Catholicism is nothing if not democratic. We might think of the stigmata, for example, as reserved for spiritual giants like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Padre Pio. The fact is, we never know who the good Lord will choose.
Consider Servant of God Rhoda Wise (1888-1948), a Catholic laywoman, wife, and mother from Canton, Ohio.
Born to working-class, Protestant parents, Rhoda was the sixth of eight children. Anti-Catholic bias permeated the household.
At 16, she suffered a burst appendix. A nurse at the hospital gave her a St. Benedict medal which she kept ever after.
Married in 1917 to widower George Wise, she and her husband adopted two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. George’s alcoholism soon became a source of ongoing poverty, shame, and embarrassment.
At 44, Rhoda underwent surgery to remove a life-threatening, 39-pound ovarian cyst. A few years later, she tripped into a sewer drain and sustained serious injury to her leg.
In 1938, she entered Mercy Hospital for the placing of yet another cast. Abscesses, adhesions, and a perforated bowel followed. During her convalescence, a Sister of Charity introduced Wise to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and taught her how to pray the rosary.
After instruction, Wise was received into the Church in 1939.
Her abdominal wound required constant dressing, and she experienced chronic pain and discomfort.
In the middle of the night on May 28, 1939, she woke to find the room filled with light. Jesus, garbed in a gold robe, was sitting on a chair.
He reappeared a month later, this time accompanied by St. Thérèse. Wise woke the next morning, her abdominal wound and ruptured bowel both miraculously healed.
In the ensuing years, Our Lord and St. Thérèse appeared to Wise 20 more times. They blessed religious articles, dictated messages, and assured her that she would save many souls.
From 1942 to 1945, she suffered the stigmata every First Friday from noon to 3 p.m., bleeding from wounds in her hands, feet, side, and forehead (representing the crowning with thorns). Crowds flocked to her side for healing. She became known as the “Miracle Woman.”
In her later years, she helped a young woman who would become Mother Angelica and found EWTN.
Ten days before her death, Jesus appeared one last time, revealed his Sacred Heart, and instructed Wise to urge people to say the rosary.
Fourteen thousand people paid their respects before Wise’s funeral. In Canton, visitors flock to the Rhoda Wise House and Grotto. Her cause for canonization was opened in 2016.
But maybe her biggest miracle was this: before she died, Rhoda’s alcoholic husband was relieved of the obsession to drink.
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Servant of God Irving “Francis” C. Houle (1925-2009), another “guy next door,” received the stigmata on Good Friday 1993, and suffered the Passion between midnight and 3 a.m. every night thereafter until the day he died.
Houle was born in Wilson, a town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to a large and deeply Catholic family.
After serving in World War II, he returned to Michigan and married in 1948. Houle and his wife Gail settled in a town near his family home and had five children. They would be married for 60 years.
Over the decades, Houle held jobs in retail and manufacturing, working his way up to plant manager at Engineered Machine Products. A loving husband and father, he was a faithful communicant and eventually a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus. He prayed the Stations of the Cross every day after work.
A bit of a prankster, said his friends, he was a plain-spoken, solid family man with a penchant for jokes and teasing.
Houle received the stigmata on Good Friday, 1993, at the age of 67. “I’m taking away your hands and giving you mine — touch My children,” Christ allegedly told him.
Afterward, the pain spread from his palms throughout his body. He was said to have suffered the Passion every night thereafter between midnight and 3 a.m.: those hours being “times of great sins of the flesh.”
Gail, luckily a sound sleeper, never witnessed these nocturnal sufferings, though others, including his brother Reynold, did. So did Father Robert J. Fox, who, in 2005, published a book about Houle entitled “A Man Called Francis” (Fatima Family Apostolate International). The pseudonym “Francis” was used to protect Houle’s identity, but the name stuck.
Houle took to wearing bandages on his hands in public and, after retiring, embarked on a series of speaking engagements, talking over the years to tens of thousands of people. Nothing made him happier than to learn of those who had returned to confession after decades away, then received the Eucharist.
He avoided the limelight and never sought or accepted any financial donations for the myriad healings that were said to have flowed from his suffering and prayer. “Jesus is the one who heals,” he insisted.
He died at Marquette General Hospital, not far from the place where he was born: unassuming, unheralded, a sign of God’s strange and unexpected mercy.
