Anne Catherine Emmerich · 5 of 83

Life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, Religious of the Order of St. Augustine, at the Convent of Agnetenberg, Dulmen, Westphalia. · Part 3

Similar reactions of the spirit upon the body are often found in the lives of persons subject to ecstasies, and are by no means contrary to faith. St. Paula, if we may believe St. Jerome, visited the holy places in spirit just as if she had visited them bodily; and a like thing happened to St. Colomba of Rieti and St. Lidwina of Schiedam. The body of the latter bore traces of this spiritual journey, as if she had really travelled; she experienced all the fatigue that a painful journey would cause: her feet were wounded and covered with marks which looked as if they had been made by stones or thorns, and finally she had a sprain from which she long suffered.

She was led on this journey by her guardian angel, who told her that these corporeal wounds signified that she had been ravished in body and spirit.

Similar hurts were also to be seen upon the body of Anne Catherine immediately after some of her visions. Lidwina began her ecstatic journey by following her good angel to the chapel of the Blessed Virgin before Schiedam; Anne Catherine began hers by following her angel guardian either to the chapel which was near her dwelling, or else to the Way of the Cross of Coesfeld.

Her journeys to the Holy Land were made, according to the accounts she gave of them, by the most opposite roads; sometimes even she went all round the earth, when the task spiritually imposed upon her required it. In the course of these journeys from her home to the most distant countries., she carried assistance to many persons, exercising in their regard works of mercy, both corporal and spiritual, and this was done frequently in parables. At the end of a year she would go over the same ground again, see the same persons, and give an account of their spiritual progress or of their relapse into sin. Every part of this labour always bore some reference to the Church, and to the king dom. of God upon earth.

The end of these daily pilgrimages which she made in spirit was invariably the Promised Land, every part of which she examined in detail, and which she saw sometimes in its present state, and sometimes as it was at, different periods of sacred history; for her distinguishing characteristic and special privilege was an intuitive knowledge of the history of the Old and New Testaments, and of that of the members of the Holy Family, and of all the saints whom she was contemplating in spirit. She saw the signification of all the festival days of the ecclesiastical year under both a devotional and an historical point of view. She saw and described, day by day, with the minutest detail, and by name, places, persons, festivals, customs, and miracles, all that happened during the public life of Jesus until the Ascension, and the history of the apostles for several weeks after the Descent of the Holy Ghost. She regarded all her visions not as mere spiritual enjoyments, but as being, so to speak, fertile fields, plentifully strewn with the merits of Christ, and which had not as yet been cultivated; she was often engaged in spirit in praying that the fruit of such and such Sufferings of our Lord might be given to the Church, and she would beseech God to apply to his Church the merits of our Saviour which were its inheritance, and of which she would, as it were, take possession, in its name, with the most touching simplicity and ingenuousness.

She never considered her visions to have any reference to her exterior Christian life, nor did she regard them as being of any historical value. Exteriorly she knew and believed nothing but the catechism, the common history of the Bible, the gospels for Sundays and festivals, and the Christian almanack, which to her far-sighted vision was an inexhaustible mine of hidden riches, since it gave her in a few pages a guiding thread which led her through all time, and by means of which she passed from mystery to mystery, and solemnised each with all the saints, in order to reap the fruits of eternity in time, and to preserve and distribute them in her pilgrimage around the ecclesiastical year, that so the will of God might be accomplished on earth as it is in Heaven. She had never read the Old or the New Testaments, and when she was tired of relating her visions, she would sometimes say: ‘Read that in the Bible,’ and then be astonished to learn that it was not there; ‘for,’ she would add, ‘people are constantly saying in these days that you need read nothing but the Bible, which contains everything, &c. &c.’

The real task of her life was to suffer for the Church and for some of its members, whose distress was shown her in spirit, or who asked her prayers without knowing that this poor sick nun had something more to do for them than to say the Pater noster, but that all their spiritual and corporal sufferings became her own, and that she had to endure patiently the most terrible pains, without being assisted, like the contemplatives of former days, by the sympathising prayers of an entire community. In the age when she lived, she had no other assistance than that of medicine. While thus enduring sufferings which she had taken upon herself for others, she often turned her thoughts to the corresponding sufferings of the Church, and when thus suffering, for one single person, she would likewise offer all she endured for the whole Church.

The following is a remarkable instance of the sort:—During several weeks she had every symptom of consumption; violent irritation of the lungs, excessive perspiration, which soaked her whole bed, a racking cough, continual expectoration, and a strong continual fever. So fearful were her sufferings that her death was hourly expected and even desired. It was remarked that she had to struggle strangely against a strong temptation to irritability. Did she yield for an instant, she burst into tears, her sufferings increased tenfold, and she seemed unable to exist unless she immediately gained pardon in the sacrament of penance. She had also to combat a feeling of aversion to a certain person whom she had not seen for years. She was in despair because this person, with whom nevertheless she declared she had nothing in common, was always before her eyes in the most evil dispositions, and she wept bitterly, and with much anxiety of conscience, saying that she would not commit sin, that her grief must be evident to all, and other things which were quite unintelligible to the persons listening to her. Her illness continued to increase, and she was thought to be on the point of death. At this moment one of her friends saw her, to his great surprise, suddenly raise herself up on her bed, and say:—

‘Repeat with me the prayers for those in their last agony.’ He did as requested, and she answered the Litany in a firm voice. After some little time, the bell for the agonising was heard, and a person came in to ask Anne Catherine’s prayers for his sister, who was just dead. Anne Catherine asked for details concerning her illness and death, as if deeply interested in the subject, and the friend above-mentioned heard the account given by the new comer of a consumption resembling in the minutest particulars the illness of Anne Catherine herself. The deceased woman had at first been in so much pain and so disturbed in mind that she had seemed quite unable to prepare herself for death; but during the last fortnight she had been better, had made her peace with God, having in the first place been reconciled to a person with whom she was at enmity, and had died in peace, fortified by the last sacraments, and attended by her former enemy. Anne Catherine gave a small sum of money for the burial and funeral-service of this person. Her sweatings, cough, and fever now left her, and she resembled a person exhausted with fatigue, whose linen has been changed, and who has been placed on a fresh bed. Her friend said to her, ‘When this fearful illness came upon you, this woman grew better, and her hatred for another was the only obstacle to her making peace with God. You took upon yourself, for the time, her feelings of hatred, she died in good dispositions, and now you seem tolerably well again. Are you still suffering on her account?’ ‘No, indeed!’ she replied; ‘that would be most unreasonable; but how can any person avoid suffering when even the end of his little finger is in pain? We are all one body in Christ.’ ‘By the goodness of God,’ said her friend, ‘you are now once more somewhat at ease.’ ‘Not for very long, though,’ she replied with a smile; ‘there are other persons who want my assistance.’ Then she turned round on her bed, and rested awhile.

A very few days later, she began to feel intense pain in all her limbs, and symptoms of water on the chest manifested themselves. We discovered the sick person for whom Anne Catherine was suffering, and we saw that his sufferings suddenly diminished or immensely increased in exact inverse proportion to those of Anne Catherine.

Thus did charity compel her to take upon herself the illnesses and even the temptations of others, that they might be able in peace to prepare themselves for death. She was compelled to suffer in silence, both to conceal the weaknesses of her neighbour, and not to be regarded as mad herself; she war, obliged to receive all the aid that medicine could afford her for an illness thus taken voluntarily for the relief of others, and to be reproached for temptations which were not her own; finally, it was necessary that she should appear perverted in the eyes of men, that so those for whom she was suffering might be converted before God.

One day a friend in deep affliction was sitting by her bedside, when she suddenly fell into a state of ecstasy, and began to pray aloud: ‘O, my sweet Jesus, permit me to carry that heavy stone!’ Her friend asked her what was the matter. ‘I am on my way to Jerusalem,’ she replied, ‘and I see a poor man walking along with the greatest difficulty, for there is a large stone upon his breast, the weight of which nearly crushes him.’ Then again, after a few moments, she exclaimed: ‘Give me that heavy stone, you cannot carry it any farther; give it to me.’ All on a sudden she sank down fainting, as if crushed beneath some heavy burden, and at the same moment her friend felt himself relieved from the weight of sorrow which oppressed him, and his heart overflowing with extraordinary happiness. Seeing her in such a state of suffering, he asked her what the matter was, and she looking at him with a smile, replied: ‘I cannot remain here any longer. Poor man, you must take back your burden.’ Instantly her friend felt all the weight of his affliction return to him, whilst she, becoming as well again as before, continued her journey in spirit to Jerusalem.

We will give one more example of her spiritual exertions. One morning she gave her friend a little bag containing some rye-flour and eggs, and pointed out to him a small house where a poor woman, who was in a consumption, was living with her husband and two little children. He was to tell her to boil and take them, as when boiled they would be good for her chest. The friend, on entering the cottage, took the bag from under his cloak, when the poor mother, who, flushed with fever, was lying on a mattress between her half-naked children, fixed her bright eyes upon him, and holding out her thin hands, exclaimed: ‘O, sir, it must be God or Sister Emmerich who sends you to me! You are bringing me some rye-flour and eggs.’ Here the poor woman, overcome by her feelings, burst into tears, and then began to cough so violently that she had to make a sign to her husband to speak for her. He said that the previous night Gertrude had been much disturbed, and had talked a great deal in her sleep, and that on awaking she had told him her dream in these words: ‘I thought that I was standing at the door with you, when the holy nun came out of the door of the next house, and I told you to look at her. She stopped in front of us, and said to me: “Ah, Gertrude, you look very ill; I will send you some rye-flour and eggs, which will relieve your chest.” Then I awoke.’ Such was the simple tale of the poor man; he and his wife both eagerly expressed their gratitude, and the bearer of Anne Catherine’s alms left the house much overcome. He did not tell her anything of this when he saw her, but a few days after, she sent him again to the same place with a similar present, and he then asked her how it was she knew that poor woman? ‘You know,’ she replied, ‘that I pray every evening for all those who suffer; I should like to go and relieve them, and I generally dream that I am going from one abode of suffering to another, and that I assist them to the best of my power. In this way I went in my dream to that poor woman’s house; she was standing at the door with her husband, and I said to her: “Ah, Gertrude, you look very ill; I will send you some rye-flour and eggs, which will relieve your chest.” And this I did through you, the next morning.’ Both persons had remained in their beds, and dreamed the same thing, and the dream came true. St. Augustin, in his City of God, book xviii., c. 18, relates a similar thing of two philosophers, who visited each other in a dream, and explained some passages of Plato, both remaining asleep in their own houses.

These sufferings, and this peculiar species of active labour, were like a single ray of light, which enlightened her whole life. Infinite was the number of spiritual labours and sympathetic sufferings which came from all parts and entered into her heart—that heart so burning with love of Jesus Christ. Like St. Catherine of Sienna and some other ecstatics, she often felt the most profound feeling of conviction that our Saviour had taken her heart out of her bosom, and placed his own there instead for a time.

The following fragment will give some idea of the mysterious symbolism by which she was interiorly directed. During a portion of the year 1820 she performed many labours in spirit, for several different parishes; her prayers being represented under the figure of most severe labour in a vineyard. What we have above related concerning the nettles is of the same character.

On the 6th of September her heavenly guide said to her: ‘“ You weeded, dug around, tied, and pruned the vine; you ground down the weeds so that they could never spring up any more; and then you went away joyfully and rested from your prayers. Prepare now to labour hard from the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin to that of St. Michael; the grapes are ripening and must be well watched.” Then he led me,’ she continued, ‘to the vineyard of St. Liboire, and showed me the vines at which I had worked. My labour had been successful, for the grapes were getting their colour and growing large, and in some parts the red juice was running down on the ground from them. My guide said to me: “When the virtues of the good begin to shine forth in public, they have to combat bravely, to be oppressed, to be tempted, and to suffer persecution. A hedge must be planted around the vineyard in order that the ripe grapes may not be destroyed by thieves and wild beasts, i.e. by temptation and persecution.” He then showed me how to build a wall by heaping up stones, and to raise a thick hedge of thorns all around. As my hands bled from such severe labour, God, in order to give me strength, permitted me to see the mysterious signification of the vine, and of several other fruit trees. Jesus Christ is the true Vine, who is to take root and grow in us; all useless wood must be cut away, in order not to waste the sap, which is to become the wine, and in the Most Blessed Sacrament the Blood of Christ. The pruning of the vine has to be done according to certain rules which were made known to me. This pruning is, in a spiritual sense, the cutting off whatever is useless, penance and mortification, that so the true Vine may grow in us, and bring forth fruit. in the place of corrupt nature, which only bean wood and leaves. The pruning is done according to fixed rules, for it is only required that certain useless shoots should be cut off in man, and to lop off more would be to mutilate in a guilty manner. No pruning should ever be done upon the stock which has been planted in humankind through the Blessed Virgin, and is to remain in it for ever. The true Vine unites heaven to earth, the Divinity to humanity; and it is the human part that is to be pruned, that so the divine alone may grow. I saw so many other things relating to the vine that a book as large as the Bible could not contain them. One day, when I was suffering acute pain in my chest, I besought our Lord with groans not to give me a burthen above my strength to bear; and then my Heavenly Spouse appeared, and said to me, . . . “I have laid thee on my nuptial couch, which is a couch of suffering; I have given thee suffering and expiation for thy bridal garments and jewels. Thou must suffer, but I will not forsake thee; thou art fastened to the Vine, and thou wilt not be lost.” Then I was consoled for all my sufferings. It was likewise explained to me why in ray visions relating to the feasts of the family of Jesus, such, for instance, as those of St. Anne, St. Joachim, St. Joseph, &c., I always saw the Church of the festival under the figure of a shoot of the vine. The same was the case on the festivals of St. Francis of Assissium, St. Catherine of Sienna, and of all the saints who have had the stigmas.

‘The signification of my sufferings in all my limbs was explained to me in the following vision: I saw a gigantic human body in a horrible state of mutilation, and raised upwards towards the sky. There were no fingers or toes on the hands and feet, the body was covered with frightful wounds, some of which were fresh and bleeding, others covered with dead flesh or turned into excrescences. The whole of one aide was black, gangrened, and as it were half eaten away. I suffered as though it had been my own body that was in this state, and then my guide said to me, “This is the body of the Church, the body of all men and thine also.” Then, pointing to each wound, he showed me at the same time some part of the world; I saw an infinite number of men and nations separated from the Church, all in their own peculiar way, and I felt pain as exquisite from this separation as if they had been torn from my body. Then my guide said to me: “Let thy sufferings teach thee a lesson, and offer them to God in union with those of Jesus for all who are separated. Should not one member call upon another, and suffer in order to cure and unite it once more to the body? When those parts which are most closely united to the body detach themselves, it is as though the flesh were torn from around the heart. In my ignorance, I thought that he was speaking of those brethren who are not in communion with us, but my guide added: “Who are our brethren? It is not our blood relations who are the nearest to our hearts, but those who are our brethren in the blood of Christ—the children of the Church who fall away.” He showed me that the black and gangrened side of the body would soon be cured; that the putrified flesh which had collected around the wounds represented heretics who divide one from the other in proportion as they increase; that the dead flesh was the figure of all. who are spiritually dead, and who are void of any feeling; and that the ossified parts represented obstinate and hardened heretics. I saw and felt in this manner every wound and its signification. The body reached up to heaven. It was the body of the Bride of Christ, and most painful to behold. I wept bitterly, but feeling at once deeply grieved and strengthened by sorrow and compassion, I began again to labour with all my strength.’

Sinking beneath the weight of life and of the task imposed upon her she often besought God to deliver her, and she then would appear to be on the very brink of the grave. But each time she would say: ‘Lord, not my will but thine be done! If my prayers and sufferings are useful let me live a thousand years, but grant that I may die rather than ever offend thee.’ Then she would receive orders to live, and arise, taking up her cross, once more to bear it in patience and suffering after her Lord. >From time to time the road of life which she was pursuing used to be shown to her, leading to the top of a mountain on which was a shining and resplendent city—the heavenly Jerusalem. Often she would think she had arrived at that blissful abode, which seemed to be quite near her, and her joy would be great. But all on a sudden she would discover that she was still separated from it by a valley, and then she would have to descend precipices. and follow indirect paths, labouring, suffering, and performing deeds of charity everywhere. She had to direct wanderers into the right road, raise up the fallen, sometimes even carry the paralytic, and drag the unwilling by force, and all these deeds of charity were as so many fresh weights fastened to her cross. Then she walked with more difficulty, bending beneath her burden and sometimes even falling to the ground.

In 1823 she repeated more frequently than usual that she could not perform her task in her present situation, that she had not strength for it, and that it was in a peaceful convent that she needed to have lived and died. She added that God would soon take her to himself, and that she had besought him to permit her to obtain by her prayers in the next world what her weakness would not permit her to accomplish in this. St. Catherine of Sienna, a short time before death, made a similar prayer.

Anne Catherine had previously had a vision concerning what her prayers might obtain after death, with regard to things that were not in existence during her life. The year 1823, the last of which she completed the whole circle, brought her immense labours. She appeared desirous to accomplish her entire task, and thus kept the promise which she had previously made of relating the history of the whole Passion. It formed the subject of her Lenten meditations during this year, and of them the present volume is composed. But she did not on this account take less part in the fundamental mystery of this penitential season, or in the different mysteries of each of the festival days of the Church, if indeed the words to take part be sufficient to express the wonderful manner in which she rendered visible testimony to the mystery celebrated in each festival by a sudden change in her corporal and spiritual life. See on this subject the chapter entitled Interruption of the Pictures of the Passion.

Every one of the ceremonies and festivals of the Church was to her far more than the consecration of a remembrance. She beheld in the historical foundation of each solemnity an act of the Almighty, done in time for the reparation of fallen humanity. Although these divine acts appeared to her stamped with the character of eternity, yet she was well aware that in order for man to profit by them in the bounded and narrow sphere of time, he must, as it were, take possession of them in a series of successive moments, and that for this purpose they had to be repeated and renewed in the Church, in the order established by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. All festivals and solemnities were in her eyes eternal graces which returned at fixed epochs in every ecclesiastical year, in the same manner as the fruits and harvests of the earth come in their seasons in the natural year.

Her zeal and gratitude in receiving and treasuring up these graces were untiring, nor was she less eager and zealous in offering them to those who neglected their value. In the same manner as her compassion for her crucified Saviour had pleased God and obtained for her the privilege of being marked with the stigmas of the Passion as with a seal of the most perfect love, so all the sufferings of the Church and of those who were in affliction were repeated in the different states of her body and soul. And all these wonders took place within her, unknown to those who were around her; nor was she herself even more fully conscious of them than is the bee of the effects of its work, while yet she was tending and cultivating, with all the care of an industrious and faithful gardener, the fertile garden of the ecclesiastical year. She lived on its fruits, and distributed them to others; she strengthened herself and her friends with the flowers and herbs which she cultivated; or, rather, she herself was in this garden like a sensitive plant, a sunflower, or some wonderful plant in which, independent of her own will, were reproduced all the seasons of the year, all the hours of the day, and all the changes of the atmosphere.

At the end of the ecclesiastical year of 1823, she had for the last time a vision on the subject of making up the accounts of that year. The negligences of the Church militant and of her servants were shown to Anne Catherine, under various symbols; she saw how many graces had not been coöperated with, or been rejected to a greater or less extent, and how many had been entirely thrown away. It was made known to her how our Blessed Redeemer had deposited for each year in the garden of the Church a complete treasure of his merits, sufficient for every requirement, and for the expiation of every sin. The strictest account was to be given of all graces which had been neglected, wasted, or wholly rejected, and the Church-militant was punished for this negligence or infidelity of her servants by being oppressed by her enemies, or by temporal humiliations. Revelations of this description raised to excess her love for the Church, her mother. She passed days and nights in praying for her, in offering to God the merits of Christ, with continual groans, and in imploring mercy. Finally, on these occasions, she gathered together all her courage, and offered to take upon herself both the fault and the punishment, like a child presenting itself before the king’s throne, in order to suffer the punishment she had incurred. It was then said to her, ‘See how wretched and miserable thou art thyself; thou who art desirous to satisfy for the sins of others.’ And to her great terror she beheld herself as one mournful mass of infinite imperfection. But still her love remained undaunted, and burst forth in these words, ‘Yes, I am full of misery and sin; but I am thy spouse, O my Lord, and my Saviour! My faith in thee and in the redemption which thou hast brought us covers all my sins as with thy royal mantle. I will not leave thee until thou hast accepted my sacrifice, for the superabundant treasure of thy merits is closed to none of thy faithful servants.’ At length her prayer became wonderfully energetic, and to human ears there was like a dispute and combat with God, in which she was carried away and urged on by the violence of love. If her sacrifice was accepted, her energy seemed to abandon her, and she was left to the repugnance of human nature for suffering. When she had gone through this trial, by keeping her eyes fixed on her Redeemer in the Garden of Olives, she next had to endure indescribable sufferings of every description, bearing them all with wonderful patience and sweetness. We used to see her remain several days together, motionless and insensible, looking like a dying lamb. Did we ask her how she was, she would half open her eyes, and reply with a sweet smile, ‘My sufferings are most salutary.’

At the beginning of Advent, her sufferings were a little soothed by sweet visions of the preparations made by the Blessed Virgil, to leave her home, and then of her whole journey with St. Joseph to Bethlehem. She accompanied them each day to the humble inns where they rested for the night, or went on before them to prepare their lodgings. During this time she used to take old pieces of linen, and at night, while sleeping, make them into baby clothes and caps for the children of poor women, the times of whose confinements were near at hand. The next day she would be surprised to see all these things neatly arranged in her drawers. This happened to her every year about the same time, but this year she had more fatigue and less consolation. Thus, at the hour of our Saviour’s birth, when she was usually perfectly overwhelmed with joy, she could only crawl with the greatest difficulty to the crib where the Child Jesus was lying, and bring him no present but myrrh, no offering but her cross, beneath the weight of which she sank down half dying at his feet. It seemed as though she were for the last time making up her earthly accounts with God, and for the last time also offering herself in the place of a countless number of men who were spiritually and corporally afflicted. Even the little that is known of the manner in which she took upon herself the sufferings of others is almost incomprehensible. She very truly said: ‘This year the Child Jesus has only brought me a cross and instruments of suffering.’