DUPE OR IMPOSTOR?

The official accredited story of this undoubtedly extraordinary and exceptional woman contains, as has been sufficiently seen, a large number of statements, which probably every reader of these pages will, without hesitation, pronounce to be false. Many of the events stated to have happened undoubtedly never did happen; but the question will still remain, how large a portion of the tale must be deemed fraudulent fiction by those who cannot believe things to have happened which contradict the known laws of nature. And when this shall have been answered as satisfactorily as may be under the difficult circumstances of the investigation, it will yet remain to be decided who is to be deemed to have been guilty of fraud.

Before entering on these questions; it may be just suggested to the reader,—as a caution to be borne in mind, not as a point intended to be dwelt on in considering the matter,—that we are perhaps not altogether so well aware what are the laws of nature in the case of persons afflicted as Catherine was, as some of us are apt to imagine.

Looking at the matter, however, from the most ordinary points of view, it may perhaps be found, that as regards Catherine herself, it is not so necessary to consider her an impostor, as it may at first sight of the matter appear.

Of the austerities, mortifications, and abstinences recounted, all perhaps may be admitted to have been possible,—especially bearing in mind that Catherine's life was neither a long nor a healthy one—except the fasting for years, and the sleeping only one quarter-of-an-hour per diem. As to the fasting, it is mentioned incidentally in another part of Father Raymond's book, that she was sustained only by the sacramental bread, which she seems to have been in the habit of taking daily. May it not be possible, that the idea of her living without food, may have been generated by some talk of hers, in quite her usual strain, of this Holy Eucharist being her only nourishment, etc., etc., meaning spiritual nourishment? But then was Father Raymond deceived by any such expressions? Did he really believe that she lived for years without taking food? For in his account, no mistake of meaning is possible. He, at all events, intends his readers to believe the simple fact in its naked absurdity.

As for the sleep, it maybe remarked that in the case of a person subject to daily trances and states of insensibility, it is very difficult to say how many hours are passed in sleep, and what is sleep, and what not.

In the next place, all the relations of visions seen in "extasy," and of conversations held, and sensations suffered during them, may—due consideration being given to what we know of the patient—be accepted as not only possible but exceedingly probable. And this category will comprise the greatest part of the whole budget of wonders. Even in those cases, in which an abiding evidence of what had happened to her in trance is said to have remained appreciable only by her own senses, as in the case of the marriage ring, and the pain after the infliction of the stigmata; those most able to form an opinion on such matters, will not think, probably, that it is attributing too much to the imagination of a cataleptic patient, living on raw vegetables, wholly without active occupation, and engrossed by a series of highly exciting thoughts on one ever-present subject of a mystical and transcendental nature, to suppose that she may have in all sincerity imagined herself to see and to feel as she described.

Of many of the miracles, including some of those most insisted on and boasted of by her biographer,—as for instance of the restoration of her mother to life,—a natural explanation, not necessarily involving any intentional falsehood, is so obvious, as to need no pointing. And others may, without any great improbability, be referred to mistake, inaccuracy, or exaggeration. On the whole, I do not think that the evidence constrains us to convict Catherine of falsehood or imposture in her miraculous pretensions. The impression of her innocence of this cannot, however, I think, be stated in any more forcible form. Few persons, probably, will obtain from an impartial consideration of the story, any satisfactory conviction that she was wholly sincere. We find her guilty of falsehood to her mother at an early period of her life, when she represents herself as frequenting certain hot baths with a different purpose than the real one, which was to burn herself by their heat, as a means of discounting eternal burning hereafter. This deception is related by her confessor as a holy and praiseworthy act. And the whole tenor of his morality, and of that of the school to which he belongs, forbids the idea, that a high reverence for truth, as truth, formed any part of their teaching. There is nothing in all we know of Catherine, either from her own writings, or from those of her biographer, to indicate that her spiritual conceptions, religious system, or theory of morals, differed in any respect from the standard orthodoxy of her time and country. We find no more elevated notions of Deity, no saner views of duty, no nobler beau-ideal of human excellence. Her history may be regarded as the culminating expression of the ascetic divinity of that age. She lived wholly surrounded by, and devoted (very literally) body and soul, to a fiercely fanatical community, eager and conscientiously bound to advance their system and the glory of their order by all and every means. Their thoughts were her thoughts, their interests her interests, and their views of all things in heaven and earth, her views. And it must be admitted, that these considerations make it very difficult to suppose, that she would have felt the least scruple in lending herself to any scheme of pious fraud, which might appear calculated to promote the "glory of God," and of the order of St. Dominic. If she could have felt any such scruple, she assuredly would have been far in advance of the moral theories and feelings of her day; and this, as has been seen, there is every reason to think that she was not.

The same consideration of the story, as it has been handed down to us, which, despite the suspicion that a pupil of Father Raymond and the Dominicans of the fourteenth century could not have had any very strict ideas of the sacredness of truth, leads us nevertheless to believe it more probable that Catherine was no conscious impostor, by no means points to the same conclusion respecting the monk, her biographer and confessor. Of course he could have had no means of ascertaining the reality of the visions she represented herself to be in the daily habit of seeing, beyond the natural probabilities of the case. And it is likely enough, that the cataleptic trances and convulsions witnessed by him, may have appeared to him, as to the generality of his contemporaries, the signs and consequences of supernatural communion with, and especial favour of, heaven. But there remain other portions of the narrative, in which facts are stated as having occurred within the writer's knowledge, which he must have known to be untrue. He could not have been deceived into supposing that Catherine lived for many years without food, though her own expressions on the subject, as has been pointed out, may have been equivocal. In one passage of her letters, referred to as containing authority of her own for the statement, the Saint, in speaking of the bodily sufferings she had recently endured, says that her body remained without food. But she says no word to indicate how long her fast lasted, and the reference is clearly a dishonest one.

Among the vast number of miracles related, it is difficult to find cases on which a charge of wilful fraud against the Dominican biographer can be safely pressed to conviction. In so many instances mistake may have been possible. In so many others, whatever he may have been inclined to believe in his own heart, he had no means of testing with certainty the truth of her statements to him; and, therefore, cannot be convicted of falsehood for repeating them. He may have believed them to be real facts. But one case of fair conviction is enough; and that we have in the statement of the total abstinence from food for many years. It should seem then, that although we may acquit Catherine of conscious deception, we must believe her confessor,—the Barnum, who "brought out" the wonder, introduced her to the world, and reaped the profit of her,—to be a rogue and impostor.

Such a subject as this enthusiastic strong-willed cataleptic girl, was a rare and most valuable catch for the Dominican Order, and was to be turned to the best account accordingly. A real producible miracle-working Saint, who did veritably pass daily into a state of rapt extasy, and whose excitable and diseased brain was in that state ever prompt to impose on her imagination as realities whatever phantasmagoria of hallucinations her ghostly instructors chose to ply her waking fancy with, was a treasure calculated to bring much grist, spiritual as well as temporal, to the Dominican mill. In that remarkable case of the stigmata, which so admirably supplied the sons of St. Dominick with exactly what they needed, to enable them to hold their own against the rival Order of the Stigmatised St. Francis, how readily may be conceived the sort of conversation and suggestions, which must have prepared the mind of Catherine to reproduce the miracle for them as soon as her infirmity should set free her imagination from the world of reality!

And this capability of being played upon, rendered her, it is to be observed, a far more valuable instrument in the hands of those who touched the keys than if she had been a mere accomplice of imposture. Such an every-day cheat would hardly have accomplished the feats, and held the position, which are the most remarkable facts in this strange story, and which present an enigma, that requires some examination in the closing chapter of it.