²³ For this reason, after This is my Body, ^{Mt 26:26} powerfully shaken, he fell backwards, but as soon as he said this, the guardian, who was standing beside him, held him so he would not fall to the ground. The brothers and the other men and women who were in the church came running, and he was carried, as if dead, to the sacristy. His body had become cold like the body of a dead man. The fingers of his hands were so tightly contracted that they could hardly be straightened or moved. He lay there, as if dead, from morning until late terce: it was during summer.

²⁵ I was present for this, and I very much wanted to know what the Savior's mercy had done to him. Almost as soon as he returned to himself, I went to him and asked him for the love of God to be kind enough to tell me about it.

²⁶ Since he had great trust in me, he told me in detail everything by the grace of God. Moreover, he said that before and while he was consecrating, his heart was melted like thoroughly dissolved wax; and his flesh seemed to have no bones so that he could hardly lift either his arms or hands to make the sign of the Cross over the host. He added that before he became a priest, he was shown that he would faint in this way during the Mass. But because he had read many Masses, and what had been predicted to him had not happened, he thought that he had been deceived about this. But about fifty days before the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, he had been shown again that this would happen to him around the Assumption, but he had forgotten about this promise.

To the praise and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

LVIII
BROTHER JOHN OF PENNA AND HIS ANGELIC CONVERSATION^a

¹ When Brother John of Penna, one of the greatest lights of the Province of the Marches,^b was still a little boy in the world, a very handsome boy called to him one night and said: "Oh, John, go to Santo Stefano, for one of my brothers is going to preach there. Pay

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