Tine Van Osselaer e Leonardo Rossi, “The Challenge of Stigmatics. The Local Clergy as Guardians of Orthodoxy, c. 1800–1950”, in Helmut Zander e Viktoria Vitanova-Kerber (eds.), Esoteric Catholicism / Esoterischer Katholizismus, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025, pp. 59–88

This chapter examines the role of local clergy in the discernment, control, and management of Catholic stigmatics between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Rather than focusing only on Roman authorities or medical experts, it highlights parish priests, confessors, spiritual directors, and local ecclesiastical actors as crucial guardians of orthodoxy. Through their proximity to alleged stigmatics and their communities, these clerics mediated between popular devotion, episcopal authority, theological suspicion, and the growing public attention surrounding extraordinary religious phenomena. The chapter argues that local clergy played a decisive role in shaping the ecclesiastical response to stigmatics, negotiating the boundary between acceptable devotion, mystical authenticity, fraud, disorder, and heterodoxy.