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Biography

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Therese Neumann was born on 8 April 1898 in the Bavarian village of Konnersreuth, then in the German Empire, the eldest of eleven children of Ferdinand Neumann, a tailor, and his wife Anna. The family was poor, rural, and devoutly Catholic. She received only an elementary education and worked on the farm and as a servant. In March 1918, while helping to fight a barn fire at a neighboring property, she fell from a stool while passing water buckets and suffered a serious spinal injury. Over the following years she developed partial paralysis, convulsions, and blindness and spent long periods bedridden. Contemporary medical accounts described a complex of injuries and nervous disorders; later Catholic writers treated the same events as the prelude to a series of claimed miraculous cures.

In the early 1920s Neumann and her circle attributed several recoveries to the intercession of Thérèse of Lisieux. She reported the return of her sight on 29 April 1923, the day of Thérèse’s beatification, and further restoration of mobility around the time of Thérèse’s canonization in 1925. From Lent 1926 she exhibited wounds corresponding to the stigmata of Christ’s Passion—on the hands, feet, side, and brow—and claimed repeated visions of scenes from the Gospels, especially the Passion, during which she was said to bleed and at times to utter words identified by some observers as Aramaic or other languages she had not studied. From that period until her death she was widely reported to have taken no ordinary food or drink, living only on daily Holy Communion, a claim of inedia that drew pilgrims, journalists, and both medical and ecclesiastical investigators. She never married and remained in her family home in Konnersreuth, where she received visitors and belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis.

Church authorities in the Diocese of Regensburg, under whose jurisdiction Konnersreuth fell, commissioned examinations and at times restricted public access and photography; no definitive official judgment on the supernatural character of the phenomena was issued during her lifetime. Supporters, including some clergy and physicians, testified to the wounds, the fasting, and her apparent knowledge of distant events. Critics, including other physicians and later historians, argued for hysteria, autosuggestion, or fraud and noted that controlled, long-term clinical observation was never fully carried out. The case became one of the best-known and most contested Catholic mysticisms of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe.

Neumann died in Konnersreuth on 18 September 1962 and was buried in the village cemetery, which became a place of popular pilgrimage. A diocesan inquiry into her life and virtues was opened in the Diocese of Regensburg in 2005, giving her the title Servant of God, but she has not been beatified or canonized. Historians, theologians, and medical writers continue to debate the nature of her stigmata, visions, and alleged abstinence from food, while popular devotion in Bavaria and beyond has persisted around her grave and former home.

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