The greatest visionary of all time?

Like many people, I was shocked when I first saw Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ in the cinema back in 2004. As we all filed out afterwards, not a word was spoken. The scale of Christ’s suffering portrayed in the film was beyond anything we had imagined before. Even the Gospel narratives do not suggest Jesus’ Passion was as bad as that. So what was Mr Gibson thinking of?

He explained that the film was based largely on the written testimony of a visionary called Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich.

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich was born in 1774 into a very modest and humble family in the west of Germany. She had a great devotion to God from her earliest years. She wanted to become a religious sister, and eventually managed to do so; but then the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the suppression of all religious orders in Germany and she was forced to lodge in an acquaintance’s house “in the world” (i.e., not in the convent). She received the Stigmata, the same wounds that Christ received during His Passion and death, and therefore had to bandage herself to avoid unwanted attention. She also miraculously survived for the last years of her life eating no food apart from the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated communion wafer that Catholics believe has become the Body of Christ.

Such a life would be marvellous enough in its own right, but these outward aspects pale almost into insignificance when compared with the inner spiritual life that she led. She had regular, daily ecstasies during which she encountered Jesus, or had visions of His life during His First Coming. In fact Jesus informed her that no-one else in history would ever receive more visions of His life than she.

Given her humble origins and lack of schooling, we would have no knowledge of her remarkable life and work were it not for a strange set of circumstances. God revealed to Anne Catherine that her visions would be committed to paper by one who was coming to her aid. She recognised Clemens Brentano as soon as she saw him from this divine “tip-off”. Brentano was a famous poet and writer in Germany at the time, but as soon as he met Anne Catherine in 1818 he abandoned all his other projects to focus on capturing her testimony for the benefit of succeeding generations. Day after day he sat with her, writing her visions down.

After her death in 1824 began the daunting task of arranging the material into a meaningful account. Brentano only managed to produce the account of Jesus’s Passion and death (1833) before his own death in 1842. It then fell to a priest, Father Carl E. Schmöger, to compile a life of Jesus from her visions, in which Brentano’s work was subsumed as the final quarter. The larger work is now known as The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations and is in print and published by Tan Books in the USA as a 4-volume set. Father Schmöger also produced a biography of Anne Catherine’s life, and this is published by Tan Books in two volumes as The Life and Revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

If you look up Anne Catherine Emmerich on Wikipedia, you’ll find that the mainstream media want you to view her work with suspicion (my emphasis):

When the case for Emmerich’s beatification was submitted to the Vatican in 1892, a number of experts in Germany began to compare and analyze Brentano’s original notes from his personal library with the books he had written. The analysis revealed various apocryphal biblical sources, maps, and travel guides among his papers, which could have been used to enhance Emmerich’s narrations.

“Could have”: big deal. Beware of what you read in the mainstream media! The truth is that Brentano’s capture of Sister Emmerich’s visions is too good for evil to let it go unchallenged. And why would Brentano have fabricated anything? He gave up all his other projects to work on this: why would he adulterate what he wrote down with anything other than what she said? Furthermore, there is no way that a fabricated account could have as much internal consistency as we discover in The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations.

The work is pretty much guaranteed to change your life. You cannot possibly read it and fail to grow closer to Jesus in the process. In its pages we discover just how cursory and brief the four Gospels actually are: Sister Emmerich provides a vast amount of background material, all of which brings Jesus’s story so much more to life. Here is a simple example: in the Gospel of Saint Luke (and in no other), we read the following:

Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.”

Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.” This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country. (Lk 7:11-17)

The equivalent of this 7-verse Gospel passage is a seven-page chapter near the beginning of Volume 3 of The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations. We learn the names of the widow and of the son who was resurrected, plus the main take-home points of a teaching given by Jesus to mark the occasion.

The “Biblical Revelations” bit applies to the early chapters of Volume 1 of The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, which reveal Anne Catherine’s visions of the Creation of the world, the fall of man and the Patriarchs. There are some fascinating insights there which impinge on the creation versus evolution debate, and which we will return to. For now, we will consider just one, almost throw-away, comment made early in Volume 1. This is in the context of the inaccurate chronologies created by the Egyptians to make their dynasties seem more ancient:

I saw these false computations of the pagan priests at the same time that I beheld Jesus teaching on the Sabbath at Aruma. Jesus, speaking before the Pharisees of the Call of Abraham and his sojourn in Egypt, exposed the errors of the Egyptian calendar. He told them that the world had now existed 4028 years. When I heard Jesus say this, He was Himself thirty-one years old.

The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, Volume 1, page 64.

Unlike the estimates of the age of the earth computed by human authorities such as Archbishop Ussher which we briefly looked at before, here is a supernatural statement of the year of Jesus’s birth, namely, 4028 – 31 = 3997 AM (Anno Mundi)[1]. Given that we date our Anno Domini calendar from the year of Jesus’s birth, the current year 2022 AD must be somewhere around 3997 + 2022 = 6019 AM (allowing for some debate over the year of Jesus’s birth in the BC / AD systems). On this basis we are indeed over 6000 years into the history of the universe, so in broad terms slightly beyond the end of the sixth “day”. The seventh day of rest is now becoming overdue! The most important parts of The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations are the accounts of, firstly, events leading up to Jesus’s birth and its aftermath, and secondly, Jesus’s Passion, Death and Resurrection. Over the last few years I have collated this material into a series of daily readings for Advent and Lent respectively, provided to subscribers by email. If you would like to be added to the distribution list for either or both of these, do let me know through the Contact Page.

[1] Ussher’s equivalent estimate for the year of Jesus’s birth was 4004 AM: just seven years different from the figure that Anne Catherine Emmerich gives us.