stigmata

At least get some kind of stigmata going.

Church figures who claimed to have experienced the stigmata wounds, including Padre Pio and Pope Francis’ namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, have inspired millions of Catholics.

The observatory’s mission statement says experts will analyze and interpret apparitions, lacrimations, or weeping statues, stigmata “and other mystical phenomena that are in progress or have already occurred, but are still awaiting a pronouncement of the ecclesiastical authority on their authenticity.”

Indeed, Palm Springs may be the only American market that can sustain a traditional radio station that primarily plays songs that older gay guys like — the men with still-fresh memories of music that “left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata,” as Andrew Holleran put it in his landmark 1978 gay novel “Dancer From the Dance.”

Now Ferrara hasn’t even attempted a conventional biopic of the man born Francesco Forgione at the end of the 19th century, and who, according to some accounts, started displaying stigmata after an illness-plagued childhood.