The nails in St. Francis's hands were his own flesh

MOUNT LA VERNA, the Casentino, September 14, 1224 AD — St. Francis of Assisi got up from prayer on the side of this mountain today with wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. They are the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ. He covered them up. He said nothing to the three brothers who had climbed the mountain with him.

He is forty-two, and he founded the Friars Minor. Early in August the four of them came up here to keep a forty days’ fast. La Verna is a lonely peak in the Tuscan Apennines. It stands about four thousand feet above the valley of the Casentino, and it had been given to him as a place to pray.

He had climbed up to find out what God wanted of him. He prayed, then took the book of the Gospels from the altar. He asked one of the brothers to open it three times, and each time it fell open at the Lord’s Passion. He understood what that meant: before he died, he would suffer as Christ had suffered. Years of penance had left his body worn out, and even so, what was coming didn’t frighten him.

The answer came this morning, on the feast of the Holy Cross, which the Church keeps today. He was praying on the mountainside when he saw a seraph coming down out of the sky. It had six wings, and it was burning and bright.

As it came near, the figure of a Man crucified appeared between the wings, hands and feet stretched out in the shape of a cross. Two of the wings were raised above the head, two were spread for flying, and two covered the whole body. St. Francis felt joy and sorrow at once — joy at the look the seraph turned on him, and sorrow at the sight of the crucified Man.

Then the vision was gone. The marks of the nails were in his hands and his feet, in the same places he had just seen them in the crucified figure. The heads stood out round and black in his palms and on the upper side of his feet. The points came through the backs of his hands and the soles of his feet, long and bent over. The nails were made of his own flesh.

In his right side there was a red wound, as though a lance had been driven in. It bled through his clothes.

Hiding his hands

He kept the marks out of sight from strangers, and he hid them from his own brothers too. He was afraid of what anyone he told would do. That person would take the wounds as a sign that God favoured him, and would pass the news on. Then, St. Francis thought, he would lose some of the grace he had been given.

But he could see that the marks would not stay hidden from the men he lived with. He couldn’t decide whether to speak or keep quiet. So he called some of the brothers together and asked them a general question: should a man tell people what God had shown him? He didn’t say the question was about his own hands.

Brother Illuminato was one of the men he called. Illuminato could see that St. Francis was barely able to speak after something he had seen. He worked out that the question was St. Francis’s own. God shows a person secrets for other people’s sake, Illuminato told him, and not only for his own. Keeping this one hidden would keep something good from a lot of people.

When people pressed St. Francis about what went on inside him, he usually answered, “My secret to me.” This time he gave way. He told the brothers the whole vision from beginning to end, and he was frightened while he told it. He told them one thing more. The figure that had appeared to him had spoken words he would never repeat to any man as long as he lived.