Domesticating a Mystic: Catholic Saint-Making in Weimar Germany

Veneration of Westphalian stigmatic and visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick (1774–1824) reached new heights during the Weimar Republic. German Catholics engaged in promoting her beatification cause organized a multipronged, multimedia campaign. Priests and laypersons, as well as the popular press and theological journals, all encouraged the veneration of Emmerick as “a crucified saint for a crucified *Volk*.” Memories of Napoleonic French aggression, secularization, and waning religious belief provided revanchist Weimar German Catholics with a readymade narrative of victimization. Moreover, as a poster child of the Westphalian *Heimat*, her pilgrimage sites offered a spiritual antidote to the “godless” modern city. Meanwhile, everyday Catholics continued a century-old, locally-based tradition of veneration that did not strictly conform to the new “official” line. Emmerick's Weimar cult, and the modern saint-making process more generally, thus provide a window onto the push and pull between clergy and laity, men and women, institutional and popular forces, in shaping lived German Catholicism in the 1920s.