Description: One day in 1917, while cooking dinner at home in Manhattan, Margaret Reilly felt a sharp pain over her heart and claimed to see a crucifix emerging in blood on her skin. Four years later Reilly entered the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, New York, where, known as Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns, she spent most of her life gravely ill and possibly exhibiting Christ's wounds. In this portrait of Sister Thorn, Paula M. Kane scrutinizes the responses to this American stigmatic's experiences and illustrates the surprising presence of mystical phenomena in twentieth-century American Catholicism.
Brief description:
Angela Brazil is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and a professional actor who is proud to be a long-standing member of the Resident Acting Company at Trinity Repertory Company. She also teaches at the Brown/Trinity Conservatory.
Review Quotes:
"This brilliantly researched and told story of 'a failed saint and possibly a false stigmatic' is at the same time a revealing study of how American Catholics in the twentieth century lived their everyday lives in close proximity to the supernatural...Reading Sister Thorn, I was repeatedly gripped by the sense that nothing about American Catholicism would ever look the same again."
-- "Robert Orsi, Northwestern University"