisms and doubts that crowded into his soul regarding his apostolic conduct; he did this with such truth and force that the disciple, confused and repentant, threw himself at his feet and humbly asked his pardon." — Mgr Paul Guérin, Les Petits Bollandistes. Vies des saints, t. IV, Paris, Bloud et Barral, 1876, at 5 April^[156]

The trait is characteristic of the infused charism: it serves not to dazzle, but to win back a soul, and it ends in pardon.

Saint Ignatius's rules

Acquired discernment found its most famous form in the rules of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The second describes how the two spirits act upon those who strive to make progress:

"It is characteristic of the evil spirit to bite, to inspire sadness, to raise obstacles, unsettling the soul with false reasoning, in order to prevent it from going forward. On the contrary, it is characteristic of the good spirit to give courage and strength, consolations, tears, lights and calm, making everything easy and clearing away all obstacles, so that one advances in the good one is doing." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, rules for the discernment of spirits, second rule, trans. Paul Debuchy^[157]

The same framework illuminates extraordinary phenomena: what comes from God leaves peace, humility and an impulse towards the good; what comes from elsewhere leaves turmoil, vanity or fascination.

Madeleine de la Croix, or the illusion that deceived Spain

The most famous case of illusion is that of Madeleine de la Croix (1487–1560), abbess of the Poor Clares of Cordoba. According to her own confession, she had bound herself to the demon by a pact at the age of thirteen; she simulated ecstasies, levitation, stigmata and predictions that were often fulfilled, made people believe for eleven years that she ate nothing, and succeeded for thirty-eight years, until 1543, in deceiving "the greatest theologians of Spain, the bishops, the cardinals, the inquisitors and the lords of the court"^[158]. On the point of death, she confessed everything publicly, then regretted her confessions; she had to be exorcised. The Inquisition condemned her in 1546^[159] to be shut up in another convent of her order^[160]. Tanquerey cites her in support of his first rule: before any phenomenon, examine the person — their balance, their sincerity, their docility to their director and above all their humility, since "true humility is the touchstone of sanctity"^[161].

Xenoglossy refers to the use of a language the subject has never learned. The model is Pentecost: "They were all filled with the Holy Spirit: they began to speak in other tongues, and each spoke according to the gift of the Spirit," to such a point that the pilgrims of every nation were astonished: "How is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?" (Acts 2:4.8).

Charism, sign of possession or hidden memory

The phenomenon is, however, ambivalent. Tanquerey recalls that the gift of tongues is, in Saint Paul, "the gift of praying in a foreign tongue with a certain feeling of exaltation" and, "according to theologians, it is the gift of speaking several languages"^[162]. But the same phenomenon appears, in the Roman Ritual, among the three principal signs of diabolical possession:

"Speaking an unknown language using several words of that language, or understanding one who speaks it; revealing distant and hidden things; displaying strengths that exceed the natural strength of one's age or condition." — Roman Ritual, cited by Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 47^[163]

There is finally a third, natural explanation: a morbid exaltation can bring back fragments of languages forgotten or merely heard. Tanquerey cites the case of a pastor's maid who recited passages of Greek or Hebrew that she had heard her master read aloud^[164]. Hence his protocol:

"To establish the fact, a thorough examination of the subject is needed, to see whether he has not had in the past the opportunity to learn a few words of these languages, and whether, instead of uttering a few phrases learned by heart, he speaks and understands a language that was truly unknown to him." — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 47^[165]

Saint Vincent Ferrer and the counterfeits

The most famous case in hagiography remains that of Saint Vincent Ferrer, the itinerant preacher who travelled across Europe at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Petits Bollandistes, who summarise the ancient biographies, write:

"He so eminently possessed the gift of tongues that the language he used in the pulpit became intelligible to all sorts of nations, and there was no one in his audience, whether French, Italian, German, English, Greek or Barbarian, who did not hear him and grasp what he said as perfectly as if he had spoken the own language of all these different countries." — Mgr Paul Guérin, Les Petits Bollandistes. Vies des saints, t. IV, Paris, Bloud et Barral, 1876, at 5 April^[166]

This gift, as in the account in Acts (Acts 2:8), concerns the comprehension of the listeners: the preacher's language became intelligible to all. Auguste Poulain judges, on the contrary, that the unknown tongues of the Protestant "revivals" of Norway (1907) and Cassel (1908) were merely "pseudo-languages, imitations of words," expressing the subject's emotion "as music would"^[167]. In the diagnosis of possession, he holds the surest sign to be the comprehension of questions asked in Latin of a person who does not know that language, especially if the answers run counter to the exorcist's expectation^[168]. A serious examination therefore requires four cumulative elements: a linguistic history that rules out any learning, real comprehension rather than memorised phrases, a genuine exchange rather than a recitation, and the identification of the language by an independent expert; then comes the question of meaning, which falls under the discernment of spirits.

Several mystics lived through long periods almost without sleep, a phenomenon that mystical theology designates by the neologism agrypnia:

"This neologism, formed from a Greek root and the alpha privative, denotes the absence or deprivation of sleep." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 112^[169]

Bouflet examines the case files of numerous mystics reputed to be agrypnic — Catherine of Siena, Thérèse Neumann, Maria Marchesi, Marthe Robin, Lidwina of Schiedam, Marie Brognier, Peter of Alcantara, Felix of Cantalice, Padre Pio, Yvonne-Aimée de Malestroit, Pierre-François Néron, Ana de Magalhães and Angela Salawa^[170]. He notes that "as a general rule" these servants of God took a minimum of rest: an hour and a half per night for Peter of Alcantara, two hours for the Capuchin Felix of Cantalice, three for Padre Pio^[171].

Peter of Alcantara according to Saint Teresa of Avila

The first of these testimonies comes from a saint, who knew the Franciscan reformer personally and found in him a defender. Teresa of Avila reports what he confided to her:

"He told me, and another person in whom he also had great confidence, that he had spent forty years without sleeping more than an hour and a half in all the day and night; and that of all the austerities he had ever practised, that of conquering sleep had, in the beginning, seemed to him the greatest; that for this reason he was always standing or kneeling; and that during the little time he sat to sleep, he rested his head against a piece of wood fixed in the wall." — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life Written by Herself, ch. XXVII, trans. Arnauld d'Andilly^[172]

The saint adds that his longest fasts took place, "in my opinion, in prayer and in the great raptures that his love of God caused him, one of which I witnessed"^[173]: the link between wakefulness, fasting and ecstasy is already established.

A reduction of sleep, not its suppression

His conclusion is clear, and deliberately departs from the most spectacular claim:

"In reality, absolute agrypnia does not exist, but there are indeed considerable reductions in sleep time, or more precisely of a half-sleep that is made up for by ecstatic states." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 116^[174]

He backs this up with a common-sense physiological argument, recalling that theologians of mysticism only admit agrypnia insofar as ecstasies compensate for an extremely reduced sleep:

"If it is true that certain people are able to recover quickly after only a few hours of sleep [...], it seems quite impossible for a human being never to sleep. [...] It is a fact that agrypnic mystics are always ecstatics." — Joachim Bouflet, Encyclopédie des phénomènes extraordinaires dans la vie mystique, vol. 2, Le Jardin des Livres, 2003, p. 113^[175]

The most precise case files point in this direction. Even for Blessed Angela Salawa, reputed to no longer sleep until her death, the witness states that "only in the early morning could she doze a little"; with Marthe Robin as with Anne-Catherine Emmerich, the documents of the beatification proceedings attest to these "daybreak dozings"^[176]. As for Marthe Robin, reputed to have slept no more from 1931 until her death, Bouflet recalls that "there was never any verification of this alleged absence of sleep"^[177]. The established phenomenon is therefore an extraordinary reduction of sleep, permeated by prayer and ecstasy.

Eight objections come up constantly with this kind of material. Each deserves a precise answer rather than a reflexive dismissal or acceptance.

Objection 1 — "Pious witnesses see what they want to see"

Answer: this objection holds for accounts resting on a single devout witness, but it falls in the face of cross-checks. In 1813, in the case of Anne-Catherine Emmerich, the minister ordered a report by two doctors, one of them Reformed in confession, and an account of the facts drawn up, if possible, jointly by the parish priest of Dülmen and the nearest Protestant pastor. The French administrator of the Grand Duchy of Berg, Count Beugnot, who did not believe in the miracle, summarises their conclusions:

"The first confirmed the physiological details I have just related. [...] The doctors ended their report with the observation that it was impossible for this to be anything other than an accidental effect of the forces of nature, but so rare that no step had been taken towards the discovery of its cause." — Count Jacques-Claude Beugnot, Mémoires, cited by Aimé Michel, Métanoia, Albin Michel, 1986, p. 159^[178]

The facts were thus confirmed by observers who had no interest in vouching for them.

Objection 2 — "An unexplained fact necessarily means the supernatural"

Answer: this leap, the clergy of Dülmen themselves refused to make: they "demanded, for the establishment of a miracle, proofs of a higher degree than the example they had before their eyes"^[179]. In 1819, a new commission, prejudiced against the stigmatic and determined to unmask the fraud, had her forcibly transferred and kept under watch day and night from 7 to 28 August: the wounds on her hands did not appear under its eyes, but those on her chest and head were recognised as authentic, as was the absence of all food; the counter-examinations subsequently carried out at Münster detected no fraud^[180]. An unexplained fact remains an unexplained fact; its supernatural significance belongs to a separate step, which is the Church's to take.

Objection 3 — "A psychosomatic explanation destroys any spiritual reading"

Answer: in 1933, Dr Alfred Lechler published the case of Elisabeth, a young Austrian Lutheran peasant suffering from neurosis: after a film about the Passion watched on Good Friday 1932, he suggested to her under hypnosis wounds on her hands and feet, which appeared, then other marks, up to tears of blood comparable to those of Thérèse Neumann^[181]. The theologians, Aimé Michel notes, were the only ones to keep their cool: they had known since Benedict XIV that "almost no prodigy can in itself be necessarily attributed to supernatural causes"^[182]. The experiment forces us to distinguish the bodily mechanism from the meaning; it does not, however, reproduce the major cases, and the article The Stigmatics compares point by point these marks with the best-attested mystical stigmata: depth, duration, absence of infection.

Objection 4 — "A saint cannot be mistaken"

Answer: Tanquerey explicitly rules this out for private revelations:

"A revelation may be true in its substance and yet mingled with accessory errors. God [...] does not correct the prejudices or errors that may be found in the minds of the seers: he has in view their spiritual good and not their intellectual formation." — Adolphe Tanquerey, Phénomènes mystiques extraordinaires, impr. du Pays Fort, 1986, p. 22^[183]

He lists the causes of these alterations: the scientific or historical errors of the time, the ideas of the spiritual director, the confusion between personal meditation and revelation, a misinterpretation by the seer himself, the retouching of secretaries^[184]. His most striking example is that of Saint Joan of Arc: to her voices, which told her that she "would be delivered by a great victory", she believed this meant her delivery from prison; "it was in reality her martyrdom and her entry into heaven"^[185]. The case of Thérèse Neumann misled by an image connected with Abbé Vachère, mentioned above, illustrates the same possibility for a charisma as precise as hierognosis.

Objection 5 — "Prodigies prove holiness"

Answer: Aimé Michel, Bouflet and Tanquerey converge on this point. Charisms are inferior to charity^[186]; many canonised saints knew no extraordinary phenomenon; conversely, Madeleine de la Croix simulated all the mystical phenomena for thirty-eight years, and the Maryland blacksmith displayed, in no religious context, an immunity to fire comparable to that of Francis of Paola. The Church sets this down in its own acts: the Dicastery's norms recall that, even in canonisation processes, the approval "does not imply a declaration of the authenticity of the supernatural phenomena present in a person's life", as the canonisation decree of Saint Gemma Galgani stressed^[187].

Objection 6 — "A few words in a foreign language prove xenoglossy"

Answer: the Roman Ritual itself classifies the unknown tongue among the signs of possession, and Tanquerey demands a complete linguistic history, real understanding and genuine exchange, not an isolated memorised sentence — the servant who recited the Greek heard at her master's house shows the pitfall^[188]. Without these conditions, phonetic resemblance or a witness's impression is never enough to establish the phenomenon, still less to determine its origin.

Objection 7 — "Reacting before a sacred object proves hierognosis"

Answer: Tanquerey considers this sign certain only if obtained without the subject's knowledge^[189]; an unblessed control object, presented under the same conditions, moreover allows comparison. Poulain recalls that such a reaction, if it stands alone, is not enough, since hypnotised patients play on order the part suggested to them^[190]. A visible reaction before witnesses who already know the nature of the object may be a matter of suggestion, without any conscious fraud being necessary.

Objection 8 — "Old accounts, based on canonisation processes, are all unusable"

Answer: this objection confuses two very different genres. A late legend, uncritically copied from one author to another, does not have the same value as a sworn deposition, dated, identifying its witness and entered in an adversarial canonical process — like those cited concerning Francis of Paola, Joseph Gérard or Egidio di San Giuseppe. Such ancient legal testimony deserves to be examined for what it is: a piece of historical evidence, never the equivalent of modern instrumental expertise, but never a fable to be dismissed out of hand either.

The norms published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on 17 May 2024 cover all the phenomena examined here: "alleged apparitions, visions, interior or exterior locutions, writings or messages, phenomena related to religious images, psychophysical phenomena and others"^[191]. Among their negative criteria are "an evident pursuit of profit, power, fame", "gravely immoral acts" and the "psychic alterations" of the subject; they consider it "of particular moral gravity" to use mystical experiences "as a means or pretext to exercise domination over people or to commit abuses"^[192]. The frauds of Catherine Filljung, Amélia Rodrigues or Palma Matarelli show why these negative criteria exist.

The decisive point, then, is never to classify a phenomenon quickly, but to examine the person, the material fact itself, any message, the lasting spiritual fruits and the risks of abuse. This grid overlaps with the five stages outlined above in Bouflet — observation, cause, meaning, fruits, judgement — and with Tanquerey's cumulative criteria. The norms, moreover, open with a reminder that puts these facts back in their place: holiness is a call addressed to all the baptised, nourished by prayer and the sacraments, and the true mystical life is offered to everyone:

"Those who let themselves be docilely guided by the Holy Spirit experience the presence and action of the Trinity, so that a life thus lived, as Pope Francis teaches, leads to a mystical life which, although 'devoid of extraordinary phenomena, is proposed to all the faithful as a daily experience of love'." — Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Norms of 17 May 2024, no. 5, citing Pope Francis, apostolic exhortation It Is the Confidence, on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, 15 October 2023, no. 35^[193]

The nihil obstat, one of the outcomes provided for by these norms, permits a prudent adherence to a devotion when its fruits are recognised and no major obstacle is identified. It does not, however, declare the supernatural origin of the phenomenon and imposes no obligation of faith on the faithful. The norms thus distinguish the pastoral decision from the qualification of the event: this distinction prevents a permission to practise a devotion from being turned into a certification of every associated account^[194].

Three principles emerge from these cases.

First, an unexplained material fact is never, in itself, a miracle. Fraud and known natural causes must still be ruled out, the meaning of the sign assessed, its lasting fruits observed, and the final judgement left to ecclesiastical authority — never to medical or scientific bodies alone, which are competent to attest that a fact is inexplicable^[195]. But where this process has been carried out — at Syracuse, Akita, Damascus, in the trials of Francis of Paola or Egidio — there is no reason to regard the prodigy as any less real than any other historical fact.

Second, the frequency of prodigies is proportional neither to the holiness nor to the authenticity of a case. The greatest saint may know no extraordinary phenomenon; a subject with no connection to the faith may present a materially comparable fact, and a fraudster may simulate its appearance. The decisive criterion always lies elsewhere: in humility, obedience, charity and conformity with the faith of the Church.

Third, these signs have a meaning that goes beyond curiosity. Tanquerey sees in the levitation and brightness of the saints "as an anticipation" of the qualities of the glorious body^[196]. Saint Paul describes this body promised to all:

"What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body." — Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42–44 (trans. AELF)

The prodigies of the saints give us a glimpse, for a moment, of what the resurrection will give to all. And they all say the same thing, summed up in the last words of Saint Veronica Giuliani: "It was love that did everything!"^[197]

• Levitations — elevation of the body or of a sacred object without visible support.
• The levitations of Saint Joseph of Cupertino — the best-documented case.
• Luminous phenomena — unexplained radiances and lights.
• Incendium amoris — burning love and mystical hyperthermia.
• Incorruptible bodies — incorruption, mummification and saponification.
• Inedias — total abstinence from food.
• Bilocations — simultaneous presence in two places.
• Stigmatists — bodily signs of the Passion.
• The stigmata of Padre Pio — the fragrance of the wounds.
• The multiplication of food — Don Bosco and modern-day cases.
• Saint Francis of Paola — the thaumaturge of the Calabrian trials.
• Criteria for discerning supernatural phenomena — norms and criteria.
• What is the discernment of spirits? — the spiritual practice of discernment.
• Exorcism in the Catholic Church — the signs of possession according to the Ritual.
• Venerable Marthe Robin — the case of distant communions.
• Our Lady of Fatima — the angel with the host in 1916.