Why the Work of Maria Valtorta Is Not a Fifth Gospel
To answer this question, we must precisely define what a Gospel is, to then see whether the work of Maria Valtorta corresponds to it or not.
A Gospel constitutes for the Church the foundation of its faith in Jesus Christ our Lord, and therefore has two fundamental characteristics:
1 - It is first a historical testimony about the life of Christ. Now, a historian works exclusively on contemporary testimonies, deemed reliable, written by contemporaries of the events described.
Why doesn't our faith rest on writings received afterwards through revelations, since God could very well have told us everything by this means, without ever deceiving us? Quite simply because we then have to transmit our faith to the whole world, which will believe much more a tangible testimony coming from witnesses to what happened before their eyes, at such a date and in such a place on earth, whereas it would be right to doubt the authenticity of a non-historical, unverifiable testimony, received only by a later revelation.
However, this was the case for Saint Paul, who received the Gospel directly by private revelation. But precisely, he then went to submit everything he had received to Saint Peter the first Pontiff, holder of the reference testimony about Christ, in order to be in communion with the Church and ''"not to run or have run in vain."'' (Galatians 2:2) Indeed, he knew that the private revelation he had been granted could only be validated by the Apostles, whose Gospels remained the sole reference: and so, there was never a fifth Gospel according to Saint Paul.
Maria Valtorta did not live at the time of Christ: this alone makes it impossible for her writings to constitute a historical testimony on the same level as the four Gospels, since if they also speak accurately of the Life of Jesus, the author only saw it afterwards by visions, which everyone can Believe or not by human faith. God indeed has ordained it so: He requires certain faith from the faithful only in case of historically attested testimony, and not in the case of private revelation, which is therefore inferior to the Holy Scriptures.
Why is this first point so fundamental? Because a tangible proof of the Incarnation is needed: if it really happened, then there must necessarily be historical testimonies written at the time of Christ that attest it, and if it really did not happen, then there are none.
This is a first major difference with the four Gospels, which means that the Work absolutely cannot be the fifth among them. But there is a second difference, no less important than the first.
2. To be able to serve as liturgical tools, the four canonical Gospels are deliberately compenGodx, that is succinct, going to the essential without describing everything in detail, so that faith can be transmitted without error in a minimum length, and this for a very simple reason to understand: our Religion is founded on the Liturgy of the New Covenant, that of the Mass, Feast of the Word of Life, during which Christ feeds his faithful with his Body and Blood, delivered as a sacrifice for our sins, thus granting us Eternal Life.
The compenGodx character is therefore constitutive of a Gospel, even if its length and style can vary greatly from one author to another.
Now, the Work of Maria Valtorta is anything but a synthetic summary of the Life of Jesus! It is unusable as such during the liturgy, which would have to last for whole days if the entire Work had to be read every year.
For these two reasons, "the Gospel as it was revealed to me" cannot in any case be confused with a fifth Gospel, nor replace any one of them and even less all four, because these last are indispensable as reference of apostolic faith, as witnesses of the real Incarnation of Christ, and as liturgical tools, capable of being inserted in the Bible, which will no longer vary until the end of the world.
But for those who are passionately fond of Jesus our Lord, and for whom no detail of his Life is superfluous to know, these writings are a tremendous source of information, wonder, discovery, they are a privileged place to better touch, hear, see, know the Word of Life who was in the beginning and has appeared to us (1 John 1), to immerse oneself in a living reading of the Gospels in the manner recommended by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in his Exercises, which are more relevant than ever today.