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Among the saints the Church celebrates on November 1 is a Carmelite nun whom her sisters saw, for forty days in the summer of 1868, throw her rosary to the ground, mock the Angelus, and say of the crucifix that it was only a piece of wood. She was not a nun who had lost her faith. According to her confessor, she was a novice possessed by the devil. Her name was Mariam Baouardy, she was born in Galilee in 1846, and Pope Francis canonized her on May 17, 2015.
Italian journalist Marco Tosatti, for years the Vatican correspondent of La Stampa, reconstructs her story in Padre Pío contra Satanás, a book with two halves. The first follows the devil’s war against the friar of Pietrelcina; the second, titled “Stories of Possessed Saints,” arises from a question suggested by his conversations with exorcist Gabriele Amorth: how is it possible that people the Church proposes as models of perfection were, for a time, at the mercy of Satan. Tosatti sees in this “an extraordinary and interesting ‘short circuit’”.
Mariam’s life was already extraordinary before she entered the convent. Orphaned at a very young age and raised by an uncle who took her to Alexandria, she refused at thirteen to marry the man chosen for her. Shortly afterward, in September 1858, a former family servant, a Muslim, tried to persuade her to abandon her faith; when she refused, he cut her throat and left her for dead. She survived, and the scar, Tosatti recounts, was later seen by several doctors. Illiterate and with a French that made her companions laugh, she entered the Carmel of Pau in June 1867 under the name Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified.
There, according to the account of her confessor, Father Estrate, which Tosatti follows closely, the torments began. A sister who was elsewhere brought her an apple during a fast; a superior who had never entered her cell forbade her from receiving Communion. And then came what the book calls the great possession, which, according to Estrate, began at noon on July 26, 1868, and ended, also at noon, on September 4.
Abbot Manaudas, superior of the major seminary of Bayonne, who was then preaching the spiritual exercises to the community, became her exorcist. The scenes recorded in the book are of remarkable crudeness: the novice interrupting the preacher to call him a liar or urging her sisters to break the enclosure, and the nun who, as soon as she is free for a few minutes, weeps because she believes God has abandoned her and repeats like a child the acts of love the priest dictates to her. Tosatti highlights a detail the confessor carefully noted: the voice speaking through her mouth acknowledged that it was forbidden to do anything against the novice’s modesty, because she had never sinned in that regard.
The core of the battle, as the book recounts it, was a wager. The devil needed only for Mariam, in her normal state, to say once that she no longer wished to suffer. He tried forty times, and forty times, upon regaining consciousness, she answered the opposite. In the final combat, each assault ended with the novice offering her pain for the Church, for sinners, or for those who do not know her, and uniting it to a scene of the Passion: the Garden of Olives, the kiss of Judas, the falls beneath the cross. At one point, the author recounts, the abbot and the nuns prostrated themselves on the ground, and the voice admitted that that gesture of humility disarmed it.
There is an irony in the account that time itself closed. In one of the assaults, according to Estrate, the devil mocks the priests and sarcastically asks them to report everything to the Pope, so that one day they may canonize the “Arab girl,” as they called her. Pius IX, a piece of whose habit was placed on the possessed woman, never saw any of this. John Paul II beatified her in 1983. Francis raised her to the altars one hundred and forty-seven years after that summer in Pau.
Tosatti does not ignore that all this admits a psychiatric reading, and in the introduction he argues against the rationalism that, in his view, rules out any non-material explanation from the outset. For him, the possession of a saint is not a stain on their biography, but an extreme form of purification. Mariam later professed in Mangalore, India, returned to Pau, founded the Carmel of Bethlehem, and died there on August 26, 1878, at the age of thirty-two. The sisters of Pau, according to the book, saw her climb to the tops of the garden trees singing of the love of God.
The chapter shares the book with two other possessed lives, that of Blessed Eustochia of Padua in the fifteenth century and that of Christina of Stommeln in the thirteenth, and with the long struggle of Padre Pio, who, as recounted in its pages, came to treat the devil almost like a bothersome neighbor to whom he gave nicknames. Between All Saints and All Souls, it leaves a question that Tosatti himself acknowledges he cannot close: why God allows those he loves most to pass through such trials.
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Section sponsored by Homo Legens Padre Pío contra Satanás Marco Tosatti · Bibliotheca Homo Legens · 16,90 € |
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