The violet of God

Having the family to follow the displacements of the Cavalry Regiment, in which her father served as an officer, Maria left Caserta when she was eighteen months old, and lived her early childhood in Faenza, Romagna, where she began to attend schools, with great success, in Milan and then to Voghera, where she made his first communion.

From her father, Giuseppe, a meek and loving man, she was educated in human values ​​and in the admiration of beauty that it can be found in nature and in art.

Decisive for her spiritual maturity, and for a planning of future life, were her happy four years as a student in the Bianconi College of Monza, where she found satisfaction in learning culture and religion.

On the afternoon of February 23, 1913, Maria Valtorta left the Collegio Bianconi and returned to her family. She found his father greatly changed. A serious illness had weakened his body and mind, so much so that he was put into retirement ahead of time. The Valtorta spouses had already decided to move to Florence, where they, with their daughter, went to reside at the beginning of March.

On March 17, 1920, while Maria was walking with her mother near the house, a criminal with an iron bar came after her and, shouting: “Abase the gentlemen and the military!”. With all his force gave her a blow to the kidneys. As a result, she fall sick with excruciating pain and stayed in bed for three months. The photo shows her in 1920, before the attack.

In September 1924 – Maria was 27 – her parents bought a house in Viareggio. On 23 October of the same year, they settled there and it was their final settlement.

Her health, undermined by harsh trials, became more and more unstable and predisposed her to permanent invalidity, although this didn’t prevent her from engaging in forms of parish apostolate and in charitable works, until her growing love for God and for the souls pushed her to the heroic decision to offer herself as a victim of divine Love and Justice. A progressive paralysis of the lower limbs, the consequence of the blow to the kidneys received on the street in Florence, made her mobility increasing difficult. On January 4, 1933 she left home for the last time, also accepting the martyrdom of the seclusion. She became completely ill on Easter day of the year 1934.

In the first months of 1943 – as per the request of Maria’s spiritual director, the servant P. Romualdo M. Migliorini – she wrote the memoirs of her life. That pious religious had gone to visit her in June of the previous year and, since that day for almost four years, he has been her confessor and spiritual guide. In a short time, filling seven notebooks for a total of 761 pages, Maria exposed to him, in an epistolary form and without any veils, “all the good and all the bad” of her earthly existence up to that moment.

Reassured by Father Migliorini of the supernatural origin of the “dictation”, Maria Valtorta continued to write on the notebooks, given to her by father Migliorini. With the same system used to write the Autobiography, always staying in bed, she wrote almost every day until 1947, then intermittently in the following years, until 1951. She filled another 122 notebooks for a total of 13,193 pages. She wrote on the spur of the moment, for inspiration, without setting up schemes and without even knowing what she would write day after day. She did not consult any texts, with the exception of the Bible and the Catechism of Pius X.

When Maria had almost finished writing her major work – which will be published in ten volumes entitled The Gospel as it was revealed to me – she was seized with nostalgia for her Lord, thinking that she would never see Him again. But He came to console her with a promise: “I will always come. And for you alone. And it will be even sweeter for you as I will be everything for you … I will take you higher, into the pure spheres of pure contemplation … From now on you will only contemplate … I will make you forget about the world for my love “. It was March 14, 1947, her 50th birthday. Just a month later, on April 18, in one of her letters to her spiritual mother (the Carmelite cloistered Mother Teresa Maria of St. Joseph) she confided that she had even offered her intellect to God.

In the summer of 1956, when the first volume of her work was published, Maria Valtorta’s progressive and mysterious psychic estrangement began. With the passage of time she became inactive, abandoned to a sweet apathy, in a contemplative state. For a certain period she resumed writing, but only to fill holy cards and slips of paper with the words “Jesus I trust in you”, repeated countless times in minute script. She no longer spoke, but repeated the last words of the sentences that were addressed to her, and every now and then she exclaimed: “What a sunshine is here!”. On two or three occasions, as if coming to her senses for a moment, she answered crucial questions in succinct and sensible words. The vividness of her gaze never went out in her face and the serenity of her expression was never altered.

Twelve years later, on 2 July 1973, the mortal remains of Maria Valtorta were moved from the Camposanto della Misericordia in Viareggio and buried in Florence, in the Chapter chapel in the large cloister of the Basilica-Sanctuary of the Ss. Annunziata. The officiant is the famous mariologist Father Gabriele Maria Roschini of the Order of the Servants of Mary.