In this excellent monograph, Michael O'Sullivan analyzes the disruptive impact of miracles on the “religious, gendered, and political narrative of modern Germany” (19). O'Sullivan's work is a welcome addition to a growing body of recent scholarship which illuminates the significant agency of the Catholic laity in the modern Catholic Church. He highlights a number of female and male seers, mystics, and stigmatics, but Therese Neumann (1898–1962), “the most sensational instance of stigmata in the German-speaking world during the modern age,” constitutes the central focus of his work (3).

Neumann, a tailor's daughter from Konnersreuth, Bavaria, entered domestic service at fourteen before a series of devastating accidents rendered her blind and bedridden until her purportedly miraculous cure in 1923. In 1926 during Lent, she experienced stigmata for the first time. Neumann's “Friday Suffering,” the appearance of wounds on her head, hands, and feet corresponding to the wounds of the crucified Christ, quickly attracted a large number of pilgrims to Konnersreuth. Every Friday, visitors gathered in her bedroom to watch the bloody spectacle, which the entranced Neumann herself narrated with much emotion and movement before falling into a state of “exalted rest” at which time “she answered questions from visitors on behalf of Jesus himself,” including questions pertaining to the situation of peoples’ departed relatives in the afterlife. (61)

Readers will appreciate O'Sullivan's insightful analysis of Neumann's transformation from a sickly, powerless rural woman on the margins of society to an empowered agent who deftly negotiated “a perilous but evolving patriarchal power structure” (15). Adopting an exaggerated posture of submission and modesty, Neumann “manipulated the gender norms of her time to survive as a public and holy figure where other mystics faded and accumulated more spiritual capital than just about any other Catholic female of her era” (116). She learned valuable lessons from mystics such as Barbara Weigand, whose brazen attacks on patriarchy and the clergy prompted the bishop of Würzburg to ban her organization in 1916. In contrast, Neumann loudly advocated conservative gender norms and surrounded herself with a circle of powerful male advocates who used their considerable social capital and economic resources to champion her cause.

Her vocal embrace of patriarchy, combined with male support, became Neumann's most potent defense against the Catholic hierarchy and other fierce critics. Although the church encouraged mysticism, it also was keen to control it. In Konnersreuth, this task fell to the bishop of Regensburg, Michael Buchberger, who pressed Neumann to consent to a medical exam to authenticate her stigmata. But Neumann knew of the perils of an exam, which in the 1920s had proved the downfall of the stigmatic Anna Maria Goebel. Neuman never consented to an exam, claiming that Jesus as well as her father did not wish her to submit to the medical test. In this shrewd move, she turned patriarchy on its head when she insisted on the traditional obedience she owed to her father to disobey Buchberger's request.

O'Sullivan's analysis of the contest between church authorities and other prominent critics of the stigmatic on the one hand and Neumann and her influential supporters, the Konnersreuth Circle, on the other are a highlight of the book. Often viewed as popular phenomena of limited importance to the institutional church and mainstream Catholicism, female mystics, seers, and stigmatics are usually relegated to the periphery of the historiography on the Catholic Church. In contrast, O'Sullivan illuminates how, in the case of twentieth-century Germany, “the margins of the faith community interacted with the mainstream in impactful ways,” arguing that “the uprising staged by traditionalist conservatives through increased faith in miracles that lasted from the end of World War I until the death of Therese Neumann meaningfully alters how we view the role of Catholicism in German history” (243). In particular, the fierce public power struggle in the 1920s over the authenticity of Neumann's stigmata sowed disunity and resentment among many Catholics. It brought into sharp relief the struggles over the role of Catholicism as a traditionalist or progressive faith in the modern, industrialized age.

O'Sullivan concludes that in this contest, the power of the Konnersreuth Circle proved immense, damaging, and capable of fragmenting “an already weakened political Catholic establishment and Weimar democracy” as a whole (80). It remains unclear, however, whether the conflict over Konnersreuth indeed “made a united [Catholic] resistance to Hitler impossible in 1933” (101). For her part, Neumann showed little interest in condemning the crimes of the Nazi regime, going so far as to deny her gift of prophecy rather than risk incarceration. Neumann in fact benefitted from the church struggle, at least to a degree, because the precarious situation of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich made it impossible for Buchberger to publicly condemn or discipline her. Although some members of the Konnersreuth Circle suffered persecution in Nazi Germany, Neumann's failure to resist Nazism enabled her to emerge unscathed in post-war Germany, where she “expanded her influence from the religious realm to culture, economics, and politics” (212). This previously antimodern traditionalist once again proved adept at taking the pulse of the time when she promoted German-American reconciliation and embraced the free market and liberal democracy. O'Sullivan's superb analysis that captures this remarkable transformation is just one reason why his work constitutes an important addition to the historiography of modern Germany.