Hiding the basic threat against which stigmata stories were built

Today, as my brother and I repeated a familiar discussion about the origins of miracle stories like Thérèse Neumann and Marthe Robin, we made a now-unusual lapse into German on a slightly different note:

“Es war eine politische Geschichte”
“Das stimmt nicht! Die Arbeiter war im großen und Ganzen nicht Kommunisten. Die Kirche wollte Sankte Thérèse!”

The problem with what my brother says is that, whilst in ordinary circumstances German workers did not show overt sympathy or any evidence of support for revolutionary socialism, when other workers demonstrated what class struggle could achieve, German workers overwhelmingly supported revolutionary socialism because they saw that it was infinitely better for the majority than capitalism.

It was this support that allowed the Bolshevik Government to survive against the intervention of 22 foreign armies. The threat of revolution at home compelled the ruling classes of Western and Central Europe to compromise. Part of the resulting compromise was withdrawing from Russia and not hosting a White Russian government-in-exile.

When the stigmata stories of Thérèse Neumann (and Marthe Robin) were developed, the Catholic Church was living in fear of a workers’ revolution in Western Europe that would have expropriated the Church’s immense wealth, and left its priests and bishops under mortal threat of execution. The peasantry stood important in the success or failure of workers’ revolution. If the workers were able to give the peasants land by expropriating the big landowners (including the Church), they would support it, but if they failed to do this, the peasantry was very likely to support the Church. Given the uncompromising hostility between the Church and the workers, the peasantry was extremely critical in the battle for power.

Even if it is unlikely any peasant shifted from the side of the workers to that of the Church upon observing supposed miracles, repeated exposure, like that to the struggles of workers on the other side, was bound to have effects. This would probably be true even for merely promoted miracles in the local area.

In the case of the Fatima Marian apparition, there is no doubt of course that it was aimed at the threat of workers’ revolution expropriating the Church. As Portugal in 1917 had a much less developed working class than Germany or France, it is logical that the threat loomed even larger even if less explicit in these slightly later stigmata miracles.