Author Description

Anne Catherine Emerich is also known as Anna Catherine Emmerick. The work of Father Schoemeger inspired this work. The author intends to have inserted, at some considerable length, specimens of those "Contemplations" of Anne Catharine which are least well known to English speaking Catholics, especially the contemplations which relate to the active life of our Blessed Lord. These already exist in two several translations in French, but have not hitherto, as far as I am aware, been given in our own language. I found that it would have been difficult to bring the selections within reasonable compass, unless all idea of going over the whole of our Lord's preaching, however cursorily, had been abandoned, and I have therefore thought better to reserve these translations for a separate publication, which I hope may soon appear as a supplement to the present volume. This being the case, it is also natural to defer till the same opportunity some prefatory remarks on the general subject of the visions or contemplations of Anne Catharine which were intended to accompany the translations just mentioned. In truth, the Life of Anne Catharine is a complete study and picture in itself. She might have had her mission of suffering and expiation at a time which in so many respects resembled our own, she might have been the holy peasant child, the misunderstood and persecuted nun, the Religious driven back to the world by the tyrannical suppression of her convent, the ecstatic and stigmatized representative of the Passion of our Blessed Lord in days of unbelief and chastisement, without having also the other gift and the other vocation which were bestowed on her-the gift of marvellous and almost perpetual insight into spiritual truths in the Conn of visions representing the life of our Lord and of the Church, and the vocation of reviving the faith and rekindling the love of so many by the communication of what she saw and heard. These latter gifts, indeed, are not usually and regularly