Relief for Therese

To the placid little Bavarian village of Konnersreuth last fortnight flocked thousands of men & women and uniformed G.I.s. They came, as people have come for a generation, to witness the strange Good Friday manifestations that have taken place for 25 years upon the body of a peasant woman named Therese Neumann. Each Good Friday (and on about 25 other Fridays through the year), chunky, good-natured Therese has bled from her eyes and the wound in her side, or from the stigmata in her hands and feet, or from all these at once. Eight marks have appeared on her head, as if caused by a crown of thorns.

On Good Friday, as the souvenir vendors arranged their wares and a radio crew made ready to pick up Theresa's voice, word spread that something was wrong: Therese Neumann was admitting no one to her bedside, the bleeding had stopped, there was nothing to show.

The crowd grew impatient, and the police pressed the white-haired parish priest, Father Josef Naber, to tell the people what had happened. It was true, he said. "Christ has relieved Therese of her pains on the 28th anniversary of the date when she first experienced the agonies of the cross." Beyond that, Father Naber admitted later, he was just as bewildered as anyone else.

"Until midnight of Thursday before Easter," he said, "everything was as it had been these past 25 years. She visualized Jesus on the Mount of Olives, which brought sweat to her body and blood dripping from her eyes. Then, all of a sudden, just before midnight, her eyes stopped bleeding. She was further tortured in her visions of Jesus' passion and felt mental and physical pains as she had done before. But the bleeding had stopped completely . . . We must take the naked facts as they are. Maybe it was a divine protest against these mass visits organized by money-chasing businessmen."

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