The Stigmata (from the Latin stigma, derived from the Greek στίγμα), are first and foremost marks or wounds that appear spontaneously on the body of some people, almost always ecstatic mystics and often preceded or accompanied by physical and moral torments. These wounds are similar to those that, according to traditional Christian iconography, were inflicted on Jesus of Nazareth at his crucifixion. The wounds generally appear on the hands, feet, and the right side, and sometimes also on the head and back, recalling the crowning with thorns and scourging of Jesus of Nazareth.
St Francis of Assisi, the most famous of the Church's stigmatised saints, had one and only one desire: to live in Christ and to be ‘configured’ to Him.
”As we know, in that year the Lord gave him the mystical answer he was waiting for, even though he was tormented by so much anguish and uncertainty. On the morning of 17 September 1224, after he had reached the top of the mountain of La Verna, in the amazement of a beautiful day filled with birdsong, and after his prayer had become for days and days more ardent, resembling an agony of love, suddenly, before his eyes, enraptured in the dazzle of Love, a Seraphim had appeared, beating the air with his six wings and bearing in his supernatural being the image of the Crucified One. Coming out of ecstasy, Francis felt himself penetrated by a multiple, piercing, and sweet pain: the wounds of the Passion were visible and bleeding on his hands, his feet, and his side. The witness of Christ bore in his flesh the stigmata of his God”.
Francis had received the stigmata of Christ's Passion on Mount La Verna, but they had remained hidden from the vast majority of people. Only two years later, on the day of St Francis’s death, were "more than fifty friars and countless lay people" able to see and venerate his Stigmata. Celano writes In the eyes of all he appeared "as if he had just been taken down from the cross". In the dead Francis, they believed they were contemplating the dead Christ himself.
In this way, the example of St Francis shows us that the Christian way consists in the "imitation of Christ." who lived through love and died out of love, on the cross. The disciple "must, so to speak, enter into Christ with his whole being, he must 'appropriate' and assimilate the entire reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself".
As St John Paul II taught us: the cross, a sign of love and total self-giving, is the emblem of the disciple called to be configured to the glorious Christ.
