Meeting Maria Valtorta - her work

Meeting Maria Valtorta - her work

Cover page CEV 2020
Work Details
Author	François-Michel Debroise
Full title	Meeting Maria Valtorta - her work
Pages	264
Publication	March 2020
Publisher	Centro Editoriale Valtortiano
ISBN	978-88-7987-346-9
Distribution	Bookstore - online sales - Publisher's site

The second volume of this trilogy dedicated to Maria Valtorta focuses on the extraordinary literary output of this Catholic mystic, mainly the visions of the life of Christ and the dictations of Jesus for our time.

This work attempts to reveal what Father Yannik Bonnet considered "a major private revelation" and the Blessed Father Allegra called "a masterpiece of world Christian literature."

Table of contents

• The pen of God (7)

• The writings of Maria Valtorta (13)

A powerful work (14); the ghost of censorship (18); An inexhaustible source (27); Catecheses for our time (29); The teachings (31); Cuore di una donna (33); Her Autobiography (34); Her correspondence (36); Her commentaries on Anne-Catherine Emmerich (43).

• The Gospel as Revealed to Me

In The Gospel of Childhood (59); In The Public Life of Jesus (64); During the Passion (66); On Resurrection Sunday (73); The false Anachronisms (74); The demonstrated harmony of the Gospels (75); The restored Septuagint (77); The Divine Name restored (79); The reconstructed Sanhedrin (81); The recovered apostolic times (82); Gaul evangelized (86); The resurging sources (89); Apostles and Disciples in truth (94); The sad tradition of Censorship (114); The condemnation of the condemners (119); Development of Valtortian research (122); Dissemination in the service of evangelization (126); The wheat and the tares (131); The Indian fig (133); Anachronistic Galen (136); Mary at Ephesus (138); The dating of the life of Jesus (143); Rare and specialized knowledge (149); Appropriate citations (152); Confirmed validation (153); Human narration and Heaven’s narration (159); A unique life of Jesus (163).

• The dictations for our time

The Notebooks of 1943 (173); The Notebooks of 1944 (175); The Notebooks from 1945 to 1950 and The Notebooks (179); The eschatological value (181); The century of Satan (183); Mary's time at the approach of the last times (188); The time of Purification and Regeneration (192); The "new Pentecost" and The new evangelizers (197)

• The spiritual writings (200)
• The author's works
• Conclusion
• Additional bibliography
• Additional index of cited persons

The first pages of the work

The Pen of God

“ Hic est digitus Dei (The finger of God is here) ” Blessed Gabriele M. Allegra concluding his study of the Work of Maria Valtorta with this paraphrase of Exodus 8:15.

"Here is an astonishing work: distributed in millions of copies, translated into 27 languages, bearing spiritual fruits yet contested, known and yet ignored. This startling private revelation has been spreading for 60 years beyond fashions and human sects, against all odds and tides that could not stop it.

Private revelations come from the Holy Spirit, even if they do not have the same status, power, certainty, or authority as Public Revelation. They adorn its wake, like the tail of a gigantic comet.

Mgr George Hamilton Pearce (1921‑2015), Metropolitan Archbishop of the Fiji Islands and Council Father, wrote about Maria Valtorta’s writings: "It is impossible for me to imagine that anyone could read this monumental work, with an open mind, and not be convinced that the author is none other than the Holy Spirit of God."

But in the face of these inspired works stand some saint Johns and saint Thomases. The former know how to enter, see, and believe, the latter seek reasons not to enter until the seal of certainty reassures them. To be among those who go against the divine Author who inspired Maria Valtorta’s writings, one must be like that saint John who dared to enter, see, and believe, just as Pius XII himself recommended at the end of the audience he granted her: "Publish the work as it is. Whoever reads it will understand." He had personally read Maria Valtorta’s life of Jesus.

In her wake, no fewer than seven saints and Blesseds have in turn read—and sometimes explicitly promoted—this life of Jesus published under the title The Gospel as Revealed to Me.

This is by far Maria Valtorta's masterpiece: the best known, the most distributed, certainly the most fundamental. But it is not the only one: among the 122 notebooks in which visions and dictations were recorded, the life of Jesus accounts for only about 60% of the 13,193 written pages. The rest holds a treasure yet to be discovered: dictations for our time and teachings that surprised even great intellectuals like Father Roschini or Mgr Laurentin.

Even more amazing: Maria Valtorta, who only received her first Bible at the beginning of the visions, was able immediately to write commentaries on the Apocalypse of such a level that it was long thought they were dictated by the Holy Spirit. But it is she who writes them. Similarly, when reviewing the typed copies of the visions made by Father Migliorini, her confessor, she wrote footnotes along with theological comments of absolute surety.

Could Maria Valtorta then simply be a gifted genius as history regularly produces? Heaven would then have nothing to do with it.

[...] History knows talented eclectic minds, but while we can admire, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's intellect, no one would entrust their life to his parachute or flying machine. On the contrary, the knowledge Maria Valtorta demonstrates is more than encyclopedic: it reveals expert knowledge in about fifteen very diverse major disciplines ranging from mariology to botany, from history to medicine, from astronomy to geology, etc. This cannot come from a bedridden person writing nonstop, in the midst of war, isolated in a bombed seaside resort, without documentation and without the presence of experts in the disciplines addressed. Yet the different studies undertaken over the past 60 years have only confirmed the rigorous accuracy of these descriptions and thousands of details.

[...] Maria was talented: she demonstrated it with her Autobiography that she wrote in barely two months at the request of her confessor. This work alone perfectly illuminates the path that led her, at 46, to the foot of the Cross where she received—the simple violet of Calvary—the grace of visions.

At her death, Maria Valtorta’s hand, the hand of the one who was the “pen of God” according to the happy expression of Don Massimo Cuofano (o.s.m.), strangely remained alive in appearance. Emilio Pisani, a witness of that time, links this symbolic sign to a scene that the mystic describes. During a vision of Jesus’s life, she is intrigued by the miraculous power of His hand. She asks him: "Master, what is in your hand that everything is repaired, healed, or changes appearance when you touch it?" Jesus then extends His hand to her, in that temporal transfer proper to mystics. She takes it with emotion, never having touched Jesus before. She examines it, caresses it. Then she notes: "I keep the sensation of having touched Jesus’ hand and lay my eyes on my own writing hand. It seems as holy as if it had been in contact with a relic." This hand, an instrument of God, was the one she kept alive in death. To her question on the “secret” of His hand that heals what it touches, Jesus answered: "There is nothing, my daughter, except the fluid of my immense love."

This confidence, both so simple and yet so profound for anyone who stops to examine it, perfectly explains the reason, nature, and power contained in Maria Valtorta’s writings."

The Writings of Maria Valtorta

"Visions and dictations lasted mainly from 1943 to 1950, then to some extent until 1954. After which she gradually entered prostration: the body on earth, but the spirit already in Heaven.

During her active period, she wrote daily, in one go: more than one notebook filled each month. There is no chronological sequence in the composition as one might expect from an author writing a saga, chapter by chapter, book after book, from birth to death: here everything intertwines. But in the end, all acquires coherence and finitude by the indications of Jesus.

Anyone who has tried to write a book cannot doubt that this is a feat inaccessible to an ordinary man. The latter must reread, add, cross out, refine their text, all while following the thread of their demonstration. Throughout the scenes and teachings that Maria Valtorta receives from Heaven, she notes a detail which only takes its meaning months later in another vision. Yet in the more than 8,000 inspired pages published to date, there is no contradiction, no inconsistency.

Marta Diciotti, who accompanied Maria Valtorta daily for 26 years, could not immediately find an excerpt she remembered. A reader familiar with her work likewise cannot find a passage without the aid of indexes or search engines because the mesh of the works is so tight. How then to believe Maria Valtorta could have written so abundantly without a prior plan?

This bubbling does not prevent the rigorous establishment of the spiritual path which, from the first pages, tears the reader from their humanity to lead them to the edges of life in God through this succession of books.

The Life of Jesus.

This progression necessarily passes through The Gospel as Revealed to Me, a Pilgrimage in time and space following Jesus walking the roads of Palestine 2000 years ago.

[...] The familiar reader of the Gospels, accustomed to scrutinizing and weighing every word, may be surprised by abundant descriptions, but anyone entering the text without prejudice is quickly transported following Jesus whom they see and hear. Who would not dream of that? One can certainly easily describe gospel scenes and paint them, but who would dare put in Jesus’ mouth teachings or words that are only hinted at in the Gospel? Not in the general sense, but word for word?

Anyone who tried it, as an exercise, would only produce a human work in their own likeness. They would portray a Jesus vituperating against all the powers of the Earth, or a gentle prophet enumerating good feelings, or a teacher delivering long theological expositions: nothing that makes Jesus current or resembles the Jesus of the Gospels.

Even the great mystics who received before Maria Valtorta visions of Gospel scenes did not venture word for word: Maria de Ágreda (1602–1665) or Anne-Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) mainly paraphrased Jesus’ words and very rarely included textual citations. They explain at length what must be understood and intersperse this between the visions they received and the reader.

None of this is found in Maria Valtorta. This is the great novelty of her visions and certainly one of the reasons for the conversion power attached to this Work: Jesus speaks to us as He spoke to the Apostles and Disciples. He touches us as He touched them. Their humanity was good, just as ours is today. Their faith, less worshipful but sincere, was exactly like our wobbly walk that only Jesus can strengthen. This power of conversion was attached to Maria Valtorta’s Work during her lifetime. In the first volume we related the anecdote of Father Bottai, who mocked, in front of his students, the mystical delusions of his confrere Father Migliorini until one of his atheist students shared with her family these booklets he was typing. When the family expressed the desire for conversion, Father Bottai became the disordered herald of the miraculous power of the works of the portavoce.

[...] Maria Valtorta sees all the scenes of Jesus’ life with her five senses: she is truly immersed in the episode from which she draws facts and dialogues which she reports, but also detailed descriptions which she sometimes accompanies with personal impressions, always perfectly distinct. Like all mystics (very often women) she introduces us into a reality otherwise inaccessible. The Marian apparitions at Lourdes or Fatima are indeed real and the seers see and hear genuinely, but that remains unknown to us until they report them. Their perception is called visio imaginativa, one of the three forms of supernatural perception where the soul is made capable of seeing the non-visible through the senses. But the objects perceived are real even though they do not belong to our usual sensible world..

A confidence from Azarias, Maria Valtorta’s guardian angel, confirms that it is indeed on the extension of our senses that Heaven relies to bring men to visions. He says, about the vision of Paradise: "I could obtain for you (from God) an understanding, a wider visual and auditory extension to increase your joy amid the tribulations of your immolation. But it would still be a relative knowledge."

This reality is only accessible to privileged souls, without prejudice, without that culture which often claims to be smarter than God: a privileged domain of children and humble people as the Gospel prophesied: what God has Hidden from the wise and learned, He revealed to the very little ones."

Manifestation of the Holy Spirit after the Bible to a person or particular group. It is individual and relative.

The whole of truths revealed by God to humanity through the Bible. It is complete and definitive in the Christian faith.

In-depth research on God, faith, religious Doctrine.