Newsletter N. 4/25 – A Conviction Without Reading: What’s New in the “Valtorta Case”?

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The discovery of the documents that the Holy Office had classified in 1949-1952 and that have finally been made available to scholars is certainly important news. We now know that in those years the Holy See, through the Holy Office, had formed a commission of inquiry – made up of: Morano, Traglia, Hudal, Cordovani, Gorr, Hürth, Liburdi, Creusen, Parente, Tromp, Grendel, Bigazzi, Dalpiaz – on the person of Maria Valtorta and her books, which at the time had not yet been published. For the moment only four of those documents have been released thanks to a French scholar (among other things an enemy of Maria Valtorta). The four documents are:

IN VOTO RELATORIS IUXTA MINTEM
Feria II – die 14.a mensis februarii 1949 S. Offizio S.0. 355/45. Concerning the Book “Words of Eternal Life” or “Gospel of Jesus Christ” by the pseudo-seer Maria Valtorta of Viareggio.

Report by Father Alberto Vaccari
ON THE WORK “WORDS OF LIFE” (as per the printed announcement) GOSPEL OF JESUS ​​CHRIST (given to be examined in typescript) OPINION OF FATHER ALBERTO VACCARI S.J., Qualifier of the Holy Office

Report of Rev. GIOVANNI PEPE
Rome, 2 February 1949 Rev. GIOVANNI PEPE, Rapporteur (10) Doc. nn. 60 and 61 of the cited Position.

Report of Card. Bea
Prot. num 355/55 144/59; (14) “WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE” OR “GOSPEL OF JESUS ​​CHRIST” by Miss Maria Valtorta of Viareggio
VOTE of the Most Reverend Father Agostino BEA S.J., Consultant. On the Typewritten Work

No one knew or had reported outside of this important consultation. We all thought that the famous blacklisting of 1950 – and repeated in 1961 – had been an extemporaneous fact due to Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office in those years. The same improvisation was supposed for the article in the Osservatore Romano of January 6, 1960: “A badly fictionalized life of Jesus”. Since then, for 65 years we have only read with sadness the arguments of that short article. Now we finally know that both the blacklisting and the descriptive article are in fact the conclusions drawn from the investigation of 1949-1952.

Does anything change for Maria Valtorta and her Work?

Honestly, we have to say no. Even a quick reading of these four documents does nothing but confirm our certainty that they were mistaken. And let it be clear: not for some form of malice, but we are convinced, beyond measure, that this is due to an excessively quick and superficial reading of the Valtortian texts, taking for granted that it was the usual alleged seer sick of protagonism and badly guided spiritually. The seers (real and false) were very numerous at that time: it was said that their number was over 250, to “annoy” the Holy See and the Pope. The thought was always the same and obvious: perhaps she was a good Catholic, but she had certainly written a very imaginative life of Jesus, exaggeratedly reworked and with an infinite number of errors of all kinds.

Now we can better understand the efforts and the tears of Monsignor Carinci in the face of the incomprehension of eminent scholars who did not want to study with the necessary open-mindedness that extraordinary number of typewritten sheets (perhaps more than 6,000) on poor and thin tissue paper. Now the greatness of Father Gabriele Rosmini appears with his theological text on the Holy Virgin in those same writings: his picture was and is an effort to prove the greatness of the gift (or gifts) made by Jesus to Maria Valtorta for the entire human race. Now we can even more read the writings of Blessed Father Gabriele Allegra as a beautiful theological and exegetical testimony on that “Poem of the Man-God” that consoled him spiritually. Now we are even more grateful to Jean Aulagnier who in 1994 published the first study on the perfect calendar of the life of Jesus present in the same Valtortian work.

So?

To work! More and more convinced that the path opened by Jean-François Lavère in 2012 is the right one: with Galilean science, analyze each Valtortian page to show that the origin of all the information contained cannot be in the writer; with Dr. Giovanni Palladino repeat: “Here is the finger of God”; with theology show that it is an extraordinary gift from Heaven, for the New Evangelization in the Third Millennium. Therefore “Take, take this work and ‘do not seal it’, but read it and have it read” (EV10 p. 520).

— fr. Ernesto Zucchini

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