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Ana Catalina Emmerick English.11,11,21

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Ana Catalina Emmerick

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerick (Coesfeld, September 8, 1774 – Dülmen, February 9, 1824) was an Augustinian canonese nun, mystic and German writer. She was born in Flamske, an agrarian community, currently in the Diocese of Münster, in Westphalia, and died in Dülmen at the age of 49. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 3, 2004. Emmerick is the surname recorded in Germany, she comes from a German town where her family lived.

Since she was little, she said she had visions in which Jesus Christ mainly appeared to her, giving him her cross. She entered an Augustinian convent. When she was 24 years old, bleeding wounds began to appear, stigmata that became visible periodically at Christmas and New Years; the first one, on December 29, 1812. During the last years of her life, she was nourished only with the Eucharist.1

The visions of her were described by Clemens Brentano, poet and novelist of German Romanticism.

Religious life

In 1802, at the age of 28, he entered the Augustinian convent of Agnetemberg, Dülmen. His cloister sisters believed that he had received supernatural powers due to his continued ecstasy. When Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, closed the convent in 1812, she was the last to leave it; she was granted refuge in the home of a widow, sister of the Dominican priest Joseph Aloys Limberg, her confessor. There the sick and poor came to seek help, and according to her contemporaries, she knew what her illnesses were and she gave relief to those in need.

Stigmata

In 1813, while she was ill in bed, the stigmata appeared on her body. An episcopal commission was in charge of investigating her life and examining her miraculous signs. Vicar General Orvergerg and three doctors, one of them a Protestant, were in charge of the investigation. The procedure lasted more than three months. Apparently they were convinced of her sanctity and the authenticity of her stigmata.

At the end of 1818 Ana Catalina reveals that God grants him through her prayer the relief of her stigmata; and the wounds on his hands and her feet are closed, but the others remain, and on Good Friday they all reopen.

In 1819 Emmerick is investigated again. She was forcibly transferred to a large room in another house and she is kept under strict surveillance during the day and night for three weeks, away from all of her friends except her confessor.

 Visions

Ana Catalina Emmerick recounted her visions from her childhood:

When, towards the age of five or six, I was meditating on the first article of the Apostles’ Creed, ‘I believe in God the Father, Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth’, all kinds of images were referred to the creation of heaven and earth were presented to my soul. I saw the fall of the angels, the Creation of Earth and Paradise, Adam and Eve, and the Fall of Man. I simply believed that everyone saw this, as other things around us. I talked about this to my parents, to my brothers and sisters, to my playmates, I told all this naively, until the moment when I realized that they were making fun of me, wondering if I had a book in which all that was written. So I began little by little to keep quiet about these things, thinking, without much reflection, that it was inappropriate to talk about such issues; however, I didn’t have any particular concerns about that.

When the second ecclesiastical investigation was carried out in 1819, the famous poet Clemens Brentano and his general practitioner Guillermo Wesener were induced to visit her; To his great amazement, she told Brentano that she had been appointed by divine inspiration as the man who would write her revelations and allow her to fulfill God’s will, that is, to write for the good of innumerable souls the revelations received by her . Clemente Brentano was a romantic writer who, after his direct contact with Ana Catalina, converted to Catholicism. He told Guillermo Wesener secrets of his personal life that no one could know, so he was convinced of Ana Catalina’s spiritual height.

From 1819 until Ana Catalina’s death in 1824, Brentano recorded her visions, filling forty volumes with detailed scenes and passages from the New Testament and the life of the Virgin Mary. The details were collected with great vividness, as they hold the reader’s interest as a graphic scene that follows one another in rapid succession, as if visible to the human eye. Brentano briefly wrote down the main points and, since she spoke the Westphalian dialect, the poet immediately rewrote in Standard German. Then he would read it aloud to her and she would make changes to it until he gave her complete approval.

After 1824, Brentano had the writings prepared for his publication and in 1833 he published the first volume of it, The Sorrowful Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the visions of Ana Catalina Emmerick. Brentano then prepared for publication the Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to Emmerick’s visions, but he died in 1842. The book was published posthumously in 1852 in Munich.

The Catholic priest Karl Schmöger (Schmoeger) edited the Brentano manuscripts and from 1858 to 1880 published the three volumes of The Public Life of Our Lord in which very detailed facts of the life of Jesus are described, since, what is read in the Gospels in a few minutes can take a few hours in the visions of Ana Catalina. Notable facts about Jesus, such as walking on water, would have been repeated, and the merchants from the Temple of Jerusalem would have been driven out several times. In 1881 in a large illustrated edition, Schmöger also wrote a two-volume biography of Anne Catherine.

Emmerick’s visions were used during the discovery of the Virgin Mary’s house on a hill near the city of Ephesus. Neither Emmerick nor Brentano had gone to Ephesus, and in fact the city had not yet been excavated, but the visions contained in the mystical work were used during its discovery. The Holy See has not taken any official position on the authenticity of the location, but in 1896 Pope Leo XIII visited the site and in 1951 Pope Pius XII declared the house a sacred place. Pope John XXIII subsequently made the permanent declaration. Paul VI in 1967, John Paul II in 1979 and Benedict XVI in 2006 visited the house, already considered a sanctuary.

He also had visions of the Holy Trinity in the form of three integrated concentric spheres – the largest, representing the Father, the middle representing the Son, and the smallest and most illuminated that of the Holy Spirit.

Of singular importance are the visions he had of various saints: San Antonio de Padua (1195-1231), San Ignacio de Loyola (1491-1556), San Francisco de Borja (1510-1572), San Carlos Borromeo (1538-1584) , San Luis Gonzaga (1568-1591), San Estanislao de Kostka (1550-1568), San Agustín (354-430), San Francisco de Asís (1181-1226), Santo Tomás de Aquino (1225-1274), Santa Lutgarda (1182-1248), Santa Rita de Casia (1381-1457), Santa Clara de Montefalco (+ 1308), etc.

Sickness and death]

In 1812 her stigmata appear and from then on she remains confined to bed; she died on February 9, 1824 in Dülmen and was buried in the cemetery outside the city four days later. In 1975, after restarting the beatification process by the postulator for the cause Josef Adam, her remains were transferred to the crypt of the nearby Church of the Holy Cross.