jhpb@garage.att.com (11/30/90)
If you are looking for spiritual reading material, you may find this unique and very interesting. Maria Valtorta lived in Italy during World War II. She was an invalid, confined to bed, because of being hit in the back by some idiot with an iron rod, as I recall. Circumstances lead me to believe that there may be a cause for her canonization, though I haven't heard anything to that effect. What I wanted to publicize here was a work of hers called The Poem of the Man God. In English, the entire work is 4200 pages, in 5 volumes. What it is is more or less a day-by-day account of our Lord's life. The last volume is just coming off the presses in English now. The unique thing about the work is that Maria Valtorta was a mystic; she wrote the entire contents of this work during visions given to her by our Lord. The books are being published with ecclesiastical approbation, of course. Pius XII, among others, had high things to say about the work. The 5 volumes progress from our Lord's infancy to after the Resurrection. Some of you may have read Venerable Maria Agreda's work of a similar vein, or perhaps Sr. Anne Catherine Emmerich's. This one is nothing like those at all. It reads like a normal narration of what an eye-witness might have seen. Nothing more, nothing less. I have found this to be an INVALUABLE character study of our Divine Lord and Saviour. The main characters are familiar to all of us, of course. For example: Judas Iscariot: messed up from the beginning Mary Magdalen: once she converted, she loved our Lord FAR more than most of the other disciples Simon Peter: had he known what Judas was going to do, he probably would have killed him! John the Evangelist: What can I say? He and our Lady are our Lord's favorites Lazarus: a wealthy friend of our Lord, whom He will eventually raise from the dead, has some sort of disease in his legs Some are not so familiar, like Photinai, the Samaritan woman at the well, or the Beauty of Korazim, a prostitute and victim of leprosy whom our Lord cures and converts. Or Doras, a wealthy man who hates our Lord, and drops dead in a fit of wrath before Him. (What a death!) Probably one of the most fascinating characters is Gamaliel. He is not ill-disposed to our Lord, but he just CANNOT believe. He knows that our Lord claims to be God, and he also knows that He is much greater than Gamaliel, but he does not have the simple faith of the common people. The hatred of a certain segment of the Jewish aristocracy for our Lord is simply indescribable. I will post some sample material from the work, as I get time. Each volume is currently $35. The main distributer in English is apparently in Canada, though several companies in this country redistribute it. Joe Buehler