Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions of the expectant Blessed Mother

During her visions on the years of preaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Blessed Anne-Catherine Emmerich(1) shared the following on December 26, 1822:

“I often hear the Blessed Virgin telling the women who were her close intimates (for instance, Joanna Chusa and Susanna of Jerusalem) various secrets about herself and about Our Lord, which she knows partly from inner knowledge and partly from what her holy mother Anna told her. Thus today I heard her telling Susanna and Martha that during the time when she was bearing Our Lord within her she never felt the slightest discomfort, nothing but infinite inner joy and beatitude. She told them, too, that Joachim and Anna had met in the hall under the Golden Gate in a golden hour; and that God’s grace had been granted to them here in such abundance as to make it possible for her alone, from her parents’ holy obedience and pure love of God, to have been conceived in her mother’s womb without any stain of sin. She also explained to them that but for the Fall the conception of all men would have been as pure. 

I saw now the whole sequence of grace received by Mary’s parents just as I have always described it, from the appearance of the angel to Anna and Joachim down to their meeting under the Golden Gate; that is to say, in the subterranean hall under the Golden Gate. I saw Joachim and Anna encompassed by a host of angels with heavenly light. They themselves shone and were as pure as spirits in a supernatural state, as no human couple had ever been before them.”

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich 

Excerpt from The Life of The Blessed Virgin Mary From the Visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich. Translated by Sir Michael Palairet 

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774 - 1824) was a Roman Catholic Augustinian Canoness Regular of Windesheim, mystic, Marian visionary, ecstatic and stigmatist. She is commemorated on February 9 according to the Roman Martyrology.