Therese Neumann was a farm servant in a Bavarian village until March 1918, when she was hurt helping to fight a fire on her uncle's farm. She was paralysed, developed bedsores, and by 1919 said she had gone blind. Her sight came back, she said, on 29 April 1923 — the day Thérèse of Lisieux was beatified in Rome — and she walked again on 17 May 1925, the day the same saint was canonised. She attributed both to her namesake.
In Lent 1926 wounds appeared on her hands, her feet and over her heart, and she began to report visions of the Passion that recurred, with bleeding, on Fridays for the rest of her life. From 1927 she was said to take no food or water at all beyond a daily Communion. That claim is the whole difficulty of her case, and unlike most such claims it was once tested: from 14 to 28 July 1927 the diocese had her watched day and night for fifteen days by four Franciscan nursing sisters under the physician Otto Seidl. She lost weight during the fast days and regained it afterwards, which her supporters read as vindication and her critics as the opposite. No second observation was ever permitted.
Konnersreuth filled with visitors for thirty years, and the Church was careful throughout: Bishop Michael Buchberger of Regensburg neither endorsed nor condemned, and no diocesan judgement was ever given on the phenomena. She died on 18 September 1962. Her cause was opened on 13 February 2005 by Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, which makes her a Servant of God and says nothing yet about the stigmata or the fast — a cause examines a life for heroic virtue, not a wonder for authenticity, and those are different questions.