Wiki Maria Valtorta, the Valtortian Encyclopedia
Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was an Italian Catholic mystic. Born in Caserta, she is the author of The Gospel as Revealed to Me, which recounts the life of Jesus, as well as other writings presenting in the form of dictation the teachings of Jesus, Mary, the Holy Spirit, her guardian angel, and various saints.
For 2000 years, several Catholic mystics have had glimpses of the Gospels. But only three people have had the complete vision: Mary of Agreda in the 17th century, Anne Catherine Emmerich in the 19th century, and Maria Valtorta in the 20th century. Maria Valtorta was the only one among them to transcribe hundreds of visions of Jesus' life firsthand and in real-time. Confined to her bed, she covered some 13,000 handwritten pages in just three and a half years, sometimes writing for up to 18 hours straight, leaving us with the most voluminous biography of Jesus in history. Although Pope Pius XII, after reading her work, gave his approval for publication as early as 1948, officials of the Holy Office—thinking it was a personal and novelized production passed off as revelation—opposed Maria Valtorta's work and placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books, without formally condemning it for any dogmatic, moral, or historical errors. For 70 years, saints, cardinals, leading theologians, and biblical scholars, along with a multitude of laypeople from all walks of life, have been enthusiastic about the work of this woman who left behind an "invaluable treasure of universal literature," according to Blessed Gabriele Maria Allegra, the first translator of the entire Bible into Chinese. Her main work, The Gospel as Revealed to Me, continuously published, is now translated into 30 languagesIncluding the original language, Italian.. A decade after Maria Valtorta's death, researchers began to examine her writings, which contained a vast number of biological, geological, astronomical, topographical, and cultural details. As of todayApril 2024., 19,930 of these details have been identified as plausible and relevant. Many sites described by Maria Valtorta (Gerasa, Bethsaida, the aqueduct of Tiberias, the synagogue of Biram, the tomb of Hillel, the enclosure of Jezreel, the dam of Ptolemais, the palace of Lazarus in Jerusalem, etc.) were excavated or confirmed during archaeological digs long after her death. If deemed authentic, Maria Valtorta's writings provide, for the first time, a historical and geographical reconstruction of Jesus Christ's public life, week by week, village by village, in coherence with the 373 narrative units of the four canonical Gospels, which her visions entirely encompass without omissions, contradictions, or inconsistencies. Ten authoritative theologians thoroughly examined this work without finding opinions contrary to faith or morals, even when some passages expressed innovative opinions or presented new facts. Within this framework, they counted explicit or implicit references to 1,166 chapters of the Bible out of its total of 1,334. Among these, they identified at least 3,133 references to the Septuagint, which was in use during Jesus' time—even though Maria Valtorta knew nothing of this subject, having left school at age 16 and only receiving her first Bible at age 46, at the time of her first visions. No commercially available life of Jesus presents such proximity and conformity to the canonical Scriptures. Maria Valtorta drew her vocation from her mystical soul and the struggles and trials she endured to become this "God’s pen," humble and docile, as she was nicknamed"Per obbedienza scrive la sua autobiografia, la prima opera valtortiana, e da qui inizia la sua attività di scrittrice, diventando per diversi anni la penna di Dio. (By obedience, she wrote her autobiography, the first Valtortian work, and from there, she began her activity as a writer, becoming God's pen for several years)." - Santi e Beati, Maria Valtorta {it} - P. Massimo Cuofano, Servites of Mary (+28/04/2017).. She discreetly mentions in some personal notes the sufferings that this mission caused her. But Jesus, in a dictation, is more explicit and of broader significance: “If you knew what slavery it is to be God's instrument [...] It takes away sleep, hunger, comforts, the desire to think of anything else, to read writings that are not of supernatural origin, to speak and hear ordinary things, the desire to be and live like everyone else, even for a single day: all of this, the inexorable fire of God's will prevents from happening. On top of this, the spite of men adds salt and acid, as if the master of the galley sprinkled salt and vinegar on the wounds of his slaves.”The Notebooks of 1944, September 24.
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