Off Topic — HabitableZone

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Memories of a Catholic childhood
Mary Anne — (archived)

I saw your reply, but didn't respond to it there because I'm already acquainted with the lady. When I was little, I went through a period of fascination with the saints and mystics of the Catholic Church, the canonization process, the whole nine yards.

This was only helped by the parochial school practice of allowing us to dress up for Hallowe'en at school, but only if we came dressed as one of our "name saints". (It's "All Hallow's Eve", you know...) I had the options of Mary or Anne, which pretty much put me in floor-length long-sleeved white dresses with veils (blue if I was Mary, another color if I was Anne) over my tied-back hair, carrying a doll: the Divine Mommy or the Divine Grandmommy forever. My friend Maureen (Maureen="little Mary" in Irish) was the envy of all the girls, for her mother was a painter and a non-conformist, so she came as Mary Magdalene, in red with her hair loose and wearing bangle bracelets, dangling earrings and jingling necklaces, carrying an exotic-looking bottle to anoint the feet of Jesus, heavily rouged and eyeshadowed. The nuns would cluck, but there was nothing they could really do. Poor Christopher: wearing a short tunic and sandals, and carrying a baby doll with an aluminum foil halo on its head to school in upstate New York in late October! He froze his bun...ions off.

Anne Catherine Emmerich wasn't in The Lives of the Saints, but she was listed among the Venerable, one step below Blessed, which is one step below Saint. Have you read the Life of Anne Catherine Emmerich in your link? I know she is considered holy, and I suppose the intercession of God, if one believes, is possible, but with what we know about anorexia and cutting these days, it makes me wonder. I tried to be like Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus for several years, in my youthful innocence, basing my aspirations on a juvenile picture biography. As I did more far-reaching research, I discovered more about her harsh father and her practices of self-mortification, including mixing her food with ashes so as to take all the pleasure out of eating. (She died at the age of 24, of tuberculosis. Big surprise.) I'm not saying that all ecstatics are mentally ill, but one begins to wonder about the fevered minds that revel in self-torture and bloodshed. I took several giant steps backward from that tradition.

If Anne Emmerich had been canonized, it might have been fun to dress up like her, an Anne, on Hallowe'en... With my head wrapped in bandages and blood leaking through, it might have been almost like The Mummy...

Personally, this is probably a big part of what will keep me away from the Gibson film. It's certainly not the politics. I just have a tendency not to give money to things I find repulsive.

Thanks for the link, Tom. Such memories!

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