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Mystic nun inspired Passion
04/10/2004 07:40 - (SA)
Vatican City - Pope John Paul II on Sunday moved five Catholics closer to sainthood, including a German nun whose graphic visions of Christ's suffering helped inspire the blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ and Austria's last reigning emperor.
Cheers went up in St Peter's Square from a crowd of about 30 000 people from many countries when the pontiff finished reading the Latin words with which he beatified the five candidates, and banners with images of the five faithful were unfurled on the facade of St Peter's Basilica.
Beatification is the last formal step in the Catholic church before possible sainthood.
John Paul declared that February 9 will be the Church's feast day for Anna Katharina Emmerick, a sickly, virtually illiterate nun whose gory visions of Jesus' last hours of suffering before his crucifixion drew pilgrims to her bedside in the years before her death on February 9, 1824.
Fans of Mel Gibson have read how the director drew much of his inspiration for minutes-long shots of bloodied flesh and torture of Jesus before his crucifixion from a book long widely held to be a faithful account of the mystic Emmerick's visions.
The bestowing of one of the Church's highest honours on Emmerick irritated some already unhappy about the Vatican's enthusiasm for a film some called anti-Semitic because it might be seen as depicting Jews as the major force behind Christ's death.
In the early 1800s, Emmerick was known for nourishing herself solely on water and communion wafers and suffering from unexplained bleeding wounds resembling those Jesus Christ suffered during his crucifixion.
In deciding that Emmerick merited beatification, the Vatican concluded that it is impossible to tell how much of the accounts of her visions contained in the book The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, came from the nun's recounting and how much came from other writings the poet consulted.
Brentano's book has been cited as a major source of inspiration for Gibson.
- AP
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South Africa
