The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

[On December 8 ^th, 1820, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the soul of Catherine Emmerich was transported in an active state of prayer and meditation over a great part of the earth. The whole of this visionary journey will be described in its proper place, but in the meantime we will reproduce the following extracts from it in order to give some idea of these journeyings of her soul.

[She came to Rome, was with the Holy Father, visited a much-loved and devout nun in Sardinia, reached Palestine after a short visit to Palermo, went to India, and thence to what she calls the mountain of the Prophet. [46] Thence she journeyed to Abyssinia, where she came to a strange Jewish city on a high mountain rock and visited its ruler Judith, [47] with whom she spoke of the Messiah, of that day's feast of the Conception of His Mother, of the holy Advent time, and of the approaching Feast of His Birth. During the whole of this journey she did all that a conscientious missionary would have done on a similar journey to carry out his task and make use of his opportunities; she prayed, taught, helped, comforted, and learnt. But in order to make plain to the reader, in her own words, what she perceived on this journey regarding the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we must refer him to the note on page 46, in which that part of Jesus' ministry to which she here alludes is described in detail.]

When in my great dream-journey I came into the Promised Land, I saw all those things which I have related about the Conception of the Blessed Virgin. Thereupon I entered into the daily visions of Our Lord's ministry and had today reached the 8 ^th of December of the third year of His teaching. I found Jesus not in the Promised Land, but was brought by my guide eastwards over the Jordan to Arabia, where the Lord, accompanied by three young men, was in a tent city of the three holy kings in which they had settled after their return from Bethlehem.