Maria Valtorta

Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was an Italian Catholic writer. A Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary, she reported that she had personal conversations with, and dictations from, Jesus Christ. She lived much of her life bedridden in Viareggio in Tuscany.

She is best known for her 5,000 page book The Poem of the Man-God, first published in 1956 and later titled The Gospel as Revealed to Me. The book was mostly written from 1944 to 1947 and was later translated into many languages. The book was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1959. In 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith stated that her writings do not have a supernatural origin.

Various Biblical experts, historians, and scientists continue to support and criticize the book to this day. Her work has been compared to the writings of other Catholic authors claiming visions and yearly conferences have been held in Italy regarding her works.

Life

Early life and education Valtorta was born in 1897 in Caserta, just north of Naples, in the Campania region of Italy, where her father's military regiment was stationed. She was the only child of parents who had both been born in the Lombardy region. Her father, Giuseppe, was in the Italian cavalry; her mother, Iside, was a teacher of French. In 1907 the regiment moved to Voghera where Maria attended school and where the park "Gardens of Maria Valtorta" was inaugurated in her name in 2013. She studied there until March 1913 when just before her 16th birthday she had to leave Lombardy with her family for Florence, in Tuscany, due to her father's retirement from the military.

In March 1920, when she was 23 years old, Maria was walking on a street in Florence with her mother, when the young and delinquent son of her mother's dress maker (who was a fascist) struck her in the back with an iron bar and shouted a slogan against the wealthy and the bourgeoisie. Valtorta's father died in 1935 and her mother in 1943, after which she was mostly alone in the house, with Martha Diciotti taking care of her to the end of her life. From 1943 to 1947 Valtorta hand wrote about 15,000 pages in her notebooks, 10,000 of which were later selected as the basis of her main book The Poem of the Man-God, and the rest were gradually organized and published after her death. Nonetheless, the first four-volume edition of the book was published anonymously.

In February 1948, the priests Miglorini, Corrado Berti, and their prior Chechin had a private audience with Pope Pius XII about her work, which was reported on in the L'Osservatore Romano. Although Pius XII had expressed admiration for the book, in 1949 the Holy Office summoned Berti and ordered him not to publish it.

In 1952 Michele Pisani agreed to publish Valtorta's work and a contract was signed by Valtorta in October 1952. However, at least two biographies of Valtorta based on taped interviews with people who personally knew her have been published, one titled Ricordi di Donne Che Conobbero Maria Valtorta, (Memories of Women Who Knew Maria Valtorta) and another titled Una Vita con Maria Valtorta: Testimonianze di Marta Diciotti (A Life with Maria Valtorta: Testimony of Marta Diciotti).

Death Basilica of Santissima Annunziata, Florence, the mother church of the Servite Order, where Maria Valtorta is buried. Maria Valtorta died in 1961, at age 64, and was buried in the town cemetery in Viareggio.

Writings The Poem of the Man-God

Valtorta's best known book is The Poem of the Man God. Valtorta signed a contract with Michele Pisani in 1952 to publish the book, and the first of the four volumes was published without an author name under the Italian title Il Poema di Gesu (The Poem of Jesus). The other three volumes were also published without an author name, but had a different Italian title: Il Poema dell'Uomo-Dio (The Poem of the Man-God).

Other books

After Valtorta's death in 1961, several books based on material contained in her handwritten notebooks were gradually published.

In 1976 the first of the four volumes of her "Notebooks" were published. These were based on material interspersed with the text for her Poem within the 122 school notebooks which she had used to write her text. In 2006 additional unpublished pages from her handwritten notebooks were gathered and published in Italian as the Small Notebooks. Valtorta's books were translated into other languages beside Italian.

Separately, the Maria Valtorta Foundation was formed in 2009 in Viareggio by Ernesto Zucchini, a priest and professor of theology, and has been holding yearly conferences on the writings of Valtorta in Viareggio, and presentations about her at various locations in Italy. The conference on 12 October 2021 (the 60th anniversary of Valtorta's death) was attended by Paolo Giulietti, the Archbishop of Lucca, who has jurisdiction over the city of Viareggio, and he gave a talk about the life and writings of Valtorta. Laurentin performed specific comparisons of the works of the three authors and noted similarities, but also dfferences.

Support and criticism

Valtorta's work became controversial, soon after its publication, given that a January 1960 article in L'Osservatore Romano called the book a badly fictionalized life of Jesus. The same issue of L'Osservatore announced the placement of the book on the Index of Forbidden Books. A notice in the December 1, 1961 issue of L'Osservatore stated that the placement on the Index was due to the lack of an imprimatur. On 15 June 1966, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith abolished the Index, and all formal sanctions against reading books placed on the Index ended.

Valtorta's work has continued to remain controversial and various Biblical experts, historians and scientists support and criticize it to this day, and yearly conferences on the scientific and theological aspects of her writings are held in Italy. Gianfranco Battisti, a professor of geography, supports the book based on its about 500 geographic and topographic descriptions. Biblical scholara such as Gabriele Allegra, Gabriel Roschini and René Laurentin support the book based on its theological contents and scriptural analysis.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Archbishop Dionigi Tettamanzi wrote letters stating that the material in the book is literary and has no supernatural origin. Historian Joachim Bouflet has criticized the book based on his historical analysis. Author Sandra Miesel criticized the book on general grounds. The Dicastry of the Doctrine of Faith made an official statement saying that Valtorta's writings are purely literary texts of a personal nature.

Works The Poem of the Man-God, , The Gospel as Revealed to Me, The Book of Azariah, The End Times, Mary Magdalene, Lessons on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, Valtorta and Ferri, The Notebooks 1943, The Notebooks 1944, The Notebooks 1945–1950, The Little Notebooks Autobiography,