While I didn’t claim to understand why it had to be that way, I tried to put vanity behind me like the childish thing it was … and remember I was still alive for a reason that would be revealed in God’s own time.
II.
The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn’t been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.
The first time it happened to me was a Sunday morning in the abbey chapel, near the close of Mass. The Host had been venerated and the brothers and I knelt along the railing before the altar as Abbot O’Riordan worked his way down the row of us.
“The body of Christ,” he would say, then rest a wafer upon a waiting tongue, while in our mouths the miracle would happen again and again — the bread become the actual flesh of our Lord, and the wine His Saviour’s blood. “The body of Christ.”
Awaiting my turn, I often contemplated the crucifix hanging on the wall before us: life-size, a plaster Christ painted in the vivid colours of His suffering and passion. His dark eyes gazed heavenward, while from His brow and nail wounds blood streamed in the other direction. Every rib stood out clearly as He seemed to labor in agony for each breath.
“The body of Christ,” said the abbot, before me now.
Only when I drew my hands from the railing to cup them beneath my chin, to catch the Host should it fall by accident, did I notice my own blood flowing from each wrist, where a nail might have been driven by a Roman executioner. Beneath my grey robe, my feet felt suddenly warm and wet.
And when the Host slipped from Abbot O’Riordan’s fingers, it fell all the way to the hard floor, with no hands there to catch it and spare it from defilement. There it chipped into crumbling fragments of proxy flesh, to mingle with drops of blood that were entirely real.
*
There was no pattern to the stigmata’s recurrence after the first time, just a gradual worsening of physical signs. Initially, blood only seeped like sweat through unbroken skin, but later the wounds themselves manifested in my flesh, deeper on each occasion, layer by layer — for scarcely a minute to begin with, until at last they lingered for as long as two hours before sealing up again.
I was examined over several months by a hierarchy of church representatives, all of them seeking a simple explanation, and I soon realized this was what they were hoping to find. The length and sharpness of my fingernails were checked repeatedly, and my routines became of intense fascination as they sought to discover some habit that might inflict deep blisters which would on occasion burst and bleed.
But Greyfriars was no reclusive monastery far from the modern world, where medieval-minded monks were turned out each sunrise to till the fields. In the quiet neighbourhoods of Kilkenny I taught Latin in the parochial school adjacent to the friary. The closest I came to fieldwork was teaching the declensions of
At least until the day I bled in class, and was removed from active staff.
For a faith founded on the resurrection of the dead, and sustained by centuries of miracles accepted as historically real as wars and plagues, the Church of my era I found to be reluctant to admit to the possibility of modern miracles. Worse, I began to feel I’d become more of an embarrassment than anything, a smudge of unfortunate dust that may have been
I believe what unsettled them most was that the wounds opened on my wrists, an anatomical verisimilitude shared by no stigmatic I’d ever heard of. Centuries of art and sculpture have depicted a crucifixion that never would’ve taken place, not with any self-respecting Roman soldier on the scene with a hammer and a fistful of nails. Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small. Nailing through the wrists was the only way to support the weight of the body and keep it on the cross without its tearing loose. But old images, fixed in the head and worn round the neck, are hard to die, although I should think they’d give anyone a handy means for weeding the miraculous from the merely hysterical: If Jesus were to go to all the trouble of manifesting through the flesh of another, you’d think He’d at least want to get the facts straight.
This, more than anything, was what seemed to keep my priestly examiners from comfortably dismissing the whole matter. It’d been going on for nearly half a year before I was told, finally, that I was to be examined the next day by a tribunal arriving from Rome.
“I would ask you to spend the hours between now and then in prayer and fasting,” Abbot O’Riordan told me. We were alone in his office and the door that he almost never closed was shut tight.
“All due respect, Father,” I said, “I’ve been praying for a bit more insight ever since this started.”
“Not for insight, that’s not what I’m asking of you, but for how you’ll answer their questions tomorrow. What you send back to Rome with them …
“I thought all I’d send them back with was the simple truth about what’s been happening.”
“Do you even know what’s happening to you, Patrick? Can you tell me the cause of it? There’s been no getting to the bottom of it for six months, and you don’t know how I prayed for an end to it before it got this far.”
He lowered his head to his hands for a moment, as if he’d said too much. Then, with those hands folded loosely together on his desk, he avoided my eyes and looked about the austere room.
“The Church,” he said in a slow hush, “is built on a solid foundation of miracles from the past. But it’s my belief — and I’m not alone in this — that the past is where they should stay. What’s in the past remains fixed and constant. There’s no reason to doubt it, no need to demand from it any greater explanation. There’s no need to question it … only to believe in it. There it is and there it remains for all time, and it need never, ever, change … because it’s safely protected by time.”
I stepped closer to him, aghast. “What threat could I pose to any of that?”
“Have you not yet understood why we’ve tried to keep this as quiet as we can? Spontaneous healings at shrines and apparitions of Mary are one thing. But give the laity another human being they see miracles in, and it opens up an entirely new channel for their faith. You don’t want it any more than I do … because they’ll want more from you. They will. No pun intended, Brother Patrick, they’ll bleed you dry, and in the end you can only disappoint them because you can’t possibly give them as much as they’ll want from you. And then they’ll doubt, because disappointment can lead to cracks in the foundation of their faith. Cracks that might never appear if we but leave well enough alone.”
