Mel Gibson's 'Passion' Source En Route to Sainthood

The saintly nun whose visions were a large part of the inspiration behind Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is about to take the first step toward sainthood.

Pope John Paul II plans to beatify the late mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich.

She has waited a long time for the honor. The process of her beatification was introduced by the Bishop of Münster in 1892.

Bishop Reinhard Lettmann announced the beatification date last week in his Muenster diocese in western Germany, where Sister Emmerich lived. Beatification is the last step before sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.

The pope will confer the title "Blessed" on Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich at an Oct. 3 ceremony.

Sister Emmerich died in 1824 and is best remembered for a book containing graphic descriptions of her visions of Jesus' passion and death.

Critics charged that Gibson's use of her visions to enhance his depictions of Christ's bloody passion and crucifixion was an endorsement of her alleged anti-Semitism, and are now attacking the Catholic Church's beatification of the nun on those grounds.

According to Reuters news agency, the Vatican has said the pope will beatify Sister Emmerich for her virtuous life, and not for her best-selling book.

But the Oct. 3 ceremony will further publicize her Passion accounts that some critics denounce as medieval and anti-Semitic.

"Beatification will almost certainly be interpreted as approval of them," Father John O'Malley, a church historian, wrote disapprovingly in the U.S. Jesuit weekly America, according to Reuters.

An Augustinian nun, stigmatic and mystic, Emmerich was born on Sept. 8, 1774, at Flamsche, in the Diocese of Münster, Westphalia, Germany. She died on Feb. 9, 1824. Throughout her life she had miraculous visions, including the details of Christ's suffering omitted in the Gospels.

Never in good health, she entered an Augustinian convent at the age of 28. In 1813 she became bedridden and began to bear the stigmata - the wounds of Christ.

According to the The Catholic Encyclopedia, her prayers to be relieved of the stigmata were answered in late 1818, and although the wounds in her hands and feet closed, the others remained, and on Good Friday all would reopen.

She began to reveal her visions concerning the Passion to a famous poet, Klemens Brentano, who recorded them and had them published in 1833 under the title "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich."

Gibson has said that his first inspiration to make the Passion film came when he accidentally picked up her book and read it.

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