Vatican ratifies that Maria Valorta’s writings have no supernatural origin

The Dicastery for the doctrine of the Vatican’s faith said that the messages contained in the writings of the Italian Catholic Maria Valorta (1897-1961) “cannot be considered of supernatural origin.”

In a communication Published on February 22, the Vatican Dicastery said that the Holy See “frequently receives requests from both the clergy and lay people for clarification about the position of the Church” regarding the writings of Valorta.

The author, who remained more than 30 years prostrated in a bed after an incident, claimed to have received visions and revelations from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, which he collected in extensive writings about the life of Christ, including details that do not appear in the Canonic Gospels.

Among his works he stands out especially The poem of man God (The poem of man-God), today known to the title The Gospel as it was revealed to me (The Gospel as revealed to me), composed of 13,000 pages.

Despite its international success and support of the then Pope Pius XII, the work was included in 1959 in the index of prohibited books, together with other publications classified by the Catholic Church as heretical, immoral or pernicious for faith, until its abolition in 1966.

In this context, the Vatican reiterated that the alleged “visions”, “revelations” and “messages” contained in their writings, or in any case attributed to them, are simply “literary forms that the author has served to narrate, in her own way, the life of Jesus Christ.”

To justify its position, the Dicastery clarified that “in its long tradition, the Church does not accept as normative or the apocryphal gospels or other similar texts, since it does not recognize divine inspiration, referring to the safe reading of the inspired gospels.”