Ana Catalina had numerous religious visions, but among all the most notable were, without a doubt, those in which the biblical episodes were revealed as they happened, on which Mel Gibson based his famous film “The Passion of the Christ”.
And these biblical revelations began from the book of Genesis.
Ana Catalina began to experience these revelations from a very early age, when she was just five years old, although the apparitions occurred throughout her life; they were not, the daydreams of a girl.
His encounter with Christ occurred at noon on a certain day in 1798, at the age of twenty-four, while praying before a crucifix in the Jesuit church of Kösfeld.
Fervently controlled, she murmured the words in a low voice, with extreme caution, as if she were afraid to worry about his mere presence. He barely dared to lift his head and look at the crucified Christ.
From that day on, everything was different: in an unexpected succession of events, the image of Our Lord - the one he observed due to the modesty of his shyness - approached, offering him a garland of flowers in one of his hands and a crown of thorns in the other. other. Invited to choose, Catherine chose the latter, which the Lord helped her to put into her head. Ana Catalina wore the mystical crown, which caused her extreme pain, from that day until the day she died.
The thorns would not be the only signs with which Christ would distinguish her. After ten years the stigmata began to appear, first on the feet and then on the hands. She also had spear wounds on her right side and two crosses on her chest, one in the shape of a Latin cross and the other in the shape of a Greek Y.
The stigmata, which turned into a scandal, led the vicar general of the diocese to subject Ana Carolina to an in-depth analysis that lasted almost three months, including continuous supervision – for ten days – by twenty neighbors led by a doctor, who accompanied the nun for twenty and four hours a day. The conclusion, which contradicted the hopes of the detractors of the miracles, was that “the wounds bled without human intervention, and that the stigmatized woman lived in an almost complete fast”.
Ana Catalina's stigmata on her feet and hands were closed from 1818, because the pain was too intense and she asked Jesus Christ to remove it. However, every Good Friday, they reopened again, as the passion reignited.
Ana Catalina Emmerick was a young German from Westphalia, very close to the Dutch border. The fifth daughter of a poor family who gave birth to nine children, she tried to enter a convent three times, but was rejected because the family's economic situation did not allow her to contribute the dowry that was then required in the congregations. So she was a seamstress, maid and farmer for many years, before being accepted in 1802 by the Augustinian sisters in the nearby town of Dülmen.
Her stay in the convent lasted only ten years, until in 1812 - in the same year that the stigmata appeared - the revolutionary government decreed the forced exclaustration of Ana Catalina, who found refuge in the house of her confessor sister, who was amazed to see that she had brought into the house someone capable of healing the sick and comforting the distressed who, in a growing procession, approached his bed. Because the nun was already bedridden and would be forever.
Ana Catalina's name soon spread throughout the region, attracting people of all conditions seeking the attention of the one who was physically disabled. Concerned about the reach of such “superstitions”, the authorities decided to take action on the matter, and in 1819 they subjected Ana Catalina to new and exhaustive examinations. This time it was the Prussian civil authorities, who wanted to put an end to what they classified as comedy. They then sent an entire section of infantry to escort the four police commissioners to carry out the investigation. Without the slightest consideration, they transferred Ana Catalina to a huge empty room where she remained for three weeks straight; The result was devastating, as the authorities wanted to prove that the nun was committing fraud but, to her regret, the members of the commission had to attest to her complete honesty.
It was around these dates that an unexpected visitor appeared for Ana Catalina: the writer Clemens Brentano. Romantic author, famous throughout Germany, Brentano was trying to overcome a turbulent personal and political past when his friend Luisa Hensel – whom the poet ardently admired – became a Lutheran, advising him to get closer to Dülmen.
For Brentano, finding Ana Catalina was salvation, no matter how desperate he was at having lost the three children his wife had conceived and, in the third birth, his own wife. Of course, he assumed that a concatenation of random coincidences were what sent him there, but Ana Catalina warned him from the first moment that she was expecting him. “Pilgrim”, he called him, because that was what she called the visions she had been having for some time: “I will die when I have told you everything, and you will prepare everything correctly and only then will you be able to die too”.
From a young age, Ana Catalina had visions relating to religious issues. In recent years, these have continually referred to passages from the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary. They revealed secrets about the future of the Church and the world, which Brentano would also put in writing. The man would remain with her for the last six years of her life, barely moving from the head of her bed. Such was the impact that the nun had on him.
Brentano witnessed Ana Catalina's honesty. He saw that she was not eating and that she was eating exclusively from the sacred form, which he chose with just a little water to make swallowing easier.
Brentano collected, throughout the years of Ana Catalina's life, those visions, as well as some other episodes of sacred history and the future. What the woman revealed to her, she would publish under the title “The Bitter Passion of Christ” because in it the atrocious sacrifice of the Savior was manifested without any sugarcoating, very detailed and far from the almost notarial style of the Gospels.
Ana Catalina witnessed in her visions the brutal treatment that Jesus received, the humiliations to which he was subjected, the harsh suffering of the Virgin Mary. He spared no details in his descriptions: “...they beat him so violently with the crown of thorns that the Savior's eyes were flooded with blood (...) Jesus suffered a horrible thirst; His wounds gave him a fever and he was cold; her flesh was torn to the bone, her tongue was contracted and the sacred blood that flowed from her head “cooled her half-open and burning mouth…” The passion of Jesus, which she relived with enormous pain not only in her flesh, but also in her spirit, was not Ana Catalina's only revelation. Mary's life was also told, as well as numerous prophecies about the future of humanity and the Catholic Church.
Ana Catalina rarely specified in time the things that will happen. She did not mention dates, but presented events in a concatenated way. From the articulation of the story, however, we can conclude that she told us about things that are familiar to us. And in some cases, she gave us a slightly firmer anchor, as when she assures us that “Lucifer would be released for some time, fifty or sixty years before 2000; though some demons were released first, to punish and tempt the world..."
In her prophecies she foreshadowed the existence of two Churches within Roman obedience, because within this there would be widespread apostasy, betrayal of the Pope and false ecumenism. Such a situation will lead to a rupture within the Church.
At the same time, the world will together disdain true religion, creating a “universal crisis”. There will be signs that the Catholic Church is collapsing in liturgical reforms, which will lead to a relativization of supernaturality. Ana Catalina also appealed to the need to preserve the Latin prayers, and to pray in vernacular languages, because “prayers in Latin are much more profound and intelligible.” She saw how they would lead to Catholic disaster. The enemies of the Church will emerge from within, sometimes speaking of faith, of a living Christianity, but despising and outraging the holy Church and placing themselves above all power and all hierarchy, and these know neither submission nor respect for spiritual authority... presumptuous, they claim to understand everything better than the holy doctors, and do not consider that discipline, mortifications, or penance are necessary..."
All these facts will accompany human history until leading it to the Great Tribulation described to us in the Apocalypse.
But it is not just the history of the Church. All of humanity will be immersed in a process of deterioration that, although it is simultaneous to that of Rome, will not stop developing through its own channels. Ana Catalina highlights different parts of the world, including Spain, and also Germany, France and Russia. Regarding the latter, Ana Catalina stated that she saw the devil laughing among the towers of the Kremlin, from where “he will bring with him many evils, and they will act everywhere... everything was dark and threatening..."
Along with all these visions, the fulfillment of not a few of which are reliable reminders of their seriousness, Ana Catalina Emmerick also witnessed the biblical episodes, from the beginning of time to its end. The veracity of some of them has been contrasted with archaeological discoveries; the result was surprising.
On October 3, 2004, one hundred and eighty years after her death, Pope John Paul II solemnly beatified Anne Catherine Emmerick.