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TAN BOOKS AND PUBLISHERS, INC.
Rockford, Illinois 61105
Nihil Obstat: Em. De Jaegher; Can. lib. cens.; Brugis, 14 Februarii 1914
Imprimatur: A. C. De Schrevel; Vicar General; Brugis, 14 Februarii 1914.
This English translation published in 1914 by Desclée De Brouwer & Co. of Lille, Paris, and Bruges, in conjunction with The Sentinel Press of New York. Reprinted by Academy Library Guild in 1954, and later by Apostolate of Christian Action, both of Fresno, California. Reprinted in 1979 by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc. Retypeset and republished again in 1986 by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc.; full-size edition (same content with enlarged type) published in 2004 by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc.
Typography is the property of TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., and may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without written permission from the publisher, except that brief selections may be copied for non-profit use without permission.
ISBN: Vol. 1 978-0-89555-787-2
ISBN: Vol. 2 978-0-89555-788-9
ISBN: Vol. 3 978-0-89555-789-6
ISBN: Vol. 4 978-0-89555-790-2
ISBN: Set 978-0-89555-791-9
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
TAN BOOKS AND PUBLISHERS, INC.
P.O. Box 424; Rockford, Illinois 61105
2004
"But there are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written everyone, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written."
—St. John the Evangelist (John 21:25)
Anne Catherine Emmerich was born on September 8th, 1774, at Flamske, near Koesfeld, Westphalia, in West Germany, and became a nun of the Augustinian Order on November 13th, 1803, in the Convent of Agnetenberg at Dülmen (also in Westphalia). She died on February 9th, 1824. Although of simple education, she had perfect consciousness of her earliest days and could understand the liturgical Latin from her first time at Mass.
During most of her later years she would vomit up even the simplest food or drink, subsisting for long periods almost entirely on water and the Holy Eucharist. She was told in mystic vision that her gift of seeing past, present and future was greater than that possessed by anyone else in history.
From the year 1812 until her death, she bore the stigmata of Our Lord, including a cross over her heart and wounds from the crown of thorns. Though Anne Catherine Emmerich was an invalid confined to bed during her later years, her funeral was nevertheless attended by a greater concourse of mourners than any other remembered by the oldest inhabitants of Dülmen.
Her mission in life seems to have been to suffer in expiation for the godlessness that darkened the "Age of Enlightenment" and the era of the Napoleonic wars, a time during which she saw her convent closed and her Order suppressed by Napoleon.
During the last five years of her life the day-by-day transcription of her visions and mystical experiences was recorded by Clemens Brentano, poet, literary leader, friend of Goethe and Görres, who, from the time he met her, abandoned his distinguished career and devoted the rest of his life to this work.
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The immense mass of notes preserved in his journals forms one of the most extensive case histories of a mystic ever kept and provides the source for the material found in this book, plus much of what is found in her two-volume definitive biography written by V. Rev. Carl E. Schmöger, C.SS.R.
This book is the first and only English version of the combined Biblical visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich. The original was published in 1914 by Desclée, de Brouwer (Bruges, Belgium) as The Lowly Life and Bitter Passion of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother, together with the Mysteries of the Old Testament.
The text is that of the 4th German edition of the 1881 version of the Very Rev. Carl E. Schmöger, C.SS.R., a compilation of the three classic works: The Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, The Bitter Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and The Life of Mary. The translation was made by an American nun, since deceased, who wished to remain anonymous.
The first edition was issued with the approval and warm recommendation of the following members of the American hierarchy: Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishops Gross, Feehan and Elder, and Bishop Toebbe. It also included testimonials from Michael Wittman, Bishop of Ratisbon, Dean Overberg, Sister Emmerich's spiritual director, Count Leopold von Stolberg, J. J. Goerres, Dom Prosper Guéranger and several others less well known in our day. To this list might be added the names of Claudel, the Maritains, Huysmans, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, Leon Bloy . . . to name but a few who have written in glowing terms of the saintly "Bride of the Passion" who was privileged to bear the wounds of Him whose life she beheld in the prophetic eye of her spirit.
The publishers, in reprinting these volumes, do so in complete and willing conformity to the decrees of Pope Urban VIII respecting private revelations, persons not as yet canonized, and the prudence with
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which all alleged supernatural phenomena not attested to by the Church must properly be regarded. The final decision in all such matters rests with the See of Rome, to which the publishers humbly submit.
Like other private revelations, Sister Emmerich's accounts of the life of Our Lord, His Blessed Mother, and other biblical personages should be treated with that respect and that degree of faith which they seem to merit when compared with the holy dogmas of our Faith as derived from Scripture and Tradition, as well as when compared with our knowledge of history, geography, and science. These revelations are not, of course, guaranteed free from all error, as are the Sacred Scriptures. The Imprimatur which these books bear simply means they have been judged by ecclesiastical authority to be free of error in matters of faith and morals. Nevertheless, these revelations show a remarkable harmony with what is known about the history, geography, and customs of the ancient world.
The visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich provide a wealth of information not found in the Bible. In these times of disbelief, when the Sacred Scriptures are so often regarded as symbolical narratives with little historical value, the visions of this privileged soul providentially confirm the Christian's faith in the rock-solid reality of the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of His words, His deeds, and His miracles.
In addition, Sister Emmerich's visions show how our sacred religious heritage goes back in an unbroken line all the way to the time of Adam, to the very beginning of the world—a line which no other religion but the Roman Catholic can claim. These revelations show how the Roman Catholic Church faithfully follows the teachings, and administers the Sacraments, of Jesus Christ Himself—which teachings and Sacraments are in turn the perfect fulfillment of the Old Testament religion.
This crucial fact, which has been almost totally
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forgotten in our day, is nevertheless all-important in proving which is the one true religion established by Almighty God. The unbroken line of the Roman Catholic Church becomes obvious to all who read these accounts of the marvelous events which Anne Catherine Emmerich was privileged to behold. For this reason alone, they are priceless—a gift of Divine Providence to an unbelieving world.
May God guide these revelations into the hands of those who need them most. May they do immense good for souls, both in time and for eternity.
—The Publishers January 31, 1986
Feast of St. John Bosco
The Life of Christ contained in these volumes is one of the most complete and one of the most extraordinary works on the subject ever published. It was witnessed in vision by a stigmatized German nun of the early 19th Century, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, and for some periods of Our Lord's life it consists of an almost day-by-day description of the three years of His Public Ministry, combined with a life of Mary, events from the Old Testament and a history of the establishment of the Church by the Apostles.
During the hundred years after it was first published in Germany, The Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ met with all but total neglect in English. The present version, the only complete translation ever to appear in our language, was out of print for over a generation and extremely rare. The first edition (published in 1914) received a very limited distribution and is not to be found in our libraries, bookstores or at second hand.
Besides dealing with the most profound mysteries of Judaism and Christianity, the narrative synchronizes the major events of the Gospels with the feasts, fasts and Sabbaths of the ancient Jewish calendar and liturgy. It includes biographies of the ancestors and relatives of the Holy Family, John the Baptist, the Apostles and minor disciples, Mary Magdalen, Judas and Lazarus—to mention only a few—as well as a veritable encyclopedia of information regarding the culture, customs, political and religious sects, architecture, geography, agriculture, even the weather conditions of first-century Palestine. Twenty major journeys of Christ are recorded in a detailed itineraria of the cities and towns of Galilee,
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Samaria, Judea, Gilead and (in the Third Year) Cyprus, Chaldea and Egypt.
The person to whom this Summa Biblica was revealed was a peasant girl born of devout and very poor parents on a farm in Westphalia in 1774. She received little education. For a number of years she worked on the farm, then as a servant girl, and later became a seamstress. At the age of 28 she entered the Augustinian convent at Dulmen, a small country town a few miles from her birthplace, near Munster. Ten years later, in 1811, all religious communities in western Germany were suppressed on the order of Jerome Bonaparte and the nuns forced to separate and find refuge wherever they could.
Shortly before taking her vows, while she was still working in the world, Anne Catherine had received the visible stigmata of the bleeding Crown of Thorns on her head. A few months after the closing of the convent, a cross appeared on her breast, as well as the wounds of the Passion on her hands, feet and side. She was given shelter by charitable persons of the town and for the remaining years of her life was unable to leave her bed. Her life became that of a victim soul, voluntarily dedicated to suffering and acts of mystical reparation. She gradually lost the power to eat food and often could not even drink a few drops of water. Also, toward the end of her life she did not sleep. She became widely known, and the public manner of her life added greatly to her sufferings. Besides the great numbers who came to see her, not always from pious motives, there were two prolonged and scrupulous investigations made of her case, one by a deeply antagonistic civil commission, in which every conceivable—and futile—effort was made to heal her mysterious wounds and expose her as an imposter.
Among those who visited her was one of the leading literary figures of the day in Germany, the poet, Clemens Brentano. He was then at the height of a
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brilliant and worldly career as the author of various published works. His meeting with Sister Emmerich had a profound and lasting influence on his life. He immediately grasped the importance of keeping a written record of her experiences, abandoned all other projects and, having obtained the permission of her spiritual director, settled himself in Dulmen. For the next five years, from the autumn of 1818 until the day of her death, February 9, 1824, he dedicated himself to the more or less continual daily task of recording her life and visions. The notes preserved in his Journals form one of the most extensive records of its kind ever kept and provided the source for the three published works combined in this version.
The period of the Emmerich revelations was one of the darkest hours in the history of Europe, the so-called Age of Enlightenment and the era of the Napoleonic wars. In the year Anne Catherine was born there appeared in Germany a work destined to be the first attack on Christianity of the rationalist school of historical criticism, Reimarus' Apologia or Defense for the Reasonable Worshippers of God. Its theme was the naked denial of the supernatural element in religion and the Bible as revelation. Two years later, in France, Voltaire published his Bible at last Explained and his History of the Establishment of Christianity. During the following century there continued to appear, for the most part in Germany, a whole flood of similar writings in which, under the appearance of scientific objectivity, Jesus Christ was explained as a minor historical figure, if not actually a myth, and the Church He had founded as the creation of deluded or calculating men.
In light of the period when they were revealed, it is seen that the historical content in the Emmerich visions and their emphasis upon the humanity of the Son of Man was profoundly allied to their spiritual mission. The purpose of private revelations, as defined
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by St. Thomas, is not to prove or to add anything to the truth of Christian doctrine, but to offer men of a certain period and because of the circumstances of that period a direction for human action.
In this our 20th Century, their principal value lies, it would seem, in their ability to focus our attention on the myriad of explicit detail which Anne Catherine witnessed in vision—details of the various episodes and events of Christ's life which confirm and expand upon what we are given in the Gospels and which reveal many, many additional points which bear directly upon the establishment of our Religion and its many saintly practices, devotions, sacramentals, and liturgical events. The net effect of reading about these events, as the visionary was privileged to see them, is the confirming of our faith in what the Church teaches, as well as in her various practices and devotions. Living, as we are, in the last half of the 20th Century, we are witnessing a continual deterioration of belief in the Catholic Faith. What these revelations of Sister Emmerich achieve for us is to call us back to a firm and committed adherence to all that Holy Mother the Church teaches.
For the men of the 19th Century, on the other hand (and actually, for many in the 20th Century as well), the purpose of these revelations on the life of Christ, insofar as one is humanly able to judge them, was to point out, in authentic terms, the historic reality of the Incarnation and the Redemption. Its striking realism and almost incredible wealth of historical, archaeological, chronological and geographical detail were the necessary means to accomplish this purpose at a time when scholarship and the alleged demonstration of facts were being used to deny the fundamental dogma of Christianity, that God was made Man.
During the century that has passed, and to an even greater extent in the last fifty years, many significant advances have been made in the field of biblical
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scholarship. Along with the opening up of the Holy Land to archaeological exploration, the systematic study of ancient history and languages, new translations of the Bible and many important discoveries of new evidence, has come a gradual accumulation of accurate information, and with it the demonstration in scientific terms of the historical validity of the Gospels and the reliability of early Christian tradition. Yet despite this invaluable accumulation, unequalled in any previous generation, the field is admitted by its leaders to be still in its infancy and in constant need of correction. As in every truly scientific advance, a great part of the modern achievement has been, not discoveries alone, but the elimination of earlier errors and the isolation of problems that yet remain. From the present objective viewpoint and with the help of present day knowledge it is possible, now more than ever before, to evaluate the historical content in the Emmerich revelations.
It must be noted that the Emmerich revelations are not directed towards the end of merely supplying us with historical data. Their purpose is also spiritual, for they are not written in the technical language of scholarship. They also contain a great deal of mystical, theological and symbolical material that cannot and ought not to be taken as historical fact. Furthermore, in their published form, they include many experimental and provisional arrangements of the material arising from the original problems of the narration and Brentano's later attempts to put it in proper order.
The narration was attended by many difficulties. There were interruptions, omissions, repetitions and an almost infinite complexity in the subject matter itself. Sister Emmerich's visions of the public life of Christ did not begin at the beginning of the First Year, but at a point not clearly defined towards the end of the Third. There were several gaps, one lasting six months, only partially restored later from
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memory or repeated on dates out of sequence with the biblical period they referred to. In some cases the order was not determined by the historical chronology but by the liturgical seasons of the Church, to which Sister Emmerich's whole life was attuned in a mysterious manner. Many visions of the Third Year were repeated annually during the long period of Septuagesima, thus occurring and recurring on varying dates in the Christian calendar. Each year during Passiontide, Advent and Lent, on the feast days of saints, or in relation to her ceaseless mystical labors of reparation, she saw and related other scenes of a liturgical or symbolical sort interwoven with those of the life of the Saviour.
It is not difficult to understand, therefore, that for some eighteen years following Sister Emmerich's death, until the day of his own, the Pilgrim (the familiar name by which she called Brentano) engaged in repeated and never wholly successful attempts to organize the immense mass of writing he had preserved. Most of the material was never published by him. During his lifetime he brought out only The Bitter Passion (also known as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ), based largely on a special series of visions witnessed during Lent, 1823. At the time of his death he had nearly completed The Life of Mary (also known as The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary), a work compiled from various visions, mainly of liturgical origin, which was put into final form and posthumously published by his relatives. The longest part of his record, the day-by-day cycle of the three years of the public life of Christ, was beyond his power to compose and he referred to it, significantly, as his "lockjaw." It is known that he remained dissatisfied with the final arrangement. As his life drew to a close he sought, in vain, to find someone qualified to complete the project, to whom he could impart the full knowledge of the problems as he alone knew them. After his
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death the manuscripts passed into other hands and in 1858/60 the three-volume Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was published for the first time at Regensburg by the Very Rev. Carl Erhard Schmöger, C.SS.R., in an edition based on the Journals as Brentano had left them. This edition has remained the standard and the source for the many subsequent editions and translations, including the present English version.
The remarkable visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich light up innumerable aspects of the Faith, bringing to life many things which the reader may not have sufficiently appreciated. Our Lord's manner of healing and exorcising, His teaching on the connection between sin and physical maladies, His teaching on marriage and especially the role of the wife, Our Lord's attitude toward material possessions and the poor, the religious status of pagans and the way in which Our Lord presented His message to them—these are a few of the fascinating topics covered in these pages.
But beyond individual insights into one or another aspect of the Christian traditions, there are two central insights to be gained from these four books—insights of paramount significance regarding the very definition of the Christian religion. These are: 1) The Church which Jesus Christ founded was the Catholic Church, a Church identical in substance and even in detail with the Catholic Church of today; 2) The Church which Our Lord Jesus Christ founded was the perfect fulfillment of the religion of the Old Testament, going back all the way to the time of Adam—thus the Catholic religion is the one true religion established and approved by Almighty God from the very beginning of the world.
Anne Catherine Emmerich saw and heard Our Lord teaching doctrines which are the same as those taught by the Catholic Church of today. As she sets forth these doctrines, the Catholic of today will have no difficulty in recognizing as Catholic Christ's words on penance, marriage, prayer, mercy, the Bread of Life, humility, love of the poor, gratitude to God,
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faith, avoiding the occasions of sin, amendment of life, Baptism, renunciation of all earthly things to follow Christ, and the punishment in store for those who do not accept Him and His teachings.
Moreover, Sister Emmerich clearly describes Our Lord as establishing a sacrificing priesthood, bishops, Sacraments, blessings, sacramentals (e.g., holy water, holy oils), the power of exorcism, the papacy, the Blessed Sacrament, and even the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament upon the altar. She saw Our Lord bringing His Apostles to His Mother to be adopted as her spiritual children, finally entrusting all Christians to her as He hung on the cross; and she saw Him celebrating the first Mass, on the evening of the Last Supper—with ceremonies strikingly similar to those of Holy Mass of today, including the ablution of the priest's thumb and forefinger after the Consecration, and the placing of a particle of the Sacred Host into the chalice. The reader is also struck by the concrete way in which Our Lord perpetuated His Church; for this purpose He ordained and commissioned the Apostles to preach His word and administer His Sacraments, this commission to begin with the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. All these elements were present in the Church from the very beginning. They were not added onto Christ's message by human invention at a later date; they came from Our Lord Himself.
These details show most clearly that Our Lord founded a visible Church. Truly, the entire Christian religion can be summed up in those words of St. John the Evangelist: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." (John 1:14). Our Lord's name, "Emmanuel," means "God with us"—a fact which was true not only for the years of His life on earth but is still true today, by His Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist upon our altars.
Yet so many of the elements of Christ's religion, left to us by Our Lord Himself, are disregarded and
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even attacked by those who claim that "the church" is something purely interior and invisible, existing solely in the hearts of individuals—individuals who want to accept Christ's Word but yet who deny His Sacraments and who base their faith upon their own personal understanding of His Word. Sister Emmerich's accounts, on the other hand, show that Our Lord continually demanded that His listeners accept His divine interpretation of the Holy Scriptures—and He sent His Apostles out to continue the true presentation of this teaching. ("He that heareth you, heareth me"—Luke 10:16). Indeed, the Pharisees themselves had the same Scriptures (Old Testament) as Our Lord, but they based their religion and teachings on their own human interpretations of them. For this sin Our Lord time and time again rebuked them severely.
Let no one fail to notice that the Catholic Church—and she alone—speaks to her hearers today in the very same terms used by Our Lord: You must hear My living voice telling you My divine explanation of the Scriptures. Even though the New Testament, as a book, did not exist in the early Christian days, Christ's Church existed, nourished by the unwritten divine Tradition that had come down through the Apostles from Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
A second great insight to be gathered from these revelations is that while Our Lord was indeed the Founder of a new religion, this new religion was itself the accomplishment of the old religion, of the holy expectations of the Chosen People, the Patriarchs and Prophets, back through Noah all the way to the time of Adam, who was the first human being to receive an intimation of God's Promised Redeemer. (Gen. 3:15). Our Lord Himself was the fulfillment of God's Promise, and He left a Church, His Mystical Body, to continue that blessed fulfillment until the end of the world.
One of the great proofs that Our Lord came from
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God and was the promised Messiah was His accomplishing of the Old Testament prophecies. The Old Covenant (or Old Testament) between God and man, begun with God's Promise to Abraham (Genesis 17), had been renewed time and again with animal sacrifices and the shedding of animal blood. But God had promised the Prophets (e.g., Ezechiel 37 and Isaiah 49) that He would one day establish a new covenant between Himself and His people. Moreover, the Prophet Malachias had prophesied that one day there would be a "clean oblation" (Mal. 1:11), a sacrifice offered from the rising to the setting of the sun, a sacrifice offered even among the Gentiles. In addition to Malachias' prophecy in word, the High Priest Melchisedech had foretold this new and perfect sacrifice by means of a deed, by offering to God bread and wine (which sacrifice is still mentioned today in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass). And of course, Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac is the most famous prophetic deed, or "type," foreshadowing the perfect Sacrifice to come—that is, that of the father sacrificing his "only begotten son." (Abraham's sacrifice, too, is mentioned in the Mass today.)
When He came upon earth, Our Lord Jesus Christ, fully conscious of His authority, abolished the Old Covenant between God and man which had existed since Abraham (some 2,000 years before) and established a New Covenant, thus inaugurating an entirely new era in the history of the world. Watching Our Lord unfold this New Covenant through His teachings, and then seeing it draw to its consummation as He, the God-Man, seals it by shedding His Blood, first mystically, after the Last Supper, and then physically on Calvary, is one of the most striking experiences the reader will encounter in these entire four volumes.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Catholic of today watches in awe as Anne Catherine Emmerich describes the momentous events of the first Holy
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Thursday and Good Friday, knowing—much more clearly than did the Apostles at that time—that on those two days was carried out the most epochal event in the history of the human race. "A new era, a new sacrifice, are about to begin," Our Lord said on that first Holy Thursday night, "and they shall last till the end of the world." As the reader sees the old religious forms (principally the Paschal supper) giving way to the new (Holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament), those sonorous and weighty words of the Tantum Ergo come to mind: Et antiquum documentum, Novo cedar ritui ("Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, newer rites of grace prevail."). To His ordained priests Our Lord gave the power and the command to perpetuate mystically His perfect sacrifice of His Body and Blood, the source and wellspring of all salvation, until He should come again at the end of the world.
The phenomena which accompanied Christ's death on Calvary—the earthquake in Jerusalem and the rending of the Temple veil—were outward signs that the Old Covenant had just come to an end and that the most desired event in the history of mankind, the making of a New Covenant between God and man, a Covenant bringing salvation to all those who would be faithful to it, had finally taken place. For the first time since the sin of Adam, the Gates of Heaven were again opened to the members of the human race.
Henceforth God's Chosen People would no longer be the Jews only; the Chosen People would now be all those, Jews and Gentiles alike, who would accept the New Covenant and its requirements: obedience to the New Law—that is, the teachings of Christ; and the New Sacrifice, that clean and perfect oblation of the Body and Blood of Christ Himself, as perpetuated in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. God's Chosen People would now become known as "Christians," and soon they would also begin to be
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known by the name of "Catholics," that is, those who embrace that religion which is “katholikos,” or universal, given by God as the one way of salvation for all men everywhere.
As Anne Catherine Emmerich describes the words and deeds of Our Lord during His public ministry, culminating with the events of Holy Week and Pentecost, one sees that He is clearly conscious of accomplishing the Mysteries of Salvation for which Patriarchs and Prophets had longed during many ages. He speaks of Abraham, of the Promise, the manna in the desert, the destroying angel, and of the prophecy of Malachias regarding the "clean oblation." Our Lord even visited the tomb of Abraham, the first Patriarch, the man with whom God had made the Old Covenant.
By God's Providence there are numerous "coincidences" of time and place, recorded in the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, which link the Old Testament events to their fulfillment in the deeds of Jesus Christ. For instance, Anne Catherine states (in agreement with a long Christian tradition) that Our Lord was crucified over the very spot on Mount Calvary where the bones of Adam lay buried; thus, the sin of Adam was repaired, four millennia later, over the very relics of him who had committed the Original Sin and thus brought about the fall of the human race. Likewise, the chalice used by Our Lord at the Last Supper was the very same one used by Melchisedech some 2,000 years previously in his prophetic sacrifice of bread and wine—a chalice which had come with Noah and his family in the Ark.
As one reads Anne Catherine Emmerich's accounts of the events of our salvation, the conviction grows that no aspect was accidental. God's eternal plan was perfect in every detail, and Our Lord carried out to the letter those things which had been foretold of Him. Through these revelations, one sees clearly that man's task is not the foolish one of creating
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for himself a religion after his own liking, but rather that he must submit in obedience to that religion given him by Almighty God: the Catholic religion—the one religion prepared for man from the time of Adam, brought from Heaven by the Son of God, and guaranteed to endure, to unite men with God, and to lead souls to Heaven, until the very end of time.
Deo Gratias.
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