One evening in New York City in 1917, a woman in her early 30s was helping her mother make dinner when, as she leaned over her oven, she felt a sharp pain in her left breast and saw a three-dimensional crucifix emerging from her body, covered in blood.
The woman was named Margaret Reilly, and instead of responding to this sudden mortification of her flesh by a supernatural being with complete horror (as I trust most of us, dear readers, would feel), she welcomed this event and the pain it caused her, and in fact spent much of her life after this point willingly enduring countless additional sufferings.
These included profuse bleeding wounds from her hands, feet, and left breast; puncture wounds along her forehead; and lashings all over her face and body. Margaret reveled in the pain and gore because it was given to her by Jesus Christ, who appeared to her in a vision and told her “Now you are my Thorn, but soon you shall be my Lily of Delight”.
And wait there’s more. Margaret also had to endure demonic temptations and their ravages — appearing as a black cat, a rat, slime, and both handsome and ugly men, these devils smashed things in her room, launched her off her wheelchair, and tempted her with sexual images, much to her horror.
Much of Margaret’s experiences parallel the lives of Medieval Christian mystics — the intimacy with Jesus that sometimes is erotic, but embracing his sufferings and taking them on, and also a belief that the suffering this entailed would help extirpate the sins of those who supported the mystic.
Margaret Reilly eventually joined a convent in Peekskill run by the Good Shepherd sisters, and took the name “Sister Crown of Thorns” (which would make a good name for a Goth band btw). There, she drew many admirers along with a fair share of skeptics. Although it is tempting to post-diagnose Margaret Reilly with a specific medical condition that caused her to experience or perpetuate delusions, this would be both anachronistic and impossible.
A more historically meaningful question to me is to think about why some people would have found Sister Thorn’s horrific experiences compelling, and signs of divine favor?
Sources: “The” book on this subject is Paula M Kane’s _Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America,” the University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Reviews from “The ‘Devil’ Inside” _American Magazine_ Laura Chmielewski, Dec 23, 2014 and @mysticsofthechurch.com, 2016 “Sr. Mary Crown of Thorns (Margaret Reilly) — a purported 20th century New York mystic and stigmatic”
