St. Veronica Giuliani

Veronica Giuliani is one of the best-documented stigmatics in the history of the Church, because the diocese of Città di Castello subjected her claims to a sustained episcopal investigation lasting years, producing a record of unusual detail and sceptical rigour. She was born Orsola Giuliani in 1660 at Mercatello sul Metauro, entered the Capuchin convent at Città di Castello in 1677, and received the crown of thorns in 1694 and the full stigmata of the five wounds in 1697. From that moment she was under direct episcopal supervision until her death in 1727.

The investigation conducted by Bishop Eustace Donnini between 1694 and his death was extraordinary in its thoroughness. The stigmata were examined by physicians; Veronica was subjected to periods of isolation from her community to rule out deception; her food intake was monitored; the wounds were covered and sealed to prevent any possibility of self-infliction, and the wounds persisted. The investigative record is the most important evidence in her case, precisely because it was designed to disprove rather than confirm, and it failed to disprove.

Her interior life is preserved in a spiritual diary that extends to more than twenty-two thousand pages, kept partly at her superiors' command, which records the progress of her mystical life in extraordinary detail — including experiences that present difficulties of interpretation and that fall within the pattern of high mystical states documented in other authenticated cases without being easily resolved beyond that.

She served as novice mistress and later as abbess of her community, which means that whatever else her mystical life involved, it coexisted with the daily governance of a religious house and the formation of younger sisters. The combination — administrative competence alongside extraordinary mystical phenomena — is one of the best indications of genuineness, because the mystical literature is full of ecstatics whose community life was difficult or destructive, while Veronica's was evidently neither. She was canonized in 1839.