Anne Catherine Emmerich

Anne Catherine Emmerich was born on 8 September 1774 at Flamschen, a poor farming hamlet near Coesfeld in the Diocese of Münster, Westphalia. One of ten children of impoverished Catholic peasants, she shared from earliest years in the hard labor of house and field. Her schooling was brief, yet all who knew her remarked her constant attraction to prayer. At twelve she worked three years on a neighboring farm; afterward she learned the trade of seamstress and practiced it for several years.

She sought admission to several convents but was refused for lack of a dowry. The Poor Clares of Münster finally agreed to receive her if she would learn the organ. She went to the organist Söntgen in Coesfeld; finding that family in want, she gave them her small savings. In 1802, at the age of twenty-eight, she and her friend Klara Söntgen entered the Augustinian convent of Agnetenberg in Dülmen. The next year she made her religious profession. Within the cloister she was known for exact observance of the rule, yet from the first she suffered continual illness and pain. Her fervor sometimes unsettled less fervent sisters, who were also puzzled by her ecstasies and frail health.

In 1812 King Jérôme Bonaparte suppressed the convent; the nuns were dispersed. Anne Catherine found shelter in the house of a widow in Dülmen. Early in 1813 the marks of the stigmata appeared on her body. The parish priest summoned physicians; later the vicar general ordered a thorough ecclesiastical investigation. Crowds came; among the visitors was the poet Clemens Brentano. By the end of 1818 the bleeding of hands and feet had ceased and the wounds closed, yet a cross-shaped mark remained on her breastbone in the form of a Y, like the cross in the church at Coesfeld. In August 1819 civil authorities placed her under observation for three weeks; no fraud was proved, though opinions remained divided.

From childhood she had spoken of conversations with Jesus and of seeing the souls in purgatory. In religious ecstasy she contemplated the life and Passion of the Lord and the mysteries of Mary. During her long years of confinement many came to her bedside—future Archbishop Clemens August von Droste zu Vischering, Bishop Johann Michael Sailer, the educator Bernhard Overberg, and writers such as Luise Hensel and Friedrich Stolberg—who found in her a living witness of friendship with God. Brentano recorded lengthy accounts of her visions; later scholarship and the Holy See judged large portions of those published books to be literary elaborations rather than her pure words, and they were set aside entirely in the cause of beatification.

In the summer of 1823 her strength failed. She died in Dülmen on 9 February 1824 and was buried outside the town amid a great throng. Her grave was twice reopened amid false rumors of desecration, yet body and coffin were found intact. In 1975 her remains were translated to the Church of the Holy Cross in Dülmen, where the faithful still leave petitions that are burned each Easter.

Descriptions attributed to her of Mary's dwelling near Ephesus guided later searchers to the house now venerated as the House of the Virgin Mary; successive popes have honored the shrine. The cause of beatification, opened in 1899, was suspended in 1928 over doubts about the Brentano texts, then reopened in 1973 on the sole basis of her life and virtues. A miracle was recognized in 2003. On 3 October 2004 Pope John Paul II beatified her, praising how her example opened hearts to loving dedication to Jesus Christ.

May Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich obtain for us the grace of patient union with the Crucified, and let us imitate today her hidden fidelity in suffering offered for the Church.