Anne Catherine Emmerich

Anne Catherine Emmerich, CRV (also Anna Katharina Emmerick; 8 September 1774 – 9 February 1824) was a Catholic Augustinian canoness of the Congregation of Windesheim. During her lifetime, she was a mystic, Marian visionary and stigmatist.

Emmerich was born in Flamschen, an impoverished farming community at Coesfeld, in the Diocese of Münster, Westphalia, Germany, and died in Dülmen (aged 49), where she had lived, bedridden, as a nun. Emmerich purportedly experienced visions of the life and Passion of Jesus Christ, revealed to her by the Blessed Virgin Mary during religious ecstasy.

During her bedridden years, a number of well-known contemporaries visited her.

Pope John Paul II beatified Emmerich on 3 October 2004, highlighting her notable virtues and deep Catholic piety.

She applied for admission to various convents, but she was rejected because she could not afford a dowry. Eventually, the Order of Saint Clare in Münster agreed to accept her, provided she would learn to play the musical organ. She went to the organist Söntgen in Coesfeld to study music and learn to play the organ, but the poverty of the Söntgen family prompted her to sacrifice her small savings in an effort to help them. During this time, the poet and romanticist Clemens Brentano first visited Emmerich.

At the end of 1818, the periodic bleeding of Emmerich's hands and feet had stopped, and the wounds had closed. While many in the community viewed the stigmata as real, others claimed that Emmerich was an impostor and that she conspired with others to perpetrate her fraud. In August 1819, the civil authorities intervened and moved Emmerich to a different house, where she was kept under observation for three weeks. The members of the commission could find no evidence of fraud, yet her stigmata continued. The commission members thus became divided in their opinions. Other critics have been less sympathetic, characterizing his books as the "conscious elaborations of an overwrought romantic poet".

Some argue that these writings indicate racist beliefs and contain a "clear antisemitic strain throughout." For example, Noah's son Ham is portrayed as the progenitor of "the black, idolatrous, stupid nations" of the world. Also, in the "Dolorous Passion", it is implied that "Jews[...] strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices".

Claims of forgery The tomb of Anne Catherine at the Church of the Most Holy Cross in Dülmen, Germany. When the case for Emmerich's beatification was submitted to the Vatican in 1892, a number of experts in Germany began to compare and analyze Brentano's original notes from his personal library with the books he had written. By 1928, the experts had come to the conclusion that only a small portion of Brentano's books could be safely attributed to Emmerich.

Emmerich described Mary's house:

In 1881, a French Catholic priest, Julien Gouyet, used Emmerich's book to search for the house in Ephesus and found it based on the descriptions. He was not taken seriously at first, but Sister Marie de Mandat-Grancey persisted until two other priests followed the same path and confirmed the finding.

Pontifical approbations Pope Leo XIII visited the shrine in 1896. Pope Pius X granted a plenary indulgence to the pilgrimage to the shrine in 1914 and sent his blessing to "the valiant searchers for the tomb of the Most Blessed Virgin." Pope Pius XII initially declared the house a "Holy Place" (1951). As former Apostolic Nuncio to Turkey, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli visited the shrine (1935), and later as Pope John XXIII made the Pian declaration permanent. Pope Paul VI (1967), Pope John Paul II (1979) and Pope Benedict XVI (2006) visited the house and current shrine.

Beatification

Pope John Paul II on 3 October 2004 declared the following:

The process of Emmerich's beatification was started in 1892 by the Bishop of Münster, and her cause was officially opened by the Vatican on 12 June 1899. The process of evaluating the spiritual writings began on 22 April 1901.

In 1973, the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints allowed the case for her beatification to be re-opened, provided it only focused on the issue of her life, without any reference to the possibly doctored material produced by Clemens Brentano.

On 3 October 2004, Anne Catherine Emmerich was beatified by Pope John Paul II. However, the books produced by Brentano were set aside, and her cause adjudicated solely on the basis of her own personal sanctity and virtue.

In film

In 2003, Hollywood actor and director Mel Gibson used Brentano's book The Dolorous Passion as a key source for his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. Gibson stated that Scripture and "accepted visions" were the only sources he drew on, and a careful reading of Brentano's book shows the film's high level of dependence on it.