Clara Germana Cele of St Michael’s Mission

When

1906 date from records made at the time

Where

St Michael’s Mission, Natal (between Umzinto and Ixopo), KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Verdict

Disputed

A 16-year-old mission pupil in Natal reportedly spoke unknown languages, recoiled from holy objects and levitated – her exorcism lasted two days.

What happened

Clara Germana Cele was an orphan, baptised as an infant and raised at the school of the Catholic St Michael’s Mission in Natal. In 1906 the 16-year-old girl reportedly confessed to her confessor, the Mariannhill missionary Father Erasmus Hörner, that she had made a pact with Satan. According to an account by one of the nuns, Clara began to understand languages she had never learned – including Polish, German and French – revealed other people’s secrets, could not bear blessed objects and hurled the sisters about the rooms with enormous strength. “No animal had ever made such sounds,” the nun wrote of her screams. The girl was also said to have floated in the air. Father Hörner and the mission’s director, Father Mansuetus, performed a two-day exorcism, after which Clara calmed down. She died in 1912 of heart failure.

Witnesses

Nuns and pupils of the mission, Father Erasmus Hörner and Father Mansuetus; the main account was written by one of the sisters.

Explanations and hypotheses

Everything we know comes from accounts by missionaries and nuns, circulated for devotional purposes; there are no independent testimonies, and even sympathetic writers consider parts of the story unreliable. Historians place the case in the context of a colonial mission, where European clergy read a young African woman’s behaviour through the lens of a struggle against “paganism”. Psychiatrists would rather see a mental crisis or dissociative states in a teenager, while levitation and knowledge of foreign languages are stock elements of possession stories.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (en)