Servant of God Thérèse Neumann (1898-1962)

Born on a Good Friday (1898)

Therese Neumann was born in Konnersreuth, a small rural town in the Bavarian Upper Palatinate, close to the Bohemian border. The date involves a nuance her biographers take seriously: her mother maintained the child was born before midnight, on the evening of Good Friday, 8 April 1898, while the parish register records the entry of 9 April in the early morning.^[7][8] That birth on a Good Friday — the day of Christ's Passion whose sufferings she would later, it is said, relive — did not fail to strike popular piety.

Her father, Ferdinand Neumann, was a master tailor; her mother, Anna née Grillmeier, kept the house. Thérèse was the eldest of a large family — the sources describe her as the eldest of eleven children.^[9][10] The home was Catholic, modest, hard-working: nothing in these peasant beginnings foreshadowed the extraordinary destiny that would be hers.

A youth of work and a missionary dream

From her teens, Thérèse was placed as a farm maid (Magd). Reputed to be sturdy, pious and hard-working, she cherished a simple and ardent desire: one day to leave as a missionary religious sister, often said to be bound for Africa.^[11][12] She was an ordinary young woman of rural Bavaria, shaped by Mass, field work and a faith passed on without fanfare — the exact opposite of the extraordinary figure she would become in spite of herself.

The 1918 fire and the collapse of her body

On 10 March 1918 — the 11th according to the English-language entry, the German entry giving only the month of March 1918 —, everything changed. While helping to put out a fire on a neighbouring farm, Thérèse, carrying heavy buckets of water, seriously injured her back — described as a dislocation of the lumbar vertebrae.^[13][14][15] There began a long descent into illness: sight disorders from autumn 1918, paralysis from October 1918, complete blindness in spring 1919, bedsores, convulsions.^[16][17] For several years she remained bedridden, almost blind and helpless, in suffering that the medicine of the time could not relieve.

It was in this trial of the body that, slowly, an inner reversal took place: Thérèse turned toward God a pain no remedy could soothe, and attached herself particularly to a young saint whom Rome had just raised to the altars, Thérèse of Lisieux.

Two dates have marked the memory of Konnersreuth, because they coincide, almost to the day, with the rise of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux toward the glory of the altars. The favourable tradition sees in this the hand of the Carmelite; criticism sees in it the resolution of disorders of nervous origin. The Church herself does not decide — but the facts, as reported, are dated.

Recovery of sight (29 April 1923)

On 29 April 1923, the very day of the beatification of Thérèse of Lisieux in Rome, Thérèse Neumann declared that she recovered her sight.^[18][19] She attributed this healing to the intercession of the Carmelite, to whom she had devoutly made novenas. The date itself is certain: the beatification of the "little Thérèse" did indeed take place on that 29 April 1923.

Healing of the paralysis (17 May 1925)

Two years later, on 17 May 1925, the day of the canonisation of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Thérèse Neumann declared that she regained the use of her legs and rose up, healed of her paralysis and her bedsores.^[20][21] The coincidence of the two healings with the two great Roman milestones of the Carmelite — beatification then canonisation — lastingly associated the name of the Bavarian peasant woman with that of the saint of Lisieux.

According to the English-language devotional account, Thérèse Neumann is said to have attributed both her healings to the intercession of the Carmelite, thanking her, as she put it, for restoring her sight and then the use of her legs.^[22] Since the exact primary source of these words has not been found, they are presented here as a reported account, not as a literal quotation.

The life of Thérèse Neumann is inseparable from the extraordinary phenomena attributed to her from 1926 onwards. Her biography cannot be written without presenting them, for they lie at the heart both of her influence and of the objections raised against her. Ignispedia devotes two specialised dossiers to them; only the essentials are given here, placed back in the thread of her life.

The stigmata and the Friday Passion (1926)

During Lent 1926 the first stigmata appeared. Tradition places a first wound near the heart on 5 March 1926, the first Friday of Lent, then wounds on the hands and feet on 2 April 1926, Good Friday, soon accompanied by tears of blood and, later, the marks of a crown of thorns.^[23][24] Every Friday, especially during Lent and Holy Week, Thérèse is said to have inwardly relived the scenes of the Passion — condemnation, scourging, carrying of the cross, crucifixion — in ecstasies observed by many witnesses and followed by deep exhaustion.^[25]

These phenomena place her among the great Catholic stigmatics, alongside Padre Pio and Venerable Marthe Robin, both her contemporaries. The detail of the observations, controversies and ecclesial discernment is treated in the dossier The Stigmata of Thérèse Neumann.

Inedia: living on the Eucharist alone

The most debated phenomenon remains inedia. From 1926 onwards, Thérèse Neumann is said to have taken in nothing — neither food nor drink — except the consecrated Host, received in Communion.^[26][27] This total fast, which she said she had never sought, is said to have lasted until her death in 1962 — some thirty years. She summed up its mystery, according to a note by her parish priest Josef Naber dated 1 March 1931, in a formula borrowed from the Transfiguration:

"Thérèse states that, at the first vision of the Transfiguration of Christ (6 August 1926), she left all hunger and thirst on Tabor."^[28]

She thus joins the long tradition of mystical inedias, almost exactly contemporary with that of Marthe Robin. The fact, unverifiable by nature, concentrated suspicions upon her: the account of the medical surveillance of July 1927 and the objections it raised is developed in the dossier The Inedia of Thérèse Neumann.

Reported gifts: visions of Purgatory, hierognosis, languages

To these phenomena are added, in the accounts of those around her, several extraordinary charisms: hierognosis — the ability to distinguish a consecrated object from an ordinary one — the understanding, during her visions, of ancient languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek), and episodes of bilocation.^[29][30] As always in such matters, these gifts belong to devotional literature and have not been scientifically verified: the Church holds them to be private revelations, which never bind the faith.

Among the most insistent features are her dealings with the souls in Purgatory. Thérèse is said to have seen deceased persons appear, asking for prayers, sometimes people she had never known. The exhibition panels reproducing her Journal thus evoke an apparition of the priest of her childhood, Fr Ebel — although the cross-check against the German edition of the Journal could not be carried out: in the absence of this verification, no literal words are quoted here; only these dealings with the departed are mentioned as such.^[31]

This praying bond with the departed belongs to the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints and of purgatory, which these accounts illustrate rather than establish.

It would be wrong to reduce Konnersreuth to a cabinet of mystical curiosities. Around Thérèse Neumann there formed a genuine network of Catholic friendship and resistance — the "Konnersreuth circle" (Konnersreuther Kreis) — whose history collides head-on with the rise of Nazism.

Fritz Gerlich, the Konnersreuth convert

The most famous case is that of Fritz Gerlich (1883-1934), a Protestant Calvinist journalist and historian, a rationalist mind who came to Konnersreuth in 1927 with the firm intention of unmasking a fraud.^[32][33] The investigation produced the opposite effect: convinced of the reality of the phenomena, Gerlich published in 1929 a two-volume study, Die stigmatisierte Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth, and converted to Catholicism in 1931.^[34]

A spiritual resistance to Nazism

Having become Catholic, Gerlich placed his pen at the service of the struggle against National Socialism. In 1932 he founded the weekly Der gerade Weg ("The Straight Path"), in which he denounced the Hitlerian ideology without mincing words:

"National Socialism means: Enmity with neighbouring nations, tyranny internally, civil war, world war, lies, hatred, fratricide and boundless want." — Fritz Gerlich, Der gerade Weg, 31 July 1932^[35]

Arrested on 9 March 1933, in the wake of Hitler's seizure of power, he was interned at Dachau and executed on 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives.^[36][37] Konnersreuth keeps his memory alive — a memorial site is devoted to him —, and the Church opened his own cause for beatification on 16 December 2017: Fritz Gerlich is himself a Servant of God.^[38] The stigmatised peasant woman and the martyred journalist remain, in the history of Catholic Bavaria, the two faces of a single refusal of falsehood.

Beyond the extraordinariness of the phenomena, what gives Thérèse Neumann her place among the servants of God is a coherent interior life, centred on the Eucharist, the offering of suffering and a childlike Marian trust.

The victim soul and reparation

Like Marthe Robin, Thérèse Neumann belongs to the Catholic tradition of victim souls: those who, uniting their pains to the Passion of Christ, offer them for the salvation of others. Her life of unbroken suffering — illness, stigmata, weekly relivings of the Passion — makes sense, in this perspective, only in relation to a reparation offered out of love. The Catholic faith never glorifies pain for its own sake — a real evil — but believes that, offered with Christ, it becomes fruitful; this is the whole meaning of the Ignispedia dossier Evil and suffering.

"Living on the Host": the primacy of the Eucharist

The centre of gravity of this existence is the Eucharist, in the most literal sense: if her loved ones are to be believed, Thérèse lived only on the Host. Her whole spirituality is ordered to the Real Presence — Christ truly received as the sole food, day after day. Where most Christians receive Communion, Thérèse Neumann subsisted on Communion: a living parable, in the eyes of her admirers, of Christ's words that "my flesh is true food" (Jn 6:55).^[39]

Trust and Marian humility

The Marian devotion of Thérèse is ardent. In a vision she dates to 2 July 1955, feast of the Visitation, she reports — still according to the exhibition panels reproducing her Journal, pending cross-checking against the German edition — that the Virgin is said to have called her to humility, in the spirit of the words of the Magnificat addressed to Saint Elizabeth. Since the account is known only through these panels, it is summarised here in paraphrase, without literal quotation.^[40]

This insistence on humility — receiving everything as a free gift, attributing nothing to oneself — is the mark of authentic mystics, and one of the criteria by which the Church discerns the spirit animating a soul.

An honest article cannot pass over in silence the serious objections weighing on the Konnersreuth case. The Church herself, by advancing slowly, took care to examine them rather than ignore them. The phenomena of Thérèse Neumann have never been recognised as supernatural by any magisterial decision.

Medical suspicions

From the outset, doctors questioned the authenticity of the phenomena. The surveillance of 14 to 28 July 1927 — fifteen days (the French-language entry gives the 13th) —, directed by Dr Otto Seidl with the psychiatrist Gottfried Ewald and four Franciscan Sisters of Mallersdorf, observed no intake of food — but recorded a variation in weight (a fall then a return to normal) which critics judged suspicious; the test was never repeated, the family refusing any further observation, notably in a hospital setting.^{[41][42][43][44]} In March 1928, Professor Martini of the Bonn university clinic, commissioned by Bishop Buchberger, examined Thérèse on 22 and 23 March, during a few hours of intermittent observation spread over a single half-day: he described the lesions precisely, but stated that he had never seen, during that brief observation, the moment when the blood actually came out of the skin — while declaring himself unconvinced by the hypothesis of simulation, presented only as a possibility not to be excluded.^[45] Later, the British historian Hilda Graef published a critical study, The Case of Therese Neumann (1951), contesting the truth of the phenomena.^[46]

What the Church has — and has not — decided

The Catholic position holds itself at an equal distance from two excesses. On the one hand, it would be unjust to erect suspicions into proofs: no fraud was ever demonstrated in Thérèse's lifetime, several observers — including Gerlich, who came as a sceptic — declared themselves convinced, and the blood collected on a handkerchief used to wipe away her tears is said to have been identified under the microscope as human blood during a one-off examination on 31 October 1927 (Prof. Merkel and Dr Walcher, Munich) — with no published protocol and no documented chain of custody, a result which establishes the nature of the liquid collected without proving its origin.^[47] On the other hand, it would be naive to conclude to a miracle: extraordinary phenomena, even when real, must be discerned according to their fruits, their conformity to the faith, the obedience and humility of the person, and the absence of any seeking after spectacle.

This is precisely the logic of a cause for beatification: in it the Church judges first of all not the phenomena, but the heroicity of the virtues — faith, hope, charity, humility, obedience lived to the end. The supernatural character of the stigmata or the inedia is not the direct object of the process; at this stage it remains an open question.

Death on 18 September 1962

Thérèse Neumann died at Konnersreuth on 18 September 1962, aged sixty-four, of heart failure — three days after the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows (15 September).^[48][49] Her funeral on 22 September 1962 gathered a considerable crowd — several thousand people from all over Bavaria and beyond.^[50] Her lifelong spiritual director, Fr Josef Naber, parish priest of Konnersreuth since 1909, had been the first witness and the patient chronicler of her mystical life.^[51][52]

Servant of God (2005)

The process for beatification opened more than forty years after her death, in three distinct acts. An episcopal decree of 19 March 2004 first set the step in motion, then Rome gave its nihil obstat on 21 January 2005 (prot. 2613-1/04), in the final months of the pontificate of John Paul II; finally, on 13 February 2005, the first Sunday of Lent, during a pontifical Mass in the packed parish church of Saint Lawrence in Konnersreuth, the Bishop of Regensburg Gerhard Ludwig Müller — future cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — publicly announced the opening of the cause.^[53][54] A petition of some forty thousand signatures from the faithful had supported the step.^[55] Thérèse Neumann has since borne the title of Servant of God.

It must be said with exactness: she has not been declared Venerable — the Church has not yet recognised the heroicity of her virtues. The cause remains, at the last update published by the diocese (8 April 2023), in the diocesan phase: more than sixty witnesses to be heard in the course of the procedure, without the dossier yet having been transmitted to Rome.^[56][57] Her tomb, in the Konnersreuth cemetery, is a place of prayer and pilgrimage,^[58][59] and a museum has been devoted to her in the village since 2022.^[60]

• Read The Stigmata of Thérèse Neumann and The Inedia of Thérèse Neumann: the two great phenomena of Konnersreuth, presented in detail and weighed with discernment.
• Compare with Venerable Marthe Robin: a strictly contemporary French mystic, bedridden, stigmatised and inedic, whose cause has reached venerability.
• Read Victim souls and The stigmatics: the spirituality of suffering offered up and the tradition of wound-bearers, at the heart of Thérèse's life.
• Read Evil and suffering: how the Catholic faith understands the pain Thérèse offered out of love.
• Read What does the Church say about purgatory?: the meaning of Thérèse's dealings with the souls of the departed.
• The essentials: Servant of God Thérèse Neumann (1898-1962), a Bavarian peasant woman of Konnersreuth, was a stigmatised mystic with weekly visions of the Passion and prolonged inedia, around whom formed a circle of Catholic resistance to Nazism. The Church, without having recognised her phenomena as supernatural, opened her cause for beatification on 13 February 2005: she is a Servant of God.