From the Meditations of

Anne Catherine Emmerich

London, Burns and Lambert

[1862]

_________________________________________________________________

PREFACE TO THE FRENCH TRANSLATION.

BY THE ABBÃ DE CAZALÃS.

THE writer of this Preface was travelling in Germany, when he chanced to
meet with a book, entitled, The History of the Passion of our Lord Jesus
Christ, from, the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, which appeared to
him both interesting and edifying. Its style was unpretending, its ideas
simple, its tone unassuming, its sentiments unexaggerated, and its every
sentence expressive of the most complete and entire submission to the
Church. Yet, at the same time, it would have been difficult anywhere to meet
with a more touching and life-like paraphrase of the Gospel narrative. He
thought that a book possessing such qualities deserved to be known on this
side the Rhine, and that there could be no reason why it should not be
valued for its own sake, independent of the somewhat singular source whence
it emanated.

Still, the translator has by no means disguised to himself that this work is
written, in the first place, for Christians; that is to say, for men who
have the right to be very diffident in giving credence to particulars
concerning facts which are articles of faith; and although he is aware that
St. Bonaventure and many others, in their paraphrases of the Gospel history,
have mixed up traditional details with those given in the sacred text, even
these examples have not wholly reassured him. St. Bonaventure professed only
to give a paraphrase, whereas these revelations appear to be something more.
It is certain that the holy maiden herself gave them no higher title than
that of dreams, and that the transcriber of her narratives treats as
blasphemous the idea of regarding them in any degree as equivalent to a
fifth Gospel; still it is evident that the confessors who exhorted Sister
Emmerich to relate what she saw, the celebrated poet who passed four years
near her couch, eagerly transcribing all he heard her say, and the German
Bishops, who encouraged the publication of his book, considered it as
something more than a paraphrase. Some explanations are needful on this
head.

The writings of many Saints introduce us into a now, and, if I may be
allowed the expression, a miraculous world. In all ages there have been
revelations about the past, the present, the future, and even concerning
things absolutely inaccessible to the human intellect. In the present day
men are inclined to regard these revelations as simple hallucinations, or as
caused by a sickly condition of body.

The Church, according to the testimony of her most approved writers,
recognises three descriptions of ecstasy; of which the first is simply
natural, and entirely brought about by certain physical tendencies and a
highly imaginative mind; the second divine or angelic, arising from
intercourse held with the supernatural world; and the third produced by
infernal agency. [1] Lest we should here write a book instead of a preface,
we will not enter into any development of this doctrine, which appears to us
highly philosophical, and without which no satisfactory explanation can be
given on the subject of the soul of man and its various states.

The Church directs certain means to be employed to ascertain by what spirit
these ecstasies are produced, according to the maxim of St. John:˜Try the
spirits, if they be of God.™ When circumstances or events claiming to be
supernatural have been properly examined according to certain rules, the
Church has in all ages made a selection from them

Many persons who have been habitually in a state of ecstasy have been
canonised, and their books approved. But this approbation has seldom
amounted to more than a declaration that these books contained nothing
contrary to faith, and that they were likely to promote a spirit of piety
among the faithful. For the Church is only founded on the word of Christ and
on the revelations made to the Apostles. Whatever may since have been
revealed to certain saints possesses purely a relative value, the reality of
which may even be disputedit being one of the admirable characteristics of
the Church, that, though inflexibly one in dogma, she allows entire liberty
to the human mind in all besides. Thus, we may believe private revelations,
above all, when those persons to whom they were made have been raised by the
Church to the rank of Saints publicly honoured, invoked, and venerated; but,
even in these cases, we may, without ceasing to be perfectly orthodox,
dispute their authenticity and divine origin. It is the place of reason to
dispute and to select as it sees best.

With regard to the rule for discerning between the good and the evil spirit,
it is no other, according to all theologians, than that of the Gospel. A
fructibus eorum, cognoscetis eos. By their fruits you shall know them. It
must be examined in the first place whether the person who professes to have
revelations mistrusts what passes within himself; whether he would prefer a
more common path; whether far from boasting of the extraordinary graces
which he receives, he seeks to hide them, and only makes them known through
obedience; and, finally, whether he is continually advancing in humility,
mortification, and charity. Next, the revelations themselves must be very
closely examined into; it must be seen whether there is anything in them
contrary to faith; whether they are conformable to Scripture and Apostolical
tradition; and whether they are related in a headstrong spirit, or in a
spirit of entire submission to the Church.

Whoever reads the life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, and her book, will be
satisfied that no fault can be found in any of these respects either with
herself or with her revelations. Her book resembles in many points the
writings of a great number of saints, and her life also bears the most
striking similitude to theirs. To be convinced of this fact, we need but
study the writings or what is related of Saints Francis of Assissium,
Bernard, Bridget, Hildegarde, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Sienna,
Ignatius, John of the Cross, Teresa, and an immense number of other holy
persons who are less known.. So much being conceded, it is clear that in
considering Sister Emmerich to have been inspired by God™s Holy Spirit, we
are not ascribing more merit to her book than is allowed by the Church to
all those of the same class. They are all edifying, and may serve to promote
piety, which is their sole object. We must not exaggerate their importance
by holding as an absolute fact that they proceed from divine inspiration, a
favour so great that its existence in any particular case should not be
credited save with the utmost circumspection.

With regard, however, to our present publication, it may be urged that,
considering the superior talents of the transcriber of Sister Emmerich™s
narrations, the language and expressions which he has made use of may not
always have been identical with those which she employed. We have no
hesitation whatever in allowing the force of this argument. Most fully do we
believe in the entire sincerity of M. Clèment Brentano, because we both
know and love him, and, besides, his exemplary piety and the retired life
which he leads, secluded from a world in which it would depend but on
himself to hold the highest place, are guarantees amply sufficient to
satisfy any impartial mind of his sincerity. A poem such as he might
publish, if he only pleased, would cause him to be ranked at once among the
most eminent of the German poets, whereas the office which he has taken upon
himself of secretary to a poor visionary has brought him nothing but
contemptuous raillery. Nevertheless, we have no intention to assert that in
giving the conversations and discourses of Sister Emmerich that order and
coherency in which they were greatly wanting, and writing them down in his
own way, he may not unwittingly have arranged, explained, and embellished
them. But this would not have the effect of destroying the originality of
the recital, or impugning either the sincerity of the nun, or that of the
writer.

The translator professes to be unable to understand how any man can write
for mere writing™s sake, and without considering the probable effects which
his work will produce. This book, such as it is, appears to him to be at
once unusually edifying, and highly poetical. It is perfectly clear that it
has, properly speaking, no literary pretensions whatever. Neither the
uneducated maiden whose visions are here related, nor the excellent
Christian writer who has published them in so entire a spirit of literary
disinterestedness, ever had the remotest idea of such a thing. And yet there
are not, in our opinion, many highly worked-up compositions calculated to
produce an effect in any degree comparable to that which will be brought
about by the perusal of this unpretending little work. It is our hope that
it will make a strong impression even upon worldlings, and that in many
hearts it will prepare the way for better ideas,perhaps even for a lasting
change of life.

In the next place, we are not sorry to call public attention in some degree
to all that class of phenomena which preceded the foundation of the Church,
which has since been perpetuated uninterruptedly, and which too many
Christians are disposed to reject altogether, either through ignorance and
want of reflection, or purely through human respect. This is a field which
has hitherto been but little explored historically, psychologically, and
physiologically; and it would be well if reflecting minds were to bestow
upon it a careful and attentive investigation. To our Christian readers we
must remark that this work has received the approval of ecclesiastical
authorities. It has been prepared for the press under the superintendence of
the two late Bishops of Ratisbonne, Sailer and Wittman. These names are but
little known in France; but in Germany they are identical with learning,
piety, ardent charity, and a life wholly devoted to the maintenance and
propagation of the Catholic faith. Many French priests have given their
opinion that the translation of a book of this character could not but tend
to nourish piety, without, however, countenancing that weakness of spirit
which is disposed to lend more importance in some respects to private than
to general revelations, and consequently to substitute matters which we are
simply permitted to believe, in the place of those which are of faith.

We feel convinced that no one will take offence at certain details given on
the subject of the outrages which were suffered by our divine Lord during
the course of his passion. Our readers will remember the words of the
psalmist:˜I am a worm and no man; the reproach of men, and the outcast of
the people;™ and those of the apostle:˜Tempted in all things like as we
are, without sin.™ Did we stand in need of a precedent, we should request
our readers to remember how plainly and crudely Bossuet describes the same
scenes in the most eloquent of his four sermons on the Passion of our Lord.
On the other hand, there have been so many grand platonic or rhetorical
sentences in the books published of late years, concerning that abstract
entity, on which the writers have been pleased to bestow the Christian title
of the Word, or Logos, that it may be eminently useful to show the Man-God,
the Word made flesh, in all the reality of his life on earth, of his
humiliation, and of his sufferings. It must be evident that the cause of
truth, and still more that of edification, will not be the losers.
_________________________________________________________________

[1] See, on this head, the work of Cardinal Bona, De Descretione Spirituum.
_________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION.

THE following meditations will probably rank high among many similar works
which the contemplative love of Jesus has produced; but it is our duty, here
plainly to affirm that they have no pretensions whatever to be regarded as
history. They are but intended to take one of the lowest places among those
numerous representations of the Passion which have been given us by pious
writers and artists, and to be considered at the very utmost as the Lenten
meditations of a devout nun, related, in all simplicity, and written down in
the plainest and most literal language, from her own dictation. To these
meditations, she herself never attached more than a mere human value, and
never related them except through obedience, and upon the repeated commands
of the directors of her conscience.

The writer of the following pages was introduced to this holy religious by
Count Leopold de Stolberg. [2] Dean Bernard Overberg, her director
extraordinary, and Bishop Michael Sailer, [3] who had often been her
counsellor and consoler, urged her to relate to us in detail all that she
experienced; and the latter, who survived her, took the deepest interest in
the arrangement and publication of the notes taken down from her dictation.
These illustrious and holy men, now dead, and whose memory is blessed, were
in continual communion of prayer with Anne Catherine, whom they loved and
respected, on account of the singular graces with which God had favoured
her. The editor of this book received equal encouragement, and met with no
less sympathy in his labours, from the late Bishop of Ratisbonne, Mgr.
Wittman. [4] This holy Bishop, who was so deeply versed in the ways of
Divine grace, and so well acquainted with its effects on certain souls, both
from his private investigations of the subject, and his own experience, took
the most lively interest in all that concerned Anne Catherine, and on
hearing of the work in which the editor of this book was engaged, he
strongly exhorted him to publish it.˜These things have not been
communicated to you for nothing,™ would he often say;˜God has his views in
all. Publish something at least of what you know, for you will thereby
benefit many souls.™ He at the same time brought forward various instances
from his own experience and that of others, showing the benefit which had
been derived from the study of works of a similar character. He delighted in
calling such privileged souls as Anne Catherine the marrow of the bones of
the Church, according to the expression of St. John Chrysostom, medulla enim
hujus mundi sunt, and he encouraged the publication of their lives and
writings as far as lay in. his power.

The editor of this book being taken by a kind friend to the dying bed of the
holy Bishop, had no reason whatever to expect to be recognised, as he had
only once in his life conversed with him for a few minutes; nevertheless the
dying saint knew him again, and after a few most kind words blessed and
exhorted him to continue his work for the glory of God.

Encouraged by the approbation of such men, we therefore yield to the wishes
of many virtuous friends in publishing the Meditations on the Passion, of
this humble religious, to whom God granted the favour of being at times
simple, ingenuous, and ignorant as a child, while at others she was
clear-sighted, sensible, possessed of a deep insight into the most
mysterious and hidden things, and consumed with burning and heroic zeal, but
ever forgetful of self, deriving her whole strength from Jesus alone, and
steadfast in the most perfect humility and entire self-abnegation.

We give our readers a slight sketch of her life, intending at some future
they to publish her biography more in full.
_________________________________________________________________

[2] The Count de Stolberg is one of the most eminent converts whom the
Catholic Church has made from Protestantism. He died in 1819.

[3] The Bishop of Ratisbonne, one of the most celebrated defenders of the
faith in Germany.

[4] Mgr. Wittman was the worthy successor of Sailer, and a man of eminent
sanctity, whose memory is held in veneration by all the Catholics of the
south of Germany.
_________________________________________________________________

LIFE

OF

ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH,

RELIGIOUS OF THE ORDER OF ST. AUGUSTINE, AT THE CONVENT OF AGNETENBERG,
DULMEN, WESTPHALIA.

ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH was born at Flamske, a village situated about a mile
and a half from Coesfeld, in the bishopric of Munster, on the 8th of
September 1774, and was baptised in the church of St. James at Coesfeld. Her
parents, Bernard Emmerich and Anne Hiller, were poor peasants, but
distinguished for their piety and virtue.

The childhood of Anne Catherine bore a striking resemblance to that of the
Venerable Anne Garzias de St. Barthelemi, of Dominica del Paradiso, and of
several other holy persons born in the same rank of life as herself. Her
angel-guardian used to appear to her as a child; and when she was taking
care of sheep in the fields, the Good Shepherd himself, under the form of a
young shepherd, would frequently come to her assistance. From childhood she
was accustomed to have divine knowledge imparted to her in visions of all
kinds, and was often favoured by visits from the Mother of God and Queen of
Heaven, who, under the form of a sweet, lovely, and majestic lady, would
bring the Divine Child to be, as it were, her companion, and would assure
her that she loved and would ever protect her. Many of the saints would also
appear to her, and receive from her hands the garlands of flowers which she
had prepared in honour of their festivals. All these favours and visions
surprised the child less than if an earthly princess and the lords and
ladies of her court had come to visit her. Nor was she, later in life, more
surprised at these celestial visits, for her innocence caused her to feel
far more at her ease with our Divine Lord, his Blessed Mother and the
Saints, than she could ever be with even the most kind and amiable of her
earthly companions. The names of Father, Mother, Brother, and Spouse,
appeared to her expressive of the real connections subsisting between God
and man, since the Eternal Word had been pleased to be born of a woman, and
so to become our Brother, and these sacred titles were not mere words in her
mouth.

While yet a child, she used to speak with innocent candour and simplicity of
all that she saw, and her listeners would be filled with admiration at the
histories she would relate from Holy Writ; but their questions and remarks
having sometimes disturbed her peace of mind, she determined to keep silence
on such subjects for the future. In her innocence of heart, she thought that
it was not right to talk of things of this sort, that other persons never
did so, and that her speech should be only Yea, yea, and Nay, nay, or Praise
be to Jesus Christ. The visions with which she was favoured were so like
realities, and appeared to her so sweet and delightful, that she supposed
all Christian children were favoured with the same; and she concluded that
those who never talked on such subjects were only more discreet and modest
than herself, so she resolved to keep silence also, to be like them.

Almost from her cradle she possessed the gift of distinguishing what was
good or evil, holy or profane, blessed or accursed, in material as well as
in spiritual things, thus resembling St. Sibyllina of Pavia, Ida of Louvain,
Ursula Benincasa, and some other holy souls. In her earliest childhood she
used to bring out of the fields useful herbs, which no one had ever before
discovered to be good for anything, and plant them near her father™s
cottage, or in some spot where she was accustomed to work and play; while on
the other hand she would root up all poisonous plants, and particularly
those ever used for superstitious practices or in dealings with the devil.
Were she by chance in a place where some great crime had been committed, she
would hastily run away, or begin to pray and do penance. She used also to
perceive by intuition when she was in a consecrated spot, return thanks to
God, and be filled with a sweet feeling of peace. When a priest passed by
with the Blessed Sacrament, even at a great distance from her home or from
the place where she was taking care of her flock, she would feel a strong
attraction in the direction whence he was coming, run to meet him, and be
kneeling in the road, adoring the Blessed Sacrament, long before he could
reach the spot.

She knew when any object was consecrated, and experienced a feeling of
disgust and repugnance when in the neighbourhood of old pagan cemeteries,
whereas she was attracted to the sacred remains of the saints as steel by
the magnet. When relies were shown to her, she knew what saints they had
belonged to, and could give not only accounts of the minutest and hitherto
unknown particulars of their lives, but also histories of the relies
themselves, and of the places where they had been preserved. During her
whole life she had continual intercourse with the souls in purgatory; and
all her actions and prayers were offered for the relief of their sufferings.
She was frequently called upon to assist them, and even reminded in some
miraculous manner, if she chanced to forget them. Often, while yet very
young, she used to be awakened out of her sleep by bands of suffering souls,
and to follow them on cold winter™s nights with bare feet, the whole length
of the Way of the Cross to Coesfeld, though the ground was covered with
snow.

From her infancy to the day of her death she was indefatigable in relieving
the sick, and in dressing and curing wounds and ulcers, and she was
accustomed to give to the poor every farthing she possessed. So tender was
her conscience, that the slightest sin she fell into caused her such pain as
to make her ill, and absolution then always restored her immediately to
health.

The extraordinary nature of the favours bestowed on her by Almighty God was
no hindrance in the way of her devoting herself to hard labour, like any
other peasant-girl; and we may also be allowed to observe that a certain
degree of the spirit of prophecy is not unusually to be found among her
country men and women. She was taught in the school of suffering and
mortification, and there learned lessons of perfection. She allowed herself
no more sleep or food than was absolutely necessary; passed whole hours in
prayer every night; and in winter often knelt out of doors on the snow. She
slept on the ground on planks arranged in the form of a cross. Her food and
drink consisted of what was rejected by others; she always kept the best
parts even of that for the poor and sick, and when she did not know of any
one to give them to, she offered them to God in a spirit of child-like
faith, begging him to give them to some person who was more in need than
herself. When there was anything to be seen or heard which had no reference
to God or religion, she found some excuse for avoiding the spot to which
others were hastening, or, if there, closed her eyes and ears. She was
accustomed to say that useless actions were sinful, and that when we denied
our bodily senses any gratification of this kind, we were amply repaid by
the progress which we made in the interior life, in the same manner as
pruning renders vines and other fruit-trees more productive. From her early
youth, and wherever she went, she had frequent symbolical visions, which
showed her in parables, as it were, the object of her existence, the means
of attaining it, and her future sufferings, together with the dangers and
conflicts which she would have to go through.

She was in her sixteenth year, when one day, whilst at work in the fields
with her parents and sisters, she heard the bell ringing at the Convent of
the Sisters of the Annunciation, at Coesfeld. This sound so inflamed her
secret desire to become a nun, and had so great an effect upon her, that she
fainted away, and remained ill and weak for a long time after. When in her
eighteenth year she was apprenticed at Coesfeld to a dressmaker, with whom
she passed two years, and then returned to her parents. She asked to be
received at the Convents of the Augustinians at Borken, of the Trappists at
Darfeld, and of the Poor Clares at Munster; but her poverty, and that of
these convents, always presented an insuperable obstacle to her being
received. At the age of twenty, having saved twenty thalers (about 3l.
English), which she had earned by her sewing, she went with this little
suma perfect fortune for a poor peasant-girlto a pious organist of
Coesfeld, whose daughter she had known when she first lived in the town. Her
hope was that, by learning to play on the organ; she might succeed in
obtaining admittance into a convent. But her irresistible desire to serve
the poor and give them everything she possessed left her no time to learn
music, and before long she had so completely stripped herself of everything,
that her good mother was obliged to bring her bread, milk, and eggs, for her
own wants and those of the poor, with whom she shared everything. Then her
mother said:˜Your desire to leave your father and myself, and enter a
convent, gives us much pain; but you are still my beloved child, and when I
look at your vacant seat at home, and reflect that you have given away all
your savings, so as to be now in want, my heart is filled with sorrow, and I
have now brought you enough to keep you for some time.™ Anne Catherine
replied:˜Yes, dear mother, it is true that I have nothing at all left,
because it was the holy will of God that others should be assisted by me;
and since I have given all to him, he will now take care of me, and bestow
his divine assistance upon us all.™ She remained some years at Coesfeld,
employed in labour, good works, and prayer, being always guided by the same
inward inspirations. She was docile and submissive as a child in the hands
of her guardian-angel.

Although in this brief sketch of her life we are obliged to omit many
interesting circumstances, there is one which we must not pass over in
silence. When about twenty-four years of age, she received a favour from our
Lord, which has been granted to many persons devoted in an especial manner
to meditation on his painful Passion; namely, to experience the actual and
visible sufferings of his sacred Head, when crowned with thorns. The
following is the account she herself has given of the circumstances under
which so mysterious a favour was bestowed upon her:˜About four years
previous to my admittance into the convent, consequently in 1798, it
happened that I was in the Jesuits™ Church at Coesfeld, at about twelve
o™clock in the day, kneeling before a crucifix and absorbed in meditation,
when all on a sudden I felt a strong but pleasant heat in my head, and I saw
my Divine Spouse, under the form of a young man clothed with light, come
towards me from the altar, where the Blessed Sacrament was preserved in the
tabernacle. In his left hand he held a crown of flowers, in his right hand a
crown of thorns, and he bade me choose which I would have. I chose the crown
of thorns; he placed it on my head, and I pressed it down with both hands.
Then he disappeared, and I returned to myself, feeling, however, violent
pain around my head. I was obliged to leave the church, which was going to
be closed. One of my companions was kneeling by my side, and as I thought
she might have seen what happened to me, I asked her when we got home
whether there was not a wound on my forehead, and spoke to her in general
terms of my vision, and of the violent pain which had followed it. She could
see nothing outwardly, but was not astonished at what I told her, because
she knew that I was sometimes in an extraordinary state, without her being
able to understand the cause. The next day my forehead and temples were very
much swelled, and I suffered terribly. This pain and swelling often
returned, and sometimes lasted whole days and nights. I did not remark that
there was blood on my head until my companions told me I had better put on a
clean cap, because mine was covered with red spots. I let them think
whatever they liked about it, only taking care to arrange my head-dress so
as to hide the blood which flowed from my head, and I continued to observe
the same precaution even after I entered the convent, where only one person
perceived the blood, and she never betrayed my secret.™

Several other contemplative persons, especially devoted to the passion of
our Lord, have been admitted to the privilege of suffering the torture
inflicted by the crown of thorns, after having seen a vision in which the
two crowns were offered them to choose between, for instance, among others,
St. Catherine of Sienna, and Pasithea of Crogis, a Poor Clare of the same
town, who died in 1617.

The writer of these pages may here be allowed to remark that he himself has,
in full daylight, several times seen blood flow down the forehead and face,
and even beyond the linen wrapped round the neck of Anne Catherine. Her
desire to embrace a religious life was at length gratified. The parents of a
young person whom the Augustinian nuns of Dulmen wished to receive into
their order, declared that they would not give their consent except on
condition that Anne Catherine was taken at the same time. The nuns yielded
their assent, though somewhat reluctantly, on account of their extreme
poverty; and on the 13th November 1802, one week before the feast of the
Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, Anne Catherine entered on her novitiate.
At the present day vocations are not so severely tested as formerly; but in
her case, Providence imposed special trials, for which, rigorous as they
were, she felt she never could be too grateful. Sufferings or privations,
which a soul, either alone or in union with others, imposes upon herself,
for God™s greater glory, are easy to bear; but there is one cross more
nearly resembling the cross of Christ than any other, and that is, lovingly
and patiently to submit to unjust punishments, rebuffs, or accusations. It
was the will of God that during her year™s novitiate she should,
independently of the will of any creature, be tried as severely as the most
strict mistress of novices could have clone before any mitigations had been
allowed in the rules. She learned to regard her companions as instruments in
the hands of God for her sanctification; and at a later period of her life
many other things appeared to her in the same light. But as it was necessary
that her fervent soul should be constantly tried in the school of the Cross,
God was pleased that she should remain in it all her life.

In many ways her position in the convent was excessively painful. Not one of
her companions, nor even any-priest or doctor, could understand her case.
She had learned, when living among poor peasants, to hide the wonderful
gifts which God had bestowed on her; but the case was altered now that she
was in familiar intercourse with a large number of nuns, who, though
certainly good and pious, were filled with ever-increasing feelings of
curiosity, and even of spiritual jealousy in her regard. Then, the
contracted ideas of the community, and the complete ignorance of the nuns
concerning all those exterior phenomena by which the interior life manifests
itself, gave her much to endure, the more so, as these phenomena displayed
themselves in the most unusual and astonishing manner. She heard everything
that was said against her, even when the speakers were at one end of the
convent and she at the other, and her heart was most deeply wounded as if by
poisoned arrows. Yet she bore all patiently and lovingly without showing
that she knew what was said of her. More than once charity impelled her to
cast herself at the feet of some nun who was particularly prejudiced against
her, and ask her pardon with tears. Then, she was suspected of listening at
the doors, for the private feelings of dislike entertained against her
became known, no one knew how, and the nuns felt uncomfortable and uneasy,
in spite of themselves, when in her company.

Whenever the rule (the minutest point of which was Sacred in her eyes) was
neglected in the slightest degree, she beheld in spirit each infringement,
and at times was inspired to fly to the spot where the rule was being broken
by some infringement of the vow of poverty, or disregard of the hours of
silence, and she would then repeat suitable passages from the rule, without
having ever learned them. She thus became an object of aversion to all those
religious who broke the rule; and her sudden appearances among them had
almost the effect of apparitions. God had bestowed upon her the gift of
tears to so great an extent, that she often passed whole hours in the church
weeping over the sins and ingratitude of men, the sufferings of the Church,
the imperfections of the community, and her own faults. But these tears of
sublime sorrow could be understood by none but God, before whom she shed
them, and men attributed them to mere caprice, a spirit of discontent, or
some other similar cause. Her confessor had enjoined that she should receive
the holy communion more frequently than the other nuns, because, so ardently
did she hunger after the bread of angels, that she had been more than once
near dying. These heavenly sentiments awakened feelings of jealousy in her
sisters, who sometimes even accused her of hypocrisy.

The favour which had been shown her in her admittance into the convent, in
spite of her poverty, was also made a subject of reproach. The thought of
being thus an occasion of sin to others was most painful to her, and she
continually besought God to permit her to bear herself the penalty of this
want of charity in her regard. About Christmas, of the year 1802, she had a
very severe illness, which began by a violent pain about her heart.

This pain did not leave her even when she was cured, and she bore it in
silence until the year 1812, when the mark of a cross was imprinted
exteriorly in the same place, as we shall relate further on. Her weakness
and delicate health caused her to be looked upon more as burdensome, than
useful to the community; and this, of course, told against her in all ways,
yet she was never weary of working and serving the others, nor was she ever
so happy as at this period of her lifespent in privations and sufferings of
every description.

On the 13th of November 1803, at the age of twenty-nine, she pronounced her
solemn vows, and became the spouse of Jesus Christ, in the Convent of
Agnetenberg, at Dulmen.˜When I had pronounced my vows,™ she says,˜my
relations were again extremely kind to me. My father and my eldest brother
brought me two pieces of cloth. My father, a good, but stem man, and who had
been much averse to my entering the convent, had told me, when we parted,
that he would willingly pay for my burial, but that he would give nothing
for the convent, and he kept his word, for this piece of cloth was the
winding-sheet used for my spiritual burial in the convent.™

˜I was not thinking of myself,™ she says again,˜I was thinking of nothing
but our Lord and my holy vows. My companions could not understand me; nor
could I explain my state to them. God concealed from them many of the
favours which he bestowed upon me, otherwise they would have had very false
ideas concerning me. Notwithstanding all my trials and sufferings, I was
never more rich interiorly, and my soul was perfectly flooded with
happiness. My cell only contained one chair without a seat, and another
without a back; yet in my eyes, it was magnificently furnished, and when
there I often thought myself in Heaven. Frequently during the night,
impelled by love and by the mercy of God, I poured forth the feelings of my
soul by conversing with him in loving and familiar language, as I had always
done from my childhood, and then those who were watching me would accuse me
of irreverence and disrespect towards God. Once, I happened to say that it
appeared to me that I should be guilty of greater disrespect did I receive
the Body of our Lord without having conversed familiarly with him, and I was
severely reprimanded. Amid all these trials, I yet lived in peace with God
and with all his creatures. When I was working in the garden, the birds
would come and rest on my head and shoulders, and we would together sing the
praises of God. I always beheld my angel-guardian at my side, and although
the devil used frequently to assault and terrify me in various ways, he was
never permitted to do me much harm.˜My desire for the Blessed Sacrament was
so irresistible, that often at night I left my cell and went to the church,
if it was open; but if not, I remained at the door or by the walls, even in
winter, kneeling or prostrate, with my arms extended in ecstasy. The convent
chaplain, who was so charitable as to come early to give me the Holy
Communion, used to find me in this state, but as soon as he was come and had
opened, the church, I always recovered, and hastened to the holy table,
there to receive my Lord and my God. When I was sacristan, I used all on a
sudden to feel myself ravished in spirit, and ascend to the highest parts of
the church, on to cornices, projecting parts of the building, and mouldings,
where it seemed impossible for any being to get by human means. Then I
cleaned and arranged everything, and it appeared to me that I was surrounded
by blessed spirits, who transported me about and held me up in their hands.
Their presence did not cause me the least uneasiness, for I had been
accustomed to it from my childhood, and I used to have the most sweet and
familiar intercourse with them. It was only when I was in the company of
certain men that I was really alone; and so great was then my feeling of
loneliness that I could not help crying like a child that has strayed from
home.™

We now proceed to her illnesses, omitting any description of some other
remarkable phenomena of her ecstatic life, only recommending the reader to
compare the accounts we have already given with what is related of St. Mary
Magdalen of Pazzi.

Anne Catherine had always been weak and delicate, and yet had been, from her
earliest childhood, in the habit of practising many mortifications, of
fasting and of passing the night in watching and prayer in the open air. She
had been accustomed to continual hard labour in the fields, at all seasons
of the year, and her strength was also necessarily much tried by the
exhausting and supernatural states through which she so frequently passed.
At the convent she continued to work in the garden and in the house, whilst
her spiritual labours and sufferings were ever an the increase, so that it
is by no means surprising that she was frequently ill; but her illnesses
arose from yet another cause. We have learned, from careful observations
made every day for the space of four years, and also from what she herself
was unwillingly forced to admit, that during the whole course of her life,
and especially during that part of it which she spent at the convent, when
she enjoyed the highest spiritual favours, a great portion of her illnesses
and sufferings came from taking upon herself the sufferings of others.
Sometimes she asked for the illness of a person who did not bear it
patiently, and relieved him of the whole or of a part of his sufferings, by
taking them upon herself; sometimes, wishing to expiate a sin or put an end
to some suffering, she gave herself up into the hands of God, and be,
accepting her sacrifice, permitted her thus, in union with the merits of his
passion, to expiate the sin by suffering some illness corresponding to it.
She had consequently to bear, not only her own maladies, but those also of
othersto suffer in expiation of the sins of her brethren, and of the faults
and negligences of certain portions of the Christian communityand, finally,
to endure many and various sufferings in satisfaction for the souls of
purgatory. All these sufferings appeared like real illnesses, which took the
most opposite and variable forms, and she was placed entirely under the care
of the doctor, who endeavoured by earthly remedies to cure illnesses which
in reality were the very sources of her life. She said on this
subject˜Repose in suffering has always appeared to me the most desirable
condition possible. The angels themselves would envy us, were envy not an
imperfection. But for sufferings to be really meritorious we must patiently
and gratefully accept unsuitable remedies and comforts, and all other
additional trials. I did not myself fully understand my state, nor know what
it was to lead to. In my soul I accepted my different sufferings, but in my
body it was my duty to strive against them. I had given myself wholly and
entirely to my Heavenly Spouse, and his holy will was being accomplished in
me; but I was living on earth, where I was not to rebel against earthly
wisdom and earthly prescriptions. Even had I fully comprehended my state,
and had both time and power to explain it, there was no one near who would
have been able to understand me. A doctor would simply have concluded that I
was entirely mad, and would have increased his expensive and painful
remedies tenfold. I have suffered much in this way during the whole of my
life, and particularly when I was at the convent, from having unsuitable
remedies administered to me. Often, when my doctors and nurses had reduced
me to the last agony, and that I was near death, God took pity on me, and
sent me some supernatural assistance, which effected an entire cure.™

Four years before the suppression of her convent she went to Flamske for two
days to visit her parents. Whilst there she went once to kneel and pray for
some hours before the miraculous Cross of the Church of St. Lambert, at
Coesfeld. She besought the Almighty to bestow the gifts of peace and unity
upon her convent, offered him the Passion of Jesus Christ for that
intention, and implored him to allow her to feel a portion of the sufferings
which were endured by her Divine Spouse on the Cross. From the time that she
made this prayer her hands and feet became burning and painful, and she
suffered constantly from fever, which she believed was the cause of the pain
in her hands and feet, for she did not dare to think that her prayer had
been granted. Often she was unable to walk, and the pain in her hands
prevented her from working as usual in the garden. On the 3d December 1811,
the convent was suppressed, [5] and the church closed. The nuns dispersed in
all directions, but Anne Catherine remained, poor and ill. A kindhearted
servant belonging to the monastery attended upon her out of charity, and an
aged emigrant priest, who said Mass in the convent, remained also with her.
These three individuals, being the poorest of the Community, did not leave
the convent until the spring of 1812. She was still very unwell, and could
not be moved without great difficulty. The priest lodged with a poor widow
who lived in the neighbourhood, and Anne Catherine had in the same house a
wretched little room on the ground-floor, which looked on the street. There
she lived, in poverty and sickness, until the autumn of 1813. Her ecstasies
in prayer, and her spiritual intercourse with the invisible world, became
more and more frequent. She was about to be called to a state with which she
was herself but imperfectly acquainted, and in order to enter which she did
nothing but submissively abandon herself to the will of God. Our Lord was
pleased about this time to imprint upon her virginal body the stigmas of his
cross and of his crucifixion, which were to the Jews a stumbling-block, and
to the Gentiles folly, and to many persons who call themselves Christians,
both the one and the other. From her very earliest childhood she had
besought our Lord to impress the marks of his cross deeply upon her heart,
that so she might never forget his infinite love for men; but she had never
thought of receiving any outward marks. Rejected by the world, she prayed
more fervently than ever for this end. On the 28th of August, the feast of
St. Augustine, the patron of her order, as she was making this prayer in
bed, ravished in ecstasy and her arms stretched forth, she beheld a young
man approach her surrounded with light. It was under this form that her
Divine Spouse usually appeared to her, and he now made upon her body with
his right hand the mark of a common cross. From this time there was a mark
like a cross upon her bosom, consisting of two bands crossed, about three
inches, long and one wide. Later the skin often rose in blisters on this
place, as if from a burn, and when these blisters burst a burning colourless
liquid issued from them, sometimes in such quantities as to soak through
several sheets. She was long without perceiving what the case really was,
and only thought that she was in a strong perspiration. The particular
meaning of this mark has never been known.

Some weeks later, when making the same prayer, she fell into an ecstasy, and
beheld the same apparition, which presented her with a little cross of the
shape described in her accounts of the Passion. She eagerly received and
fervently pressed it to her bosom, and then returned it. She said that this
cross was as soft and white as wax, but she was not at first aware that it
had made an external mark upon her bosom. A short time after, having gone
with her landlady™s little girl to visit an old hermitage near Dulmen, she
all on a sudden fell into an ecstasy, fainted away, and on her recovery was
taken home by a poor peasant woman. The sharp pain which she felt in her
chest continued to increase, and she saw that there was what looked like a
cross, about three inches in length, pressed tightly upon her breast-bone,
and looking red through the skin. As she had spoken about her vision to a
nun with whom she was intimate, her extraordinary state began to be a good
deal talked of. On All Souls™ day, 1812, she went out for the last time, and
with much difficulty succeeded in reaching the church. From that time till
the end of the year she seemed to be dying, and received the last
Sacraments. At Christmas a smaller cross appeared on the top of that upon
her chest. It was the same shape as the larger one, so that the two together
formed a double forked cross. Blood flowed from this cross every Wednesday,
so as to leave the impression of its shape on paper laid over it. After a
time this happened on Fridays instead. In 1814 this flow of blood took place
less frequently, but the cross became as red as fire every Friday. At a
later period of her life more blood flowed from this cross, especially every
Good Friday; but no attention was paid to it. On the 30th March 1821, the
writer of these pages saw this cross of a deep red colour, and bleeding all
over. In its usual state it was colourless, and its position only marked by
slight cracks in the skin. . . . Other Ecstaticas have received similar
marks of the Cross; among others, Catherine of Raconis, Marina de l™Escobar,
Emilia Bichieri, S. Juliani Falconieri, &c.

She received the stigmas on the last days of the year 1812. On the 29th
December, about three o™clock in the afternoon, she was lying on her bed in
her little room, extremely ill, but in a state of ecstasy and with her arms
extended, meditating on the sufferings of her Lord, and beseeching him to
allow her to suffer with him. She said five Our Fathers in honour of the
Five Wounds, and felt her whole heart burning with love. She then saw a
light descending towards her, and distinguished in the midst of it the
resplendent form of her crucified Saviour, whose wounds shone like so many
furnaces of light. Her heart was overflowing with joy and sorrow, and, at
the sight of the sacred wounds, her desire to suffer with her Lord became
intensely violent. Then triple rays, pointed like arrows, of the colour of
blood, darted forth from the hands, feet, and side of the sacred apparition,
and struck her hands, feet, and right side. The triple rays from the side
formed a point like the head of a lance. The moment these rays touched her,
drops of blood flowed from the wounds which they made. Long did she remain
in a state of insensibility, and when she recovered her senses she did not
know who had lowered her outstretched arms. It was with astonishment that
she beheld blood flowing from the palms of her hands, and felt violent pain
in her feet and side. It happened that her landlady™s little daughter came
into her room, saw her hands bleeding, and ran to tell her mother, who with
great anxiety asked Anne Catherine what had happened, but was begged by her
not to speak about it. She felt, after having received the stigmas, that an
entire change had taken place in her body; for the course of her blood
seemed to have changed, and to flow rapidly towards the stigmas. She herself
used to say:˜No words can describe in what manner it flows.™

We are indebted to a curious incident for our knowledge of the circumstances
which we have here related. On the 15th December 1819, she had a detailed
vision of all that had happened to herself, but so that she thought it
concerned some other nun who she imagined must be living not far off, and
who she supposed had experienced the same things as herself. She related all
these details with a very strong feeling of compassion, humbling herself,
without knowing it, before her own patience and sufferings. It was most
touching to hear her say:˜I ought never to complain any more, now that I
have seen the sufferings of that poor nun; her heart is surrounded with a
crown of thorns, but she bears it placidly and with a smiling countenance.
It is shameful indeed for me to complain, for she has a far heavier burden
to bear than I have.™

These visions, which she afterwards recognised to be her own history, were
several times repeated, and it is from them that the circumstances under
which she received the stigmas became known. Otherwise she would not have
related so many particulars about what her humility never permitted her to
speak of, and concerning which, when asked by her spiritual superiors whence
her wounds proceeded, the utmost she said was:˜I hope that they come from
the hand of God.™

The limits of this work preclude us from entering upon the subject of
stigmas in general, but we may observe that the Catholic Church has produced
a certain number of persons, St. Francis of Assissium being the first, who
have attained to that degree of contemplative love of Jesus which is the
most sublime effect of union with his sufferings, and is designated by
theologians, Vulnus divinum, Plago amoris viva. There are known to have been
at least fifty. Veronica Giuliani, a Capuchiness, who died at Città di
Castello in 1727, is the last individual of the class who has been canonised
(on the 26th May 1831). Her biography, published at Cologne in 1810, gives a
description of the state of persons with stigmas, which in many ways is
applicable to Anne Catherine. Colomba Schanolt, who died at Bamberg in 1787,
Magdalen Lorger, who died at Hadamar in 1806, both Dominicanesses, and Rose
Serra, a Capuchiness at Ozieri in Sardinia, who received the stigmas in
1801, are those of our own times of whom we know the most. Josephine Kumi,
of the Convent of Wesen, near Lake Wallenstadt in Switzerland, who was still
living in 1815, also belonged to this class of persons, but we are not
entirely certain whether she had the stigmas.

Anne Catherine being, as we have said, no longer able to walk or rise from
her bed, soon became unable also to eat. Before long she could take nothing
but a little wine and water, and finally only pure water; sometimes, but
very rarely, she managed to swallow the juice of a cherry or a plum, but she
immediately vomited any solid food, taken in ever so small a quantity. This
inability to take food, or rather this faculty of living for a great length
of time upon nothing but water, we are assured by learned doctors is not
quite unexampled in the history of the sick.

Theologians will be perfectly aware that there are many instances of
contemplative ascetics, and particularly of persons frequently in a state of
ecstasy and who have received the stigmas, remaining long without taking any
other food than the Blessed Sacrament; for instance, B. Nicholas of Flue,
St. Liduvina of Schiedam, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Angela of Foligno,
and St. Louise de l™Ascension. All the phenomena exhibited in the person of
Anne Catherine remained concealed even from those who had the most
intercourse with her, until the 25th February 1813, when they were
discovered accidentally by one of her old convent companions. By the end of
March, the whole town talked of them. On the 23d of March, the physician of
the neighbourhood forced her to undergo an examination. Contrary to his
expectation, he was convinced of the truth, drew up an official report of
what be had seen, became her doctor and her friend, and remained such to her
death. On the 28th of March, commissioners were appointed to examine into
her case by the spiritual authorities of Munster. The consequence of this
was that Anne Catherine was henceforth looked upon kindly by her superiors,
and acquired the friendship of the late Dean Overberg, who from that time
paid her every year a visit of several days™ duration, and was her consoler
and spiritual director. The medical counsellor from Druffel, who was present
at this examination in the capacity of doctor, never ceased to venerate her.
In 1814, he published in the Medical Journal of Salzbourg a detailed account
of the phenomena which he had remarked in the person of Anne Catherine, and
to this we refer those of our readers who desire more particulars upon the
subject. On the 4th of April, M. Gamier, the Commissary-General of the
French police, came from Munster to see her; he inquired minutely into her
case, and having learned that she neither prophesied nor spoke on politics,
declared that there was no occasion for the police to occupy themselves
about her. In 1826, he still spoke of her at Paris with respect and emotion.

On the 22d of July 1813, Overberg came to see her, with Count de Stolberg
and his family. They remained two days with her, and Stolberg, in a letter
which has been several times printed, bore witness to the reality of the
phenomena observed in Anne Catherine, and gave expression to his intense
veneration for her. He remained her friend as long as he lived, and the
members of his family never ceased recommending themselves to her prayers.
On the 29th of September 1813, Overberg took the daughter of the Princess
Galitzin (who died in 1806) to visit her, and they saw with their own eyes
blood flow copiously from her stigmas. This distinguished lady repeated her
visit, and, after becoming Princess of Salm, never varied in her sentiments,
but, together with her family, remained in constant communion of prayer with
Anne Catherine. Many other persons in all ranks of life were, in like
manner, consoled and edified by visiting her bed of suffering. On the 23d of
October 1813, she was carried to another lodging, the window of which looked
out upon a garden. The condition of the saintly nun became day by day more
painful. Her stigmas were a source of indescribable suffering to her, down
to the moment of her death. Instead of allowing her thoughts to dwell upon
those graces to the interior presence of which they bore such miraculous
outward testimony, she learned from them lessons of humility, by considering
them as a heavy cross laid upon her for her sins. Her suffering body itself
was to preach Jesus crucified. It was difficult indeed to be an enigma to
all persons, an object of suspicion to the greatest number, and of respect
mingled with fear to some few, without yielding to sentiments of impatience,
irritability, or pride. Willingly would she have lived in entire seclusion
from the world, but obedience soon compelled her to allow herself to be
examined and to have judgment passed upon her by a vast number of curious
persons. Suffering, as she was, the most excruciating pains, she was not
even allowed to be her own mistress, but was regarded as something which
every one fancied he had a right to look at and to pass judgment upon,often
with no good results to any one, but greatly to the prejudice of her soul
and body, because she was thus deprived of so much rest and recollection of
spirit. There seemed to be no bounds to what was expected of her, and one
fat man, who had some difficulty in ascending her narrow winding staircase,
was heard to complain that a person like Anne Catherine, who ought to be
exposed on the public road, where every one could see her, should remain in
a lodging so difficult to reach. In former ages, persons in her state
underwent in private the examination of the spiritual authorities, and
carried out their painful vocation beneath the protecting shadow of hallowed
walls; but our suffering heroine had been cast forth from the cloister into
the world at a time when pride, coldness of heart, and incredulity were all
the vogue; marked with the stigmas of the Passion of Christ, she was forced
to wear her bloody robe in public, under the eyes of men who scarce believed
in the Wounds of Christ, far less in those which were but their images.

Thus this holy woman, who in her youth had been in the habit of praying for
long hours before pictures of all the stages of Christ™s painful Passion, or
before wayside crosses, was herself made like unto a cross on the public
road, insulted by one passer by, bathed in warm tears of repentance by a
second, regarded as a mere physical curiosity by a third, and venerated by a
fourth, whose innocent hands would bring flowers to lay at her feet.

In 1817 her aged mother came from the country to die by her side. Anne
Catherine showed her all the love she could by comforting and praying for
her, and closing her eyes with her own handsthose hands marked with the
stigmas on the 13th of March of the same year. The inheritance left to Anne
Catherine by her mother was more than sufficient for one so imbued with the
spirit of mortification and suffering; and in her turn she left it
unimpaired to her friends. It consisted of these three sayings:˜Lord, thy
will, not mine, be done;™˜Lord, give me patience, and then strike hard;™
˜Those things which are not good to put in the pot are at least good to put
beneath it.™ The meaning of this last proverb was: If things are not fit to
be eaten, they may at least be burned, in order that food may be cooked;
this suffering does not nourish my heart, but by bearing it patiently, I may
at least increase the fire of divine love, by which alone life can profit us
anything. She often repeated these proverbs, and then thought of her mother
with gratitude. Her father had died some little time before.

The writer of these pages became acquainted with her state first through
reading a copy of that letter of Stolberg, to which we have already alluded,
and afterwards through conversation with a friend who had passed several
weeks with her. In September 1818 he was invited by Bishop Sailer to meet
him at the Count de Stolberg™s, in Westphalia; and he went in the first
place to Sondermuhlen to see the count, who introduced him to Overberg, from
whom he received a letter addressed to Anne Catherine™s doctor. He paid her
his first visit on the 1711 of September 1818; and she allowed him to pass
several hours by her side each day, until the arrival of Sailer. From the
very beginning, she gave him her confidence to a remarkable extent, and this
in the most touching and ingenuous manner. No doubt she was conscious that
by relating without reserve the history of all the trials, joys, and sorrows
of her whole life, she was bestowing a most precious spiritual alms upon
him. She treated him with the most generous hospitality, and had no
hesitation in doing so, because he did not oppress her and alarm her
humility by excessive admiration. She laid open her interior to him in the
same charitable spirit as a pious solitary would in the morning offer the
flowers and fruit which had grown in his garden during the night to some
way-worn traveller, who, having lost his road in the desert of the world,
finds him sitting near his hermitage. Wholly devoted to her God, she spoke
in this open manner as a child would have done, unsuspectingly, with no
feelings of mistrust, and with no selfish end in view. May God reward her!

Her friend daily wrote down all the observations that he made concerning
her, and all that she told him about her life, whether interior or exterior.
Her words were characterised alternately by the most childlike simplicity
and the most astonishing depth of thought, and they fore. shadowed, as it
were, the vast and sublime spectacle which later was unfolded, when it
became evident that the past, the present, and the future, together with all
that pertained to the sanctification, profanation, and judgment of souls,
formed before and within her an allegorical and historical drama, for which
the different events of the ecclesiastical year furnished subjects, and
which it divided into scenes, so closely linked together were all the
prayers and sufferings which she offered in sacrifice for the Church
militant.

On the 22d of October 1818 Sailer came to see her, and having remarked that
she was lodging at the back of a public-house, and that men were playing at
nine-pins under her window, said in the playful yet thoughtful manner which
was peculiar to him:˜See, see; all things are as they should bethe invalid
nun, the spouse of our Lord, is lodging in a public-house above the ground
where men are playing at nine-pins, like the soul of man in his body.™ His
interview with Anne Catherine was most affecting; it was indeed beautiful to
behold these two souls, who were both on fire with the love of Jesus, and
conducted by grace through such different paths, meet thus at the foot of
the Cross, the visible stamp of which was borne by one of them. On Friday,
the 23d of October, Sailer remained alone with her during nearly the whole
of the day; he saw blood flow from her head, her hands, and her feet, and he
was able to bestow upon her great consolation in her interior trials. He
most earnestly recommended her to tell everything without reserve to the
writer of these pages, and he came to an understanding upon the subject with
her ordinary director. He heard her confession, gave her the Holy Communion
on Saturday, the 24th, and then continued his journey to the Count de
Stolberg™s. On his return, at the beginning of November, he again passed a
day with her. He remained her friend until death, prayed constantly for her,
and asked her prayers whenever he found himself in trying or difficult
positions. The writer of these pages remained until January. He returned
again in May 1819, and continued to watch Anne Catherine almost
uninterruptedly until her death.

The saintly maiden continually besought the Almighty to remove the exterior
stigmas, on account of the trouble and fatigue which they occasioned, and
her prayer was granted at the end of seven years. Towards the conclusion of
the year 1819, the blood first flowed less frequently from her wounds, and
then ceased altogether. On the 25th of December, scabs fell from her feet
and hands, and there only remained white scars, which became red on certain
days, but the pain she suffered was undiminished in the slightest degree.
The mark of the cross, and the wound on her right side, were often to be
seen as before but not at any stated times. On certain days she always had
the most painful sensations around her head, as though a crown of thorns
were being pressed upon it. On these occasions she could not lean her head
against anything nor even rest it on her hand, but had to remain for long
hours, sometimes even for whole nights, sitting up in her bed, supported by
cushions, whilst her pallid face, and the irrepressible groans of pain which
escaped her, made her like an awful living representation of suffering.
After she had been in this state, blood invariably flowed more or less
copiously from around her head. Sometimes her head-dress only was soaked
with it, but sometimes the blood would flow down her face and neck. On Good
Friday, April 19th, 1819, all her wounds re-opened and bled, and closed
again on the following days. A most rigorous inquiry into her state was made
by some doctors and naturalists. For that end she was placed alone in a
strange house, where she remained from the 7th to the 29th of August; but
this examination appears to have produced no particular effects in any way.
She was brought back to her own dwelling on the 29th of August, and from
that time until she died she was left in peace, save that she was
occasionally annoyed by private disputes and public insults. On this subject
Overberg wrote her the following words:˜What have you had to suffer
personally of which you can complain? I am addressing a soul desirous of
nothing so much as to become more and more like to her divine Spouse. Have
you not been treated far more gently than was your adorable Spouse? Should
it not be a subject of rejoicing to you, according to the spirit, to have
been assisted to resemble him more closely, and thus to be more pleasing in
his eyes? You had suffered much with Jesus, but hitherto insults had been
for the most part spared you. With the crown of thorns you had not worn the
purple mantle and the robe of scorn, much less had you yet heard the cry,
Away with him! Crucify him! Crucify him! I cannot doubt but that these
sentiments are yours. Praise be to Jesus Christ.™

On Good Friday, the 30th of March 1820, blood flowed from her head, feet,
hands, chest, and side. It happened that when she fainted, one of the
persons who were with her, knowing that the application of relies relieved
her, placed near her feet a piece of linen in which some were wrapped, and
the blood which came from her wounds reached this piece of linen after a
time. In the evening, when this same piece of linen with the relies was
being, placed on her chest and shoulders, in which she was suffering much,
she suddenly exclaimed, while in a state of ecstasy:˜It is most wonderful,
but I see my Heavenly Spouse lying in the tomb in the earthly Jerusalem; and
I also see him living in the heavenly Jerusalem surrounded by adoring
saints, and in the midst of these saints I see a person who is not a
sainta nun. Blood flows from her head, her side, her hands, and her feet,
and the saints are above the bleeding parts.™

On the 9th February 1821 she fell into an ecstasy at the time of the funeral
of a very holy priest. Blood flowed from her forehead, and the cross on her
breast bled also. Some one asked her,˜What is the matter with you?™ She
smiled, and spoke like one awakening from a dream:˜We were by the side of
the body. I have been accustomed lately to hear sacred music, and the De
Profundis made a great impression upon me.™ She died upon the same day three
years later. In 1821, a few weeks before Easter, she told us that it had
been said to her during her prayer,˜Take notice, you will suffer on the
real anniversary of the Passion, and not on the day marked this year in the
Ecclesiastical Calendar.™ On Friday, the 30th of March, at ten o™clock in
the morning, she sank down senseless. Her face and bosom were bathed in
blood, and her body appeared covered with bruises like what the blows of a
whip would have inflicted. At twelve o™clock in the day, she stretched
herself out in the form of a cross, and her arms were so extended as to be
perfectly dislocated. A few minutes before two o™clock, drops of blood
flowed from her feet and hands. On Good Friday, the 20th of April, she was
simply in a state of quiet contemplation. This remarkable exception to the
general rule seemed to be an effect of the providence of God, for, at the
hour when her wounds usually bled, a number of curious and ill-natured
individuals came to see her with the intention of causing her fresh
annoyances, by publishing what they saw; but they thus were made
unintentionally to contribute to her peace, by saying that her wounds had
ceased to bleed.

On the 19th of February 1822 she was again warned that she would suffer on
the last Friday of March, and not on Good Friday.

On Friday the 15th, and again on Friday the 29th, the cross on her bosom and
the wound of her side bled. Before the 29th, she more than once felt as
though a stream of fire were flowing rapidly from her heart to her side, and
down her arms and legs to the stigmas, which looked red and inflamed. On the
evening of Thursday the 28th, she fell into a state of contemplation on the
Passion, and remained in it until Friday evening. Her chest, head, and side
bled; all the veins of her hands were swollen, and there was a painful spot
in the centre of them, which felt damp, although blood did not flow from it.
No blood flowed from the stigmas excepting upon the 3d of March, the day of
the finding of the Holy Cross. She had also a vision of the discovery of the
true cross by St. Helena, and imagined herself to be lying in the excavation
near the cross. Much blood came in the morning from her head and side, and
in the afternoon from her hands and feet, and it seemed to her as though she
were being made the test of whether the cross was really the Cross of Jesus
Christ, and that her blood was testifying to its identity.

In the year 1823, on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, which came on the 27th
and 28th of March, she had visions of the Passion, during which blood flowed
from all her wounds, causing her intense pain. Amid these awful sufferings,
although ravished in spirit, she was obliged to speak and give answers
concerning all her little household affairs, as if she had been perfectly
strong and well, and she never let fall a complaint, although nearly dying.
This was the last time that her blood gave testimony to the reality of her
union with the sufferings of him who has delivered himself up wholly and
entirely for our salvation. Most of the phenomena of the ecstatic life which
are shown us in the lives and writings of Saints Bridget, Gertrude,
Mechtilde, Hildegarde, Catherine of Sienna, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of
Bologna, Colomba da Rieti, Lidwina of Schiedam, Catherine Vanini, Teresa of
Jesus, Anne of St. Bartholomew, Magdalen of Pazzi, Mary Villana, Mary
Buonomi, Marina d™Escobar, Crescentia de Kaufbeuern, and many other nuns of
contemplative orders, are also to be found in the history of the interior
life of Anne Catherine Emmerich. The same path was marked out for her by
God. Did she, like these holy women, attain the end? God alone knows. Our
part is only to pray that such may have been the case, and we are allowed to
hope it. Those among our readers who are not acquainted with the ecstatic
life from the writings of those who have lived it, will find information on
this subject in the Introduction of Goërres to the writings of Henry Suso,
published at Ratisbonne in 1829.

Since many pious Christians, in order to render their life one perpetual act
of adoration, endeavour to see in their daily employments a symbolical
representation of some manner of honouring God, and offer it to him in union
with the merits of Christ, it cannot appear extra. ordinary that those holy
souls who pass from an active life to one of suffering and contemplation,
should sometimes see their spiritual labours under the form of those earthly
occupations which formerly filled their days. Then their acts were prayers;
now their prayers are acts; but the form remains the same. It was thus that
Anne Catherine, in her ecstatic life, beheld the series of her prayers for
the Church under the forms of parables bearing reference to agriculture,
gardening, weaving, sowing, or the care of sheep. All these different
occupations were arranged, according to their signification, in the
different periods of the common as well as the ecclesiastical year, and were
pursued under the patronage and with the assistance of the saints of each
day, the special graces of the corresponding feasts of the Church being also
applied to them. The signification of this circle of symbols had reference
to all the active part of her interior life. One example will help to
explain our meaning. When Anne Catherine, while yet a child, was employed in
weeding, she besought God to root up the cockle from the field of the
Church. If her hands were stung by the nettles, or if she was obliged to do
afresh the work of idlers, she offered to God her pain and her fatigue, and
besought him, in the name of Jesus Christ, that the pastor of souls might
not become weary, and that none of them might cease to labour zealously and
diligently. Thus her manual labour became a prayer.

I will now give a corresponding example of her life of contemplation and
ecstasy. She had been ill several times, and in a state of almost continual
ecstasy, during which she often moaned, and moved her hands like a person
employed in weeding. She complained one morning that her hands and arms
smarted and itched, and on examination they were found to be covered with
blisters, like what would have been produced by the stinging of nettles. She
then begged several persons of her acquaintance to join their prayers to
hers for a certain intention. The next day her hands were inflamed and
painful, as they would have been after hard work; and when asked the cause,
she replied:˜Ah! I have had so many nettles to root up in the vineyard,
because those whose duty it was to do it only pulled off the stems, and I
was obliged to draw the roots with much difficulty out of a stony soil.™ The
person who had asked her the question began to blame these careless workmen,
but he felt much confused when she replied:˜You were one of them,those who
only pull off the stems of the nettles, and leave the roots in the earth,
are persons who pray carelessly.™ It was afterwards discovered that she had
been praying for several dioceses which were shown to her under the figure
of vineyards laid waste, and in which labour was needed. The real
inflammation of her hands bore testimony to this symbolical rooting up of
the nettles; and we have, perhaps, reason to hope that the churches shown to
her under the appearances of vineyards experienced the good effects of her
prayer and spiritual labour; for since the door is opened to those who
knock, it must certainly be opened above all to those who knock with such
energy as to cause their fingers to be wounded.

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:œAh, 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:œAh, 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 heartthat 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:˜œ 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:œWhen 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, . .
.œI 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,œThis 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:œLet 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:œWho 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
Christthe 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 citythe
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.™

She became each day more and more absorbed in her sufferings, and although
she continued to see Jesus travelling from city to city during his public
life, the utmost she ever said on the subject was, briefly to name in which
direction he was going. Once, she asked suddenly in a scarcely audible
voice,˜What day is it?™ When told that it was the 14th of January, she
added:˜Had I but a few days more, I should have related the entire life of
our Saviour, but now it. is no longer possible for me to do so.™ These words
were the more incomprehensible as she did not appear to know even which year
of the public life of Jesus she was then contemplating in spirit. In 1820
she had related the history of our Saviour down to the Ascension, beginning
at the 28th of July of the third year of the public life of Jesus, after
which she returned to the first year of the life of Jesus, and had continued
down to the 10th of January of the third year of his public life. On the
27th of April 1823, in consequence of a journey made by the writer, an
interruption of her narrative took place, and lasted down to the 21st of
October. She then took up the thread of her narrative where she had left it,
and continued it to the last weeks of her life. When she spoke of a few days
being wanted, her friend himself did not know how far her narrative went,
not having had leisure to arrange what he had written. After her death he
became convinced that if she had been able to speak during the last fourteen
days of her life,™she would have brought it down to the 28th of July of the
third year of the public life of our Lord, consequently to where she had
taken it up in 1820.

Her condition daily became more frightful. She, who usually suffered in
silence, uttered stifled groans, so awful was the anguish she endured. On
the 15th of January she said:˜The Child Jesus brought me great sufferings
at Christmas. I was once more by his manger at Bethlehem. He was burning
with fever, and showed me his sufferings and those of his mother. They were
so poor that they had no food but a wretched piece of bread. He bestowed
still greater sufferings upon me, and said