Under new norms, DDF weighs in on alleged mystic

Maria Valtorta's writings have had a rocky history in the Church - and major supporters.

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said in a Tuesday press release that the writings of Italian writer Maria Valtorta should not be regarded “as having a supernatural origin,” and that passages suggesting the contrary should be taken as literary devices used by the author.

María Valtorta. Image credit: public domain.

The announcement is the latest such statement since the Vatican changed last year the Church’s process for evaluating visionaries and Marian apparitions.

In a statement published March 4 but dated February 22, the DDF said that Valtorta’s “alleged ‘visions’, ‘revelations,’ and ‘messages’” cannot be considered to have a supernatural origin.

María Valtorta was an Italian laywoman who wrote a five-volume life of Jesus called ‘The Poem of the Man-God’ after experiencing supposed apparitions of Jesus and Mary between 1943 and 1947.

Although the book’s relationship with the Vatican has always been rocky, including its 1959 prohibition from popular use, Valtorta’s work has been read by prominent Church leaders, including Saint Theresa of Calcutta.

—
In a succinct press release, the DDF said that “the Holy See frequently receives requests from both clergy and laity for a clarification about the Church’s position on the writings of Maria Valtorta.”

“It should be reiterated that alleged ‘visions,’ ‘revelations,’ and ‘messages’ contained in the writings of Maria Valtorta—or, in any case, attributed to them—cannot be regarded as having a supernatural origin. Rather, they should be considered simply as literary forms that the author used to narrate the life of Jesus Christ in her own way,” the statement explained.

“In its long tradition, the Church does not accept as normative the Apocryphal Gospels and other similar texts since it does not recognize them as divinely inspired. Instead, the Church refers back to the sure reading of the inspired Gospels,” it concludes.

The statement is the latest and most definitive on Valtorta’s work, which has a large following in Italy and beyond.

Valtorta, born in 1897, was a writer and supposed mystic who claimed to have received revelations and visions of Jesus and Mary between 1943 and 1947, which she wrote by hand in over 10,000 pages that were later edited into the “The Poem of the Man-God.”

Valtorta was struck in the back by an unknown man with an iron bar in 1920, which left her confined to a bed for three months. But she suffered long-term health problems from the attack, eventually leaving her bedridden in 1934.

In 1942, she met Fr. Rornuald Migliorini OSM, who became her spiritual director, who then ordered Valtorta to dictate her autobiography to him in 1943.

On Good Friday in April 1943, Valtorta allegedly received the first of her dictations and visions from Jesus, leading her to write almost non-stop by hand from then until 1947.

These notes were eventually edited and became “The Poem of the Man-God,” which is today often titled “The Gospel as it was revealed to me.” The text narrates the life of Christ in more than 5,000 pages, adding a significant number of episodes and dialogues that do not appear in any of the Gospels.

Pope Pius XII was an early reader and supporter of the work, as he received a copy in 1947 and spent the following months reading it.

He granted an audience to the three Servite priests who had edited the work in 1948, and told them to publish it “just as it is.”

The editors did not seek a formal nihil obstat to publish the book, believing that Pius XII verbal authorization in the 1948 audience was enough. Nevertheless, in 1949 the Holy Office asked the book’s editors to hand in all available copies, and promise not to publish the text.

But Valtorta had retained the original manuscript, so she signed a contract with a different publisher in 1950, who published the work in four volumes between 1956 and 1959.

The unauthorized publication of the book led it to become in 1959 the next-to-last book placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, before the index itself was abolished in 1966.

Despite that history, Pope Pius XII was not the only significant ecclesiastical figure to favor Valtorta’s writings.

Pope St. Paul VI was also an apparent fan, as his private secretary said once that he read one of the volumes of her work during his time as Archbishop of Milan.

Blessed Gabriele Allegra, OFM ,wrote extensively in support of Valtorta’s texts, as did Fr. Gabriel Roschini, a prominent contemporary Marian theologian. Even St. Theresa of Calcutta recommended her works.

But perhaps the most unexpected supporter of Valtorta’s work was American political commentator William Buckley Jr.

In his spiritual memoir, “Nearer, My God,” Buckley wrote that “The account by Valtorta, or at least that much of it that deals specifically with the suffering endured, would be painful reading describing any death by crucifixion. Valtorta is excruciatingly absorbed by physical detail. Either she was once a medical student or else she studied anatomy, bone by bone.”

In 1981, two alleged visionaries from another controversial alleged apparition — Medjugorje — said that they had a vision in which “Our Lady says that ‘The Poem of the Man-God’ is the truth.”

In 2021, the 60th anniversary of Valtorta’s death, Archbishop Paolo Giuletti of Lucca, Valtorta’s local diocese, gave a talk at a conference commemorating the author.

Valtorta died in 1961. But despite the formal Vatican cautions about her work, her fame continued to grow. In 1973, her remains were transferred to the Basilica of the Annunziata in Florence, and her book continued to beknown throughout the world.

Still, Valtorta’s issues with ecclesiastical authorities did not stop with the abolition of the Index of Forbidden books in 1966.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote in a 1983 letter that the CDF had asked the Italian bishops’ conference to see that published texts of the work should “clearly indicate that the ‘visions’ and ‘dictations’ referred by [Valtorta] are simply literary forms used by the author to narrate the life of Jesus in her own way. They cannot be considered to have a supernatural origin.”

Despite its rocky history, the CDF has not issued a formal and pronounced judgment on the doctrinal orthodoxy of the work.

Some supporters argue that Valtorta’s breadth of historical, geographical, and theological knowledge could well be miraculous for a woman who received only a very basic education.

Critics, on the other hand, say the work makes fundamental theological and historical mistakes.

American academic Sandra Miesel studied the book, and argued in 2021 that the most fundamental error in the work is “its claim to compensate for the inadequacies of the Gospels. As Jesus himself explains to Valtorta, the New Testament needs to be supplemented because of the evangelists’ “unbreakable Jewish frame of mind.”

Moreover, despite the fact that the book claims a celestial origin, and the claim by Valtorta’s supporters that the author only consulted the Bible and the Catechism of Saint Pius X as she wrote, Miesel found extracts from apocryphal and medieval texts — suggesting a more involved process than Valtorta had claimed.

According to Miesel, Valtorta’s composition made a series of fundamental mistakes that belie the alleged supernatural origin of the visions.

While Valtorta claimed to be recounting things revealed to her about the life of Jesus, there were factual errors and historical inconsistencies, Miesel wrote.

Valtorta’s description of the Temple of Jerusalem did not fit with descriptions of the Temple made at the time of Jesus, example. In Valtorta’s work, Jesus underwent a bar mitzvah — a practice which did not exist at the time — and characters frequently pronounced the tetragrammaton, Yahweh, to describe God, despite the fact that doing so is a taboo in Jewish society and religious practice. Characters also used the name “Jehovah” on occasion, which is a modern rendition of the tetragrammaton.

The work also seemed to use the term “Christian” in a way that it was not used, according to the Book of Acts, in the time Valtorta meant to depict.

Further, Miesel said, the book is filled with antisemitism, including Valtorta’s own assertion that “Hebrew wombs conceive vile perjurers. Roman wombs conceive nothing but heroes.”

—
The DDF’s statement on the text comes almost a year after it published new norms to evaluate supernatural apparitions.

The new DDF norms offer a nuanced sliding scale of recognition for purported apparitions, rather than the two options previously used by the dicastery.

The dicastery’s process urges that investigation of alleged investigations be undertaken by the diocesan bishop, involving other local bishops as necessary, and in conversation with the local bishops’ conference — with the dicastery in Rome giving a final approval to any decision.

Instead of bishops declaring an apparition either proven, but not as a matter of faith, or unproven, the Church now uses in a scale of six possible outcomes, ranging from a declaration that an alleged apparition has been found not to be supernatural, to a judgement of nihil obstat, which says there is nothing preventing a bishop from recognizing an alleged’s apparations pastoral value, or promoting it.

Since it promulgated the new scale, the Vatican has ruled on a number of Marian apparitions and visions, including most famously, Medjugorje.

The DDF is also working on the possibility of establishing canonical crimes of “false mysticism and spiritual abuse.”

“In this context, ‘false mysticism’ refers to spiritual approaches that harm the harmony of the Catholic understanding of God and our relationship with the Lord. It is in this sense that the phrase appears in the Magisterium,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the DDF’s prefect, wrote in a November 2024 letter to the pope.

But the cardinal flagged an issue he believed should be addressed: “There is no delict in canon law classified by the name ‘false mysticism,’ even though canonists occasionally use the expression in a manner that is closely tied to crimes of abuse.”

Fernández noted that in the new norms for the assessment of alleged supernatural occurrences and phenomena, the dicastery did recognize that “the use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.”

“At the same time, it is possible to classify a delict of ‘spiritual abuse,’ avoiding the overly broad and ambiguous expression of ‘false mysticism,’” the cardinal wrote.