Anne Catherine Emmerich
Anne Catherine Emmerich, CRV (8 September 1774 – 9 February 1824) was a Catholic Augustinian canoness of the Congregation of Windesheim. During her lifetime, she was a mystic, Marian visionary and stigmatist.
Emmerich was born in Flamschen, an impoverished farming community at Coesfeld, in the Diocese of Münster, Westphalia, Germany, and died in Dülmen (aged 49), where she had lived, bedridden, as a nun. Emmerich purportedly experienced visions of the life and Passion of Jesus Christ, revealed to her by the Blessed Virgin Mary during religious ecstasy.
During her bedridden years, a number of well-known contemporaries visited her. The poet Clemens Maria Brentano interviewed her at length and wrote several pages, based on his notes of her description of the visions. The authenticity of Brentano's writings has been questioned, and critics have characterized the books as "conscious elaborations by a poet". Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, Jose Saraiva Martins declared the writings attributed to her the "artistic fantasy of Brentano".
In the Martyrology
- February 9 Blessed Anna Katharina Emmerich, religious