BILOCAZIONE. — From the Latin bis and locatio, the simultaneous presence of a person in two different places.
Among the prodigious phenomena with which Catholic hagiography abounds, this is one of the rarest. We read of it in the cases of St. Filippo Neri, St. Caterina de' Ricci, St. Pietro d'Alcantara, St. Alfonso de' Liguori, who, although he was in S. Agata dei Goti, declared that he had assisted the dying Clemente XIV (cf. A. Tannoia, Della vita ed istituto del ven. servo di Dio Alfonso M. Liguori, II, Napoli 1800, p. 283), St. Francesco di Girolamo (cf. F. S. D'Aria, S. Francesco di Girolamo, I, Roma 1944, pp. 320-21), and several other saints.
Catholic theologians attribute this phenomenon to a supernatural cause, but they do not agree on the metaphysical explanation of how it occurs. Some admit the simultaneous “circumscribed” presence of a body, together with its dimensional quantity, in two places, with its parts corresponding to one another and acting simultaneously in two spaces, by virtue of the “potentia oboedientialis” (v.). For St. Tommaso (IV Sent., dist. 44, q. 2, a. 2) and the Scholastics in general, this entails a metaphysical absurdity, because, while the essential presence (in this sense God is everywhere) and the sacramental presence (Jesus under the Eucharistic species) of a being in several places are possible, bodily presence is necessarily linked to quantity, which can be placed only in a determinate place that circumscribes II. In this case mystical grace would consist in the miraculous formation of a representative subject that takes the place of the real one.
Metapsychics has so far established no cases of b.
Ectoplasmic phenomena are highly uncertain. Astral projection (subjective b.), produced by autosuggestion, leads the patient to mental alienation. Thus the sciences cannot at present reach any conclusion concerning hagiographical b.