Stewart Ain - Staff
Writer
In the wake of Mel Gibson’s box office blockbuster “The
Passion of the Christ,” which sparked a crisis in
Jewish-Christian relations, the 19th century German mystic
whose writings Gibson relied on for the negative portrayal of
Jews is about to become beatified, touching off a new storm of
protests.
“Why do this when it will be painful to us?”
asked Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation
League, who was Gibson’s most vocal critic in the run-up to
“The Passion.”
The Rev. John Pawlikowski, a Catholic
priest and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at
the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, pointed out that
the “worst parts of the film about Jews and Judaism are
supposed to have come from her writing.”
He was
referring to Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, who the Vatican
reportedly is set to beatify Oct. 3. Such a move is the last
step in a process that could lead to sainthood.
Although Gibson relied on the gospels of Mark, Matthew
and Luke, the filmmaker said he also borrowed heavily from
Sister Emmerich’s book, which presents her own “eyewitness”
accounts of the lives of Mary and Jesus, including the
Crucifixion.
The Catholic News Service reported that
Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit in Rome who has championed her cause,
said that in making the decision to beatify her, the Vatican
ignored her writings.
“She is being judged not on the
basis of what she has written but, as always, on the basis of
her virtues,” Gumpel was quoted as saying.
Rabbi David
Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the American
Jewish Committee in Jerusalem, said he wrote to the Vatican
several weeks ago and received a similar response. He said the
Vatican explained that “beatification does not mean that the
person was 100 percent kosher, only that the actions
attributed to the person are worthy of emulation.”
“More important is that they have acknowledged that
that book that is the basis for Gibson’s inspiration … has
nothing to do with the process of beatification,” Rabbi Rosen
said.
“Does that make us happy? No. Are we concerned
about it? Yes, because in the wake of the Gibson movie one
would have expected a certain degree of sensitivity on the
part of the Vatican as to how it would be viewed,” he said.
In a letter last week to Catholic Church officials in
Rome, the United States and Germany, Foxman expressed “great
distress” over the beatification plans. He said Sister
Emmerich’s visions, as recounted in writings attributed to
her, have “fomented hatred and anti-Semitism.” And he said
beatifying her “could cause harm to Jewish-Catholic
relations,” especially in the aftermath of the Gibson movie.
Told that the Vatican is saying it ignored her
writings in deciding to beatify Sister Emmerich, Foxman said
in an interview, “How do you beatify the good and ignore the
bad?”
Sister Emmerich lived from 1774 until 1824. As a
child she is supposed to have received visitations from Jesus
and John the Baptist. In 1799 she began to bleed from a
ringlet of tiny wounds around her head. Three years later she
exhibited the stigmata on her hands, feet and side, and became
so weak and ill that after 1813 she rarely left her bed,
according to an article by the Rev. John O’Malley in the
national Catholic weekly America.
An examination of
Sister Emmerich by civil and ecclesiastical officials found no
evidence of deception. Six weeks after she died, her body was
exhumed to make sure her followers had not stolen it. The body
was found to be free of “corruption and odor,” Rev. O’Malley
noted.
It was while she lay in bed that Clemens
Brentano, a German poet, sat at her bedside and transcribed
the words she spoke during her visions about the lives of
Jesus and Mary. Nine years after her death, he published them
in a book, “The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
After the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich.”
Efforts to beatify her began in 1892 but were halted
in 1928 by the Vatican after questions were raised about
whether the text of the book came from Brentano or were truly
Sister Emmerich’s visions.
Speaking of Jesus, one
passage in the book said, “His body was entirely covered with
black, blue, and red marks; the blood was trickling down on
the ground, and yet the furious cries which issued from among
the assembled Jews showed that their cruelty was far from
being satiated.”
Said another: “The Jews, having quite
exhausted their barbarity, shut Jesus up in a little vaulted
prison, the remains of which subsist to this day.” Other
passages labeled the Jews as “wicked” and “cruel.”
The
beatification process was resumed in the 1980s, but with the
proviso that her writings be excluded from consideration. Her
application languished until Gibson said in an interview last
fall that her book had influenced his movie.
Rabbi
Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs for the
ADL, said her writings profoundly influenced Gibson’s work,
giving him the idea to include Satan among the Jews; to
include a scene of Jewish figures brutalizing Jesus and
dragging him around with a bag over his head; to flip Jesus
upside down while nailing him to the cross; and to make an
earthquake that destroyed the entire Temple after the
Crucifixion “because of the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.”
“It is possible to present the Passion of Jesus
without making it into an anti-Semitic screed,” Rabbi
Bretton-Granatoor said, adding that the movie made it appear
that the entire Jewish community was allied against Jesus when
that was not the case.
Rev. Pawlikowski said that if
one takes seriously the statements of the Church and Pope John
Paul II that anti-Semitism is a sin, they must be applied in a
concrete way.
“There is no indication that she changed
her views, and unless you clearly repudiate her writings you
give a halo to all her material, including the anti-Semitic
material,” he said.
Sister Mary Boys, a professor of
theology at Union Theological Seminary, said Sister Emmerich’s
writing “betrays all the prejudices and limitations of a 19th
century peasant woman … [and] reflect a very negative
understanding of Judaism.”
She speculated that because
of the Pope’s failing health, Sister Emmerich’s beatification
is being “driven in a power vacuum by certain right-wing
groups.”
“I don’t understand what they were thinking,”
Sister Boys said. “This is not a book that we want people to
read as a commentary on the gospels. It is precisely an
interpretation that the Church has been writing against for 40
years.”
Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center
for Interreligious Understanding in Secaucus, N.J., said
beatification is the Church’s own decision and “does not
reflect on a whole range of Jewish relations. … Whoever they
beatify, they beatify for very narrow internal reasons in the
same way whoever we chose as Israel’s chief rabbi is chosen
for internal reasons.”
“I don’t think we should get
involved in this,” Rabbi Bemporad said. “What we should
basically deal with is the issue of can they come out with a
full and final statement that recognizes Judaism as a valid,
living religion so that in no way can they ever view Judaism
again as a fossil or something that could be superseded or
anything like that.”
But Rabbi A. James Rudin, senior
interreligious adviser of the AJCommittee, expressed concern
that if Sister Emmerich does eventually become a saint it will
have an impact on the Jewish community “because her writings
are really anti-Jewish.”
“Here is a nun from a fairly
recent time and her writings are just filled with anti-Jewish
stereotypes and images,” he said. “If someone [like this]
merits sainthood, it is a damaging signal and a setback for
Catholic-Jewish relations.”
Rabbi Rudin said he was
concerned as well about the timing of the Vatican’s action,
which will come just a month after Gibson’s movie is released
on DVD.
Philip Cunningham, executive director of the
Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, said
that aside from her writings, he does not know much else about
the life of Sister Emmerich.
“She was sickly and
bedridden toward the end of her life, and people visited her
and were edified by the experience,” he said.
Cunningham added that he found it “puzzling that
someone would be advocated for sainthood on the basis of not a
whole lot of information.
“I don’t see how, at least
in the current climate in the aftermath of the Gibson movie.”
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