The Smell of Sin

Christina of Sint-Truiden was a Belgian shepherdess, orphaned at fifteen, the youngest of three sisters and otherwise unremarkable until the seizure killed her at twenty-two.

The village arranged the funeral. The priest reached the end of the Mass.

Then Christina sat up in her coffin and flew to the rafters of the church.

The congregation fled. The priest stayed, and he had to coax her down like a cat from a tree, because she refused to descend among the mourners. They smelled, she explained, of sin.

For the next forty years she kept climbing away from it. She crawled into active bread ovens and rolled in the flames. She perched on baptismal fonts and on the topmost branches of trees. She climbed onto the village gallows and prayed beside the hanging corpses of thieves, and the villagers below stood listening to her cries to learn whether the dying were bound for heaven or hell.

Count Louis II of Loon confessed his sins to her on his deathbed.

In 1857, Pope Pius IX approved her cult. She is the patron saint of psychiatrists.