The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. - documenta ...

The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.Anne Catherine Emmerich216apparently well in health; and she answered, ‘I always feel thus when Mid-Lent comes, for thenthe Church sings with Isaias in the introit at Mass; “Rejoice, O, Jerusalem, and come together allyou that love her; rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow, that you may exult and be filledfrom the breasts of your consolation.” Mid-Lent Sunday is consequently a day of rejoicing; andyou may likewise remember that, in the gospel of this day, the Church relates how our Lord fedfive thousand men with five loaves and two fishes, of which twelve baskets of fragments remained,consequently we ought to rejoice.’She likewise added, that our Lord had deigned to visit her on that day in the Holy Communion,and that she always felt especial spiritual consolation when she received him on that particular dayof the year. The friend cast his eyes on the calendar of the diocese of Munster, and saw that on thatday they not only kept Mid-Lent Sunday, but likewise the Feast of St. Joseph, the foster-father ofour Lord; he was not aware of this before, because in other places the feast of St. Joseph is kept onthe 19th, and he remarked this circumstance to Sister Emmerich, and asked her whether she didnot think that was the cause of her speaking about Joseph. She answered that she was perfectlyaware of its being the feast of the foster-father of Jesus, but that she had not been thinking of thechild of that name. However, a moment after, she suddenly remembered what her thoughts hadbeen the day before, and explained to her friend that the moment the feast of St. Joseph began, hervisions of the sorrowful mysteries of the Passion ceased, and were superseded by totally differentscenes, in which St. Joseph appeared under the form of a child, and that it was to him that the wordswe have mentioned above were addressed.We found that when she received these communications the vision was often in the form of a child,especially in those cases when an artist would have made use of that simile to express his ideas. If,for instance, the accomplishment of some Scripture prophecy was being shown to her, she oftensaw by the side of the illustration a child, who clearly designated the characteristics of such or sucha prophet, by his position, his dress, and the manner in which he held in his hand and waved to andfro the prophetic roll appended to a staff.217Sometimes, when she was in extreme suffering, a beautiful child, dressed in green, with a calm andserene countenance, would approach, and seat himself in a posture of resignation at the side of herbed, allowing himself to be moved from one side to the other, or even put down on to the ground,without the smallest opposition and constantly looking at her affectionately and consoling her. If,when quite prostrate from illness and the sufferings of others which she had taken upon herself,she entered into communication with a saint, either by participation in the celebration of his feast,or from his relics being brought to her, she sometimes saw passages of the childhood of this saint,and at others the most terrible scenes of his martyrdom. In her greatest sufferings she was usuallyconsoled, instructed, or reproved (whichever the occasion called for) by apparitions under the formof children. Sometimes, when totally overcome by trouble and distress, she would fall asleep, andbe carried back in imagination to the scenes and perils of her childhood. She sometimes dreamed,as her exclamations and gestures demonstrated, that she was once more a little country girl of fiveyears old, climbing over a hedge, caught in the briars, and weeping with fear.These scenes of her childhood were always events which had really occurred, and the words whichescaped her showed what was passing in her mind. She would exclaim (as if repeating the words124