I learned from All Things Considered this afternoon that the Catholic Church has just beatified Anne Catherine Emmerich, the nun whose sometimes anti-Semitic visions were an inspiration for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

You won't learn from the NPR story what exactly is anti-Semitic in Emmerich's visions, but you can get a taste of her The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ in this article from New York's Jewish Week:

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."

Nevertheless, the Vatican pressed on with beatification, arguing that (a) those may not be her words and (b) it wouldn't matter anyway. In the NPR story, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter explains:

The official Vatican position, actually, is that [the writings] are largely the work of a German Romantic poet by the name of Clemens Brentano, who came into Sister Anne Catherine's life towards the end and became quite a devotee of hers, and listened to her describe her visions and then went off and fleshed them out, so to speak, and perhaps dramatized them a bit. And because it's not clear how much in the actual book is the original insight of Sister Anne Catherine and how much is the Romantic embellishment of Brentano, the Vatican took the position that they were not going to consider the content of the visions in the beatification process....

From the Vatican's point of view, a beatification and an eventual canonization is never an endorsement of the particular theological or political positions someone took during their life. It's instead a judgment about what the Vatican calls their heroic virtue, which basically means the quality of their interior life, the quality of their devotion, their prayer, their private relation with God.

What was so special about her "interior life"? Allen explains that she had stigmata, that she suffered nobly through a long illness, and that she subsisted during the last ten years of her life on water and communion wafers. Oh, and for all you Dostoevsky fans, the Jewish Week story notes that her body was exhumed six weeks after her death and found to be free of "corruption and odor."

All this, I guess, makes up for the distinct possibility that she believed Jews are evil.

The Jewish Week story credits Gibson with the push to beatify Emmerich:

Efforts to beatify her began in 1892 but were halted in 1928 by the Vatican...

The beatification process was resumed in the 1980s, but ... Her application languished until Gibson said in an interview last fall that her book had influenced his movie.

I was raised in the Catholic Church. I've been out of it for quite a while, but it still infuriates me on a regular basis. It's a church that whispers its opposition to the death penalty and the Iraq war, but shouts its opposition to stem cell research, homosexuality, abortion, and condoms even as an AIDS preventative. It's a church that saw widespread pedophilia and worried most about scandal.This is relatively harmless, but it's infuriating nonetheless.