Therese Neumann was born in Konnersreuth, Bavaria (Germany), on April 8, 1898, into a poor and deeply devout Catholic family. As recorded in her journals, her greatest desire was to become a missionary sister in Africa. However, in 1918, at the age of twenty, a severe accident radically changed her life: when a fire broke out at a neighboring farm,
Therese Neumann: stigmata on heart and hands (Medical photograph, 1926)
Therese rushed to assist, but while hoisting heavy buckets of water to quench the flames, she suffered a severe spinal injury that resulted in complete paralysis of both legs and total blindness. Therese spent her days immersed in continuous prayer. One day, a miraculous event occurred in the presence of her parish priest, Father Naber: Therese perceived a radiant light while an extraordinarily sweet voice asked if she wished to be healed.
Therese's remarkable response was that whatever God willed was good: to be healed, to remain sick, or to die, provided God's will was fulfilled. The mysterious voice informed her that “today she would receive a small joy: the cure of her illness; but henceforth she would suffer much.” For a brief period Therese enjoyed improved health, but in 1926 the extraordinary mystical phenomena began that persisted until her death: the holy stigmata, and a complete, absolute fast in which the Holy Eucharist was her solitary nourishment.
Father Naber, who administered Holy Communion to her every day until her death, wrote: “In her the word of God is fulfilled to the letter: ‘My Flesh is true food and my Blood is true drink'.” Therese offered her physical sufferings to God: from Thursday evening, when our Lord began His Passion, through Sunday morning, the day of the Resurrection, blood flowed from her stigmata. All this was offered in intercession for sinners.
Whenever she was called to the bedside of a dying person, she was granted mystical visions of the particular judgment awaiting that soul after death. Ecclesiastical and medical authorities conducted rigorous scientific surveillance to examine Therese's total inedia (fast). Jesuit Father Carl Sträter, appointed by the Bishop of Regensburg to investigate her case, affirmed:
The supernatural significance of Therese Neumann's total fast was to demonstrate to mankind across the world the divine reality of the Eucharist: to make men realize that Christ is truly present beneath the sacramental species of bread, and that through the Eucharist physical life itself can be miraculously sustained.
Text and photographs: international exhibition «The Eucharistic Miracles of the World», by Saint Carlo Acutis. Original panel at miracolieucaristici.org.