Regarding the early years of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica little is known, but we rejoice in the possession of a beautiful "vision" of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, an Augustinian nun, stigmatic, and ecstatic .

The Vision of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

Through the relics of St. Scholastica, I saw many scenes in her life and that of St. Benedict.  I saw their paternal home in a great city, not far from Rome.  It was not built entirely in the Roman style.  Before it was a paved courtyard whose low wall was surmounted by a red latticework, and behind lay another court with a garden and a fountain.  In the garden was a beautiful summer-house overrun with vines, and here I saw Benedict and his little sister Scholastica playing as loving, innocent children are wont to amuse themselves.   The flat ceiling of the summer-house was painted all over with figures, which at first I thought sculptured, so clearly were their outline defined.

The brother and sister were very fond of each other and so nearly of the same age that I thought them twins.  The birds flew in familiarly at the windows with flowers and twigs in their beaks and sat looking intently at the children, who were playing with flowers and leaves, planting sticks and making gardens.  I saw them writing and cutting all sorts of figures out of colored stuffs.  Occasionally their nurse came to look after them.

Their parents seemed to be people of wealth, who had much business on hand, for I saw about twenty persons employed in the house; but they did not seem to trouble themselves about their children.  The father was a large powerful man, dressed in the Roman style, he took his meals with his wife and some other members of the family in the lower part of the house, while the children lived entirely upstairs in separate apartments.  Benedict had for preceptor an old ecclesiastic with who he stayed almost all the time, and Scholastica had a nurse near whom she slept.  The brother and sister were not often allowed to be alone together, but whenever they could steal off for a while, they were very gleeful and happy.  I saw Scholastica by her nurse’s side, learning some kind of work.  In the room adjoining that in which she slept stood a table on which lay in baskets the material for her work, a variety of colored stuff, from which she cut figures of birds, flowers, etc., to be sewed on other larger pieces.  When finished they looked as if carved on the groundwork.

The ceilings of the rooms, like that of the summer-house, were covered with different colored pictures.  The windows were not glass; they were some kind of stuff on which were embroidered all sorts of figures, trees, lines and pointed ornaments.  Scholastica slept on a low bed behind a curtain.  I saw her in the morning, when her nurse left the room, spring out of bed and prostrated in prayer before a crucifix on the wall. When she heard the nurse returning, shed used to slip quickly behind the curtain and be in bed again before the nurse entered the room.  I saw Benedict and Scholastica separately learning from the former’s tutor.  They read from great rolls of parchment, and they painted letters in red, gold and an extraordinarily fine blue; as they wrote, they rolled the parchment.  They made use of an instrument about as long as one’s finger.  The older the children grew, the less were they allowed to be together.

I saw Benedict at Rome, when about fourteen years old, in a large building in which there was a corridor with many rooms.  It looked like a school or a monastery.  They were many young men and some old ecclesiastics in a large hall, as if at a holiday feast.  The ceilings were adorned with the same kind of paintings as those in Benedict’s home.  The guest did not eat reclining.  They sat on round seats so low that they were obliged to stretch out their feet; some sat on one side, back to back, at a very low table.  There were hold hollowed in the massive table to receive the yellow plates and dishes; but I did not see much food, only three large plates of flat, yellow cakes in the center of the table.

When all had finished, I saw six females of different ages, relative of the youth, ether the hall, carrying something like sweetmeats and little flasks in baskets on their arms.  The young men arose and conversed with their friends at one end of the hall, eating the dainties and drinking from the flasks.  There was one woman about thirty years of age, whom I had once before seen at Benedict’s home.  She approached the young man with an enticing mien; but he, perfectly innocent, suspected nothing bad in her.  I saw that she hated his purity and entertained a sinful love for him.  She gave him a poisoned, an enchanted drink from a flask.  Benedict suspected nothing, but I saw him that evening in his cell, restless and tormented.  He went, at last, to a man and asked permission to go down into the courtyard, for he never went out without leave.  There he knelt in a corner of the yard, disciplining himself with long thorn branches and nettles.  I saw him later on, when a hermit, helping this would-be-seducer, who had fallen into deep distress precisely because she had sought to tempt him.  Benedict had been interiorly warned of her guild.

Afterward I saw Benedict on a high, rocky mountain, perhaps in his twentieth year.  He had hollowed out a cell for himself in the rock.  Too this he added a passage and another cell, and then several cells, all cut in the rock; but only the first opened outside.  Before it he had planted an avenue of trees.  He arched them and ornamented the vaulted roof with pictures which seemed to be made of many small stones put together.  In once cell I saw three such pictures: Heaven in the center, the nativity of Christ on one side, the last Judgment on the other.  In the last, Our Lord was represented sitting on an arch, a sword issuing from his mouth; below, between the elect and the reprobate, stood an angel with a pair of scales.  Benedict had besides made a representation of a monastery with its abbot and crows of monks in the background.  He seemed to have a foresight of his own monastery.

More than once I saw Benedict’s sister, who lived at home, going on foot to visit her brother.  He never allowed her to stay with him overnight.  Sometimes she brought him a roll of parchment which she had written.  The he showed her what he had done, and they conversed together on divine things.  Benedict was always very grave in his sister’s presence, which she, in her innocence, was mirthful and joyous. When she found hum too serious, she turned to God in prayer, and he instantly became like herself, bright and gay. 

Later on, I saw her under her brother’s direction, establishing a convent on a neighboring mountain, distant only a short day’s journey.  To it flocked numbers of religious women.  I saw her teaching them to chant; they had no organs.  Organs have been very prejudicial to singing.  They make of it only a secondary affair.  The nuns prepared all the church ornaments themselves in the same kind of needlework that Scholastica had learned when a child at home.  On the refectory table was a large cloth on which were all sorts of figures, pictures and sentences, so that each religious always had before her that to which she was especially obliged.  Scholastica spoke to me of the sweets and consolations of spiritual labor and the labor of ecclesiastics. 

I always saw Scholastica and Benedict surrounded by tame birds.  While the former was yet in her father’s house, I sued to see doves flying from her to Benedict in the desert; and in the convent I saw around her doves and larks brining her red, white, yellow, and violet-blue flowers.  Once I saw a dove bringing her a rose with a leaf.  I cannot repeat all the scenes of her life that were shown me, for I am so sick and miserable!  Scholastica was purity itself.  I see her in heaven as white as snow.  With the exception of Mary and Magdalen, I know of no Saint so loving.

Thus far the “vision” of Anne Catherine Emmerich.