a number of similar assertions are made in the book
The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Blessed Emmerich
quoted below:
In the great longing which I had, I then received a
multitude of visions of the Blessed Virgin’s ancestors. I must have seen them back to the
fourth or fifth generation. I saw them always as wonderfully pious and simple people
inspired by a quite extraordinary secret longing for the coming of the promised Messias.
The real Essenes were specially concerned with prophetic matters, and their head on
Mount Horeb was often vouchsafed divine revelations in the cave of Elias respecting the
coming of the Messias. He had knowledge of the family from which the mother of the
Messias was to come, and at the time that he gave prophetic advice to the grandparents of
St. Anne in matters of marriage, he saw that the day of the Lord was approaching.
Anna’s steadfast faith was supported by an inmost certainty that the coming of the
Messias was near, and that she herself was among His human relations. She prayed for the
fulfilment of the Promise with loud supplications, and both she and
Joachim were always striving after more perfect purity of life.
The maidservant’s reviling of Sara
(Tob. 3.7) symbolized the reviling by the heathen and by the godless and unbelieving among
the Jews against the expectation of the Messias, for whose coming all God-fearing Jews
were, like Sara, inspired to pray with ever-increasing fervour.
Joseph was very devout and prayed fervently for the coming of the
Messias.
The Blessed Virgin lived with other virgins in the Temple under the care of pious
matrons. The maidens employed themselves with embroidery and other forms of decoration
of carpets and vestments, and also with the cleaning of these vestments and of the vessels
used in the Temple. They had little cells, from which they could see into the Temple, and
here they prayed and meditated. When these maidens were grown up, they were given in
marriage. Their parents in dedicating them to the Temple had offered them entirely to God,
and the devout and more spiritual Israelites had for a long time had a secret presentiment
that the marriage of one of these virgins would one day contribute to the coming of the
promised Messias.
Elisabeth was, however, unable to abandon her expectation, for she had learnt in a
dream that one of her family had become the mother of the promised Messias. She had at
once thought of Mary, had longed to see her, and had in spirit perceived her in the distance
on her way to her.
The Blessed Virgin must have known that she was to bear her child in
Bethlehem, but had been silent out of humility. She knew it from the writings of the
Prophets about the birth of the Messias, all of which she treasured in her little cupboard at
Nazareth. (She had been given them by her women-teachers in the Temple and had been
instructed in them by these holy women. She used to read them very often and pray for their
fulfilment. Her prayers were ever full of yearning for the coming of the Messias; she ever
extolled as blessed her who should bear the holy child, and hoped only to be allowed to
serve her as her lowest maidservant. Never in her humility had she thought that she herself
might be the chosen one.)
