Page 103 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

LIFE OF SAINT GERARD MAJELLA

two places at the same time.
At Lacedogna there lived a family called Di Gregorio, with whom
the Saint was on terms of special intimacy. He had one day worked a
striking miracle on their behalf, restoring to its unimpaired condition
a large cask of wine, which had turned acid.
Now it so happened that a servant in this house became
dangerously ill. One evening in the midst of her pain she
remembered this miracle, thought of Saint Gerard, and ardently
desired to see him.
“Oh, my dear Brother Gerard!” she cried out, “where are you?
Why do you not come and deliver me from my sufferings?”
The words were hardly out of her mouth before she heard a

those to whom he appears, though he himself is not there.

III. Per visionem corporalem qua videtur Sanctus, licet sit longe distans
— i.e., the Saint himself is really seen through all the intervening
space, as though he were present.

However, Suarez, De Lugo, and with them the greater number of
Theologians hold against St. Thomas that circumscriptive
Multilocation is possible by miracle. They can therefore, if they
please, thus account without difficulty for the Bilocation of Saints
during life; but many even of these authors prefer to explain this
wonderful fact in one of the modes just mentioned, — as for the
most part they explain the Apparitions of Our Lord from Heaven
(always excepting the three great Apparitions to His Holy Mother
on occasion of her Death and Assumption, to St. Peter on the
Appian Way, and to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, — cases in
which it seems to be almost certain that either Our Lord in His
Sacred Humanity left Heaven for the moment, or that there was
by miracle a circumscriptive Bilocation of His glorified Body), as
well as those of the Blessed Virgin and of the Saints after their
death. Theologians generally discuss these questions when
treating of the Eucharist and of the Mysteries of Our Lord's Life.
Perhaps the most satisfactory treatment of the whole subject is
that to be found in “Suarez De Mysteriis Vitas Christi,” Disp. li.,
sec. 4, and “De Euch.,” Disp. xlviii., sec. 4, n. 5 to n. 17.

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