A Bavarian Peasant Woman Bled From The Five Wounds Of Christ Every Friday For 36 Years. She Took No Food Or Water For The Last 40 Years Of Her Life. The Bavarian State Sealed Her In A 14-Day Continuous Medical Watch In 1927.
On the morning of Friday the seventh of April, 1933, in the small German Bavarian village of Konnersreuth in the Upper Palatinate region of north-eastern Bavaria, a thirty-four-year-old German Catholic peasant woman knelt on the wooden floor of her family farmhouse bedroom and began to bleed from her hands, her feet, her side, and her forehead, as she had every Friday since 1926.
She had been born in the same small village, the eldest of eleven children of a Bavarian Catholic tailor. Her name was Therese Neumann. In March 1918, at the age of nineteen, while helping fight a fire on the family farm, she suffered a catastrophic spinal injury. She lost the sight of both eyes and the use of both legs. She lay paralysed and blind for five years. On the twenty-ninth of April, 1923, the day of the beatification of Therese of Lisieux, her sight returned in a single night.
On the seventeenth of May, 1925, the day of the canonisation of Therese of Lisieux, the paralysis lifted. On Good Friday, the second of April, 1926, the first stigmata appeared on her hands and feet. The wound on her right side opened in November 1926. The crown-of-thorns wounds appeared on Good Friday, 1927. The five stigmata bled every Friday morning until her death thirty-six years later. Photographs of the bleeding wounds are in the diocesan archives at Regensburg.
In 1922 Therese Neumann took her last food and her last water other than daily Catholic Communion. She was twenty-four. She did not eat or drink again for the next forty years. From the fourteenth to the twenty-eighth of July, 1927, the Catholic Bishop of Regensburg authorised a continuous fifteen-day medical watch by four hospital sisters of the German Franciscan Sisters of Mallersdorf and the named Bavarian state physician Dr Otto Seidl. The signed report records no food, no water, no excrement, no weight loss.
In her weekly Friday Passion ecstasies between 1926 and 1962, Therese Neumann spoke, according to the philologist Father Franz Xaver Mayr of Eichstätt and other named witnesses, in fluent ancient Aramaic, ancient Hebrew, and ancient Koine Greek, none of which she had ever formally studied. She died at Konnersreuth on the eighteenth of September, 1962, aged sixty-four. Her grave at Konnersreuth receives an estimated one hundred thousand pilgrims a year. Her cause for canonisation in the Catholic Church is open.
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