In a Christian sense we mean by stigmata the marks or wounds on a person similar to those made in Christ's body at the crucifixtion, that is, in his hands and feet by the nails and in his side by the spear. Sometimes the wounds made by the crown of thorns and by the weight of the cross upon the shoulder also appear. By the stigmata one is made to share in the physical sufferings of Christ.

The idea that a person could bear in his or her body the marks of the wounds of Christ existed in the early Middle Ages. It is mentioned, for instance, that one who claimed to have the stigmata but was an imposter confessed his guilt at a council in Oxford in 1222 and was punished. The best known stigmatist in history is St Francis of Assisi.

It was the year 1224. Francis was then only 42 years of age, but he was very much broken down in health. His fasting and other penance, his exhausting apostolic journeys and his continual illness had impaired his health. His eyesight too was failing. Apart from all that, dissension and division among his brothers and the disloyalty of some caused him great pain of mind. He who always wanted to follow Christ closely was now approaching the Passion.

In August that year, with a few of his brothers closest to him, he made his way through the Apennine forest to the peak of Alverna, where a hut of branches was built for him, a little way from his companions. Here, on or about Holy Cross Day, September 14, after a night of prayer, he found towards dawn the stigmata of Christ marked on his body which brought him intense pain. The pain never left him till the end of his life, which came in 1226.

In the history of the Church there have been several hundreds of stigmatists, most of them men and women religious. The Italian Capuchin, Padre is the best known stigmatist of recent times.

There have been persons too who bore invisible stigmata, that is, persons in whose body the marks of the wounds did not appear but who nevertheless experienced suffering from the wounds. Such a stigmatist was St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).

Those who have borne the stigmata have been popularly regarded as persons favoured by God, and well they may be, but the Church has always been reticent in making any pronouncement on the matter, since there could be natural causes for the stigmata.

In the case of St Francis, however, the Church has recognized the stigmata as authentic. Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) in his bull Confessor Domini of 1237 states that the wounds in Francis' body were imprinted by divine power. There has even been from 1615, a feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis in the universal Church, but since the reform of the calendar after Vatican II it has been confined to the Franciscan calendar.

The Church's unwillingness to make pronouncements or stigmata as being of divine origin and as proof of heroic virtue for beautification and canonization is supported by modern advances in neurology and psychology according to which stigmatization could occur without divine intervention. Scientists, Catholics among them, hold that the stigmata could be caused by nervous or cataleptic hysteria.