BILOCATION. - From the Latin bis and locatio, the simultaneous presence of a person in two different places.
Among the portentous facts with which Catholic hagiography is rich, this is one of the rarest. We read of it in the case of St. Philip Neri, of St. Catherine de' Ricci, of St. Peter of Alcantara, of St. Alphonsus de' Liguori, who, although he was at S. Agata dei Goti, declared that he had assisted the dying Clement XIV (cf. A. Tannoia, Della vita ed istituto del ven. servo di Dio Alfonso M. Liguori, II, Naples 1800, p. 283), of St. Francis of Girolamo (cf. F. S. D'Aria, S. Francesco di Girolamo, I, Rome 1944, pp. 320-21) and of several other saints.
Catholic theologians attribute this phenomenon to a supernatural cause, but they do not agree on the metaphysical explanation of the manner. Some admit the simultaneous "circumscribed" presence of a body with its dimensional quantity in two places, commensurating its parts and acting simultaneously in two spaces, by virtue of "obediential power" (v.). For St. Thomas (IV Sent., dist. 44, q. 2, a. 2) and the scholastics in general this implies 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, the corporeal presence is necessarily bound to quantity, which cannot be placed except in a determinate place that circumscribes it. In that case the mystical grace would consist in the miraculous formation of a representative subject that takes the place of the real one.
Metapsychics has so far not ascertained any cases of b.
Ectoplasmic phenomena are very uncertain. The astral exit (subjective b.) produced by autosuggestion leads the patient to mental alienation. So the sciences cannot for now conclude anything about hagiographic b.
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