Newsletter n. 12/21 – An epochal event: 12 October 2021
In life there are crucial, decisive, important moments, which have equally epochal consequences: on a personal level, they can be, for example, an exam or the choice of a job. I believe that in our case too we must speak of a crucial moment.
If the month of March 2012 was the moment in which science, through Jean-François Lavère, finally entered fully into the understanding of the work of Maria Valtorta, this 12 October 2021 is another epochal event of her history. The first had nullified all the devotions that from the beginning had been crushing Maria Valtorta and her writings almost equating her with the deranged, paranoid, dreamers and inventors of fairy tales, which the world has known many times. Eng. Jean-François Lavère had the great human and spiritual merit of dissolving that aura of no objective value that surrounded both life and Valtortian writings: he opened doors and windows and gave everyone the opportunity to change the air. From that moment on, true Galilean scientific studies began to bear fruit, manifesting the extraordinary contents of Valtortian writings.
Last Tuesday, October 12, 2021, something similar happened on the level of the Catholic faith: the archbishop of Lucca, H.E. Msgr. Paolo Giulietti, concelebrated with seven priests and a permanent deacon, in front of a church full of faithful, the Holy Mass for Maria Valtorta, in the parish of Sant’Andrea in Viareggio. The questions that immediately arise are obvious: what does this mean? What consequences does this event have in the history of Maria Valtorta? Does our attitude towards her change? I am not afraid to give the event an epochal significance because it had never happened, in the sixty years since her death, that an archbishop of Lucca would publicly celebrate Holy Mass for Maria Valtorta; and in addition in his own city of Viareggio. Perhaps a combination of factors had so far prevented such an event: ill-informed clerics, anticlericals of various currents, enemies of faith in Christ, prejudiced atheists, devotionals without prudence, had led to believe that even simply praying publicly for her was out of place. We acknowledge Msgr. Giulietti not to have feared – indeed, to have accepted with benevolence! – that Maria Valtorta and, of course, her monumental writings may be known in his Diocese and under his direct authority!
However, this event does not mean that the road has come to an end. A single but fundamental door – because of the only Diocese that can and must decide on Maria Valtorta – has publicly opened. We repeat that it is not yet a question of any of those approvals so desired and invoked by her from the moment in which she realised the value of the gift that Heaven was giving her for all men and for the Church itself.
This opening, sought yet unexpected, also has the value of a happy omen: that the true path of the process of verifying the heroic virtues of Maria Valtorta can finally begin, and then end in the best possible way, until she is fully accepted by the Holy Church as a model to imitate and to ask for intercession publicly. The door has opened, now those who want can get busy so that the always desired goal can be reached: studying, discovering, making known, publishing and praying, praying, praying, are the activities that await all the defenders and devotees of Maria Valtorta.
– don Ernesto Zucchini
