Word: stigmata
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kind of funny how movies seem to follow such odd trends even though the scheduling usually is coincidental. The Blair Witch Project, Stir of Echoes, Stigmata and The Sixth Sense were all filmed so far apart from each other that there was practically no chance of them ever opening within the same season--let alone the same month. But strangely enough, August was a spookfest every week at the local cineplex. It's ironic, of course, since the true flood of copycat movies will begin in the next six to seven months as Hollywood execs try to capitalize...
Padre Pio bled for 50 of his 81 years from mysterious, Christlike wounds on his hands, feet and side. Suspicious about the stigmata as well as his reputation for seeing visions and being in two places at once, the Vatican investigated the friar and curtailed his activities. But he was sought out by believers, including, in 1947, a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla, who reportedly was told he'd someday be Pope. As Cracow's auxiliary bishop, Wojtyla asked Padre Pio to pray for a friend with cancer; she recovered, and is still alive. In 1983 the Pontiff...
...almost equal quality is a very early panel depicting a tonsured, hollow-cheeked and rather minatory St. Francis, holding a cross and an open New Testament and exhibiting the stigmata on his hands and feet, standing ramrod-straight and flanked by four scenes of his posthumous miracles. It was done by an unknown artist, either an Italian or a Byzantine Greek, in the second third of the 13th century. It looks stiff and archaic, yet the painter has infused a remarkable energy into some of its details, such as the calligraphic loops on the blue robe of a madwoman from...
...deeper problem: the absence of miracles, which the Vatican authorities need as "verification of godliness." Mere piety is not enough for sainthood. No worker, so far, has fallen from the Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Famolia and been caught by an angel; no Japanese tourist has burst out with stigmata in the ticket line. The best that Almuzara and his devotees have been able to come up with is a student who thinks Gaudi helped her pass her exams and a woman who claimed that after praying to Gaudi, she was cured of a kidney stone. But on such mini...
Unless he has adapted to the new era, as has the one who calls himself Juvenal in writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's Touch. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...