for Our Time
For millions of Catholics, a much needed sunbeam of joy in a time of great darkness and scandals, rose in our hearts last July when word came down from Rome that the cause for beatification of the German mystic, Anne Catherine Emmerich, was on track again after laying somewhat dormant since 1972. Emmerich was born in a poor farm village on September 8, 1774, at Flamsche in the Diocese of Munster, Westphalia, Germany, and died at Dulmen, in February, 1824. She was declared Venerable at the end of the 19th century. The reason for this reopening of her Cause was a miracle which occurred in Germany in 1880, attributed to this ascetic Augustinian religious, and now officially recognized by the Holy See on July 7, 2003. This is what accounted for this latest phase in the life of this remarkable stigmatic-mystic so devoted to the Passion of Jesus.
Although disabled by many mysterious illnesses which she interpreted as a sharing in the redemptive sufferings of Christ for sinners (Col 1:24) Emmerich lived an astonishing apostolate of love, for a time as a nun, at other times helping and nursing those who were poor and sick (even sucking the putrifications from their wounds when there was otherwise no medicine), and writing about her personal experiences of her life in Christ crucified and risen from the dead.
The script of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," to be released in the United States this month, was inspired in part by the visions of this religious, many of them transcribed with the help of Clemens Brentano, the famous poet of her day, who became her disciple and contributing amanuensis. One fruit of their remarkable collaboration was The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ based on a series of Emmerich's many visions of the Passion of the Christ, appearing in 1833.
The Gibson movie and the renewal of her Cause in Rome has sparked widespread renewal of interest in the life of this prodigy. Gibson credits this writing and her life with his own late conversion to Christ, if not to His and her Church yet.
Three names especially have always moved me and countless others in our time to silence, awe, and contemplation: the recently canonized stigmatic Padre Pio, St. Theresa of Lisieux (proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI), and the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich. All three in their own unique ways were devoted to the Passion of Jesus and lived lives of radical love and utter abandonment to the divine will through light and darkness, joy and sorrows, and in giving themselves as Victim Souls, souls who begged to share in the redemptive cross of Jesus for the sick, the poor, the souls in purgatory, and for all sinners and Christians who were still undergoing the great contest in the Church Militant here on earth. This calling is something we all share in some degree. St. Peter urged the Christians of his day to:
“Think of what Christ suffered in this life, and then arm yourselves with the same resolution that he had: anyone who in this life has bodily suffering has broken from sin, because for the rest of his life on earth he is not ruled by human passions but only by the will of God. (1 Pet 4:1-3)
But in Victim Souls, such as in Pio, Therese and Emmerich, ( all three marked out for even more glory after the Second Vatican Council) there was a yearning to drink the cup of suffering to the very dregs. Drink that cup voluntarily, completely and totally out of the most radical love, not out of vanity, fanaticism or presumption. Here was the desire to be utterly “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:19, 20) so that the life now lived was “no longer ‘I’ but Christ” who “ lives and suffers in me” for the salvation of the world (1 Pet 4:1:13; 2 Cor 4:10; 2 Cor 1:5-7; 1 Jn 3:16;Mt 20:22; 2 Tim 4:6; Phil 1:18, 19, 30; 3:10, 11; ;2:17; 1 Pet 2:19, etc.)
And Catherine Anne Emmerich surely had her share of suffering as she took up her cross to follow the Crucified, always and only by grace, “through Him, with Him, and in Him," as we say in the liturgy.
"She bore the stigmata of the Lord's Passion and received extraordinary charisms that she used to console numerous visitors. From her bed, she carried out an important and fruitful apostolate," Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said when reading the decree of recognition of a miracle before John Paul II. (Zenit News Agency, July 29, 2003)
Besides the fact that her visions of the Passion had a supplementary influence on the interpretation of Mel Gibson (in addition to his primary sources, the four Gospel narratives of the Passion) there is another consoling factor which makes Emmerich a consoling sign of hope in our day. She, too, was born and lived in a time of darkness in the world and Church. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913:
Sister Emmerich lived during one of the saddest and least glorious periods of the Church's history, when revolution triumphed, impiety flourished, and several of the fairest provinces of its domain were overrun by infidels and cast into such ruinous condition that the Faith seemed about to be completely extinguished. Her mission in part seems to have been by her prayers and sufferings to aid in restoring Church discipline, especially in Westphalia, and at the same time to strengthen at least the little ones of the flock in their belief. Besides all this she saved many souls and recalled to the Christian world that the supernatural is around about it to a degree sometimes forgotten.
The convergence of all these factors, the Gibson conversion to Christ and his movie, the reopening of her cause toward beatification and canonization, and the fact that she lived in very dark times after the French Revolution with its spreading persecutions can only be seen as a ray of that Light and Hope to God’s elect in a time when, as in the days of before the flood, each man does only what is right in his own eyes and casts off the supernatural, as well as the natural and moral laws of God, and seems Hell-bent on plunging toward eternal ruin.
Yet it was for such sinners that Christ came to save, and it is for such that Christ sends his holy ones, the Saints, to call us back to repentance and penance (Joel 2:20) before it is too late. They, like Him, serve as a Sign of Contradiction in a time of transgressive arrogance, rebellions innumerable, and outright spiritual suicide.
Her Kenotic Character
While many have highlighted the supernatural aspects and deeds which make Sister Emmerich a true wonder-worker in the annals of the Church, it is her kenotic character, her self-emptying in Christ, which grips me even more than all that. Here was a woman who loved to the point of self-oblation. Not only was she mistreated by many of the nuns in the Augustinian convent which she entered at the age of 28 on account of her strict abidance by the rule of her order, as well as her ecstacies, but when an episcopal commission was set up to see what the stir was all about they did not treat her particularly well, though this is typical in the lives of the saints. The Church, understandably, must be to a degree skeptical in order to separate the real from the false and the demonic.
For most of her life she was very ill, bedridden; yet her love did not slumber. Her biographer says
Her body was, so to speak, the crucible in which the Physician of souls prepared remedies for his people, whilst her soul was keenly alive to terror, sadness (depression), anguish, dryness, desolations, to all those withering impressions which the passions of one man can cause another, or by which diabolical malice can assail its victims. She was burdened with fears of the dying, the corruption of morals, with the consequences of wrath, revenge gluttony, curiosity; with them seh struggled, over them she gained victory, the fruit of which she relinquished in favor of poor sinners”. (The Life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, by the very reverend carl E. Schmoger, C.S.S.R, ol 1. P.162 Maria regina Guild, 1968)
Her life was a Gethsemane and the Cross. For most of her life she would vomit up the most meager of food or drink, subsisting for long periods almost entirely on water and the Holy Eucharist. In the year 1812, until her death, she bore the incredibly painful wounds of Christ, the stigmata, with a cross wound over her heart and wounds upon her head from the crown of thorns. All of this was a humilation for her, but through Christ’s insistence she came to understand it as an atoning, in Christ, with and through Him, for the sins of her age. She offered her sufferings as the purest form of prayer. The asceticism of the Church as seen in this respect has never been self-centered, but, rather, in the words of St. Paul to the Colossians :
24 I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.
It is this suffering for others which distinguishes Christian from, say, Platonic or Stoic acseticism which is, at the end of the day, self-centered: the ancient philosopher often considered himself above the hoi polloi. Christian asceticism on the other hand is a participation in the redemptive Cross of Jesus Christ, the Cross of love and salvation, a “filling up” in one’s own flesh of that which “is still lacking” in Christ’s afflictions.
And what is this “lacking” which St. Paul tells of and which offends some Protestant fundamentalist sensibilities? Precisely the post-resurrectional sufferings of Christ in His Mystical Body, the Church, realized through time, through history!
By living “ in Him” as branches live in, and receive nourishment from, the Vine (Jn 15), Christians transcend time, having belonged to Him “before the foundation of the world” and who were in a very real sense “with Him” on the Cross as His Bride. The Christ and His Church are inseparable, indivisible. This is how Christians “take up” their “cross” and “follow” Him as Jesus says we must, even if it sounds to worldly ears preposterous, “foolishness” and a “stumbling block” (1 Cor 1:18f).
It was in this very sense that Our Lord could say to Saul on the road to Damascus, who was persecuting the Church of God, “Why do you persecute Me?” For indeed Jesus was the One Who was suffering in his brothers and sisters, sufferings in time, as they filled up “what was still lacking”—their redemptive sufferings--- in His cross: this is His redemptive completion, through time, to the very end of the world. This is our "share in the sufferings of Christ" (1 Pet 4:12-17)
This is why suffering is to be counted as a blessing (ibid.) for Christians when consciously “offered up” in Christ through His cross for the sins of the world. This is the mystery of His Mystical Body. And this alone explains the renewed light of the oblation of Anne Catherine Emmerich, which is working conversions to this very hour, and all the saints with her, and which makes her and them such a sign —such a reminder— for us in such seemingly dark times as this. It is never so dark that it can quench His Light (Jn1:3-5).
He, Jesus the Christ, true God and true man (Jn 1:1; 20:28) has gone before us. The “worst has happened in history,” the Cross. But His Empty Tomb is the surety of His victory over sin and death ---and ours in Him. For when sin abounds in the world, grace does “much more” abound, St. Paul exults to tell us. The lesson being that love, peace, joy and suffering in the saints are not opposites or contradictions, but are mystically one in the experience of Jesus the Christ, crucified and risen. This is indeed a great mystery, consolation, and grace. And this is the promise (more and more fulfilled) which is Anne Catherine Emmerich.