Anne Catherine Emme-rich was born in Germany in 1774. As a child she believed that angels, saints, and the Holy Family visited and talked with her as she worked in the fields. At twenty-four, she had her first mystic vision of the sufferings of Christ, accompanied by stigmata and bleeding. At twenty-nine, she became an Augustinian nun and continued to have visions and stigmata. In her visions she recounted scenes from the life of Christ, which she seemed to have witnessed. These phenomena brought her fame and investigation by both science and the Church.
This book was one of the sources for Mel Gibsons motion picture, The Passion of Christ, to be released in 2004.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.