BOFFO BEATITUDE.(The Talk of the Town)

Last Tuesday, a double-decker sightseeing bus was inching its way along Via della Conciliazione, the wide thoroughfare that leads to St. Peter's Basilica, in Rome. The bus, which was plastered all over with an advertisement for the DVD of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ," stopped frequently. For a moment, a trick of perspective made the church's dome look like a beanie sitting on top of the bloody, thorn-crowned head of Jesus Christ that covered the back of the bus. The same peculiar alignment of religion and Hollywood was evident in the shops along the approach to St. Peter's. "The Passion" TM was taking up space that the crucifixes, rosaries, and other untrademarked forms of devotion once occupied.

On Sunday, in the piazza in front of St. Peter's, Pope John Paul II will beatify Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, the nineteenth-century nun whose visionary account of Jesus' last twelve hours was a major source for Gibson's film. Sister Anne was a mostly illiterate German nun who, in 1812, when she was thirty-eight, began to manifest stigmata, starting with a circle of bleeding wounds around her head, followed by wounds on her hands and feet and the imprint of a cross on her chest. The Romantic poet Clemens Brentano spent five years at her bedside, taking notes while she mentally travelled back in time and became a spectator at Jesus' Crucifixion, describing the scene with a cinematic eye for detail that the Gospel writers cannot match. She saw, for example, the type of whips the Romans used to flog Jesus ("straps covered with iron hooks, which penetrated to the bone, and tore off large pieces of flesh at every blow"). In 1833, nine years after Emmerich's death, Brentano published the nun's visions as "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." The book was famous throughout Europe for much of the nineteenth century; travellers to Jerusalem used it as a kind of spiritual Baedeker for the sites of the Passion, even though Emmerich herself had never been there. The gruesome account of Christ's physical suffering had an effect on nineteenth-century readers not unlike the impact Gibson's "Passion" has had on modern moviegoers.

Because the Pope has already made his enthusiasm for the movie known ("It is as it was," he reportedly said), and has granted ...