Understanding Mary’s Joys.

On the Morning of May 13, 1944, after Communion in Honor of the Immaculate Heart, the Blessed Virgin said to Maria Valtorta:

 

"I want you to understand my joys better. You will say the Franciscan [crown] rosary more willingly [Maria was a Third Order Franciscan.]”

 

The Annunciation: "In the first one, I was not happy because of my glory and joy, but because the time had come for man's redemption and God's forgiveness of man. 

 

The Visitation: "The second one made me happy not because of the praise offered me by my cousin, but because I had begun redemption by sanctifying the Baptist by taking my Jesus, your Redeemer, to him.

 

The Birth of Jesus: "The blessedness of the third one was not exclusively because I had become a mother, without pain or the staining of my virginity, or because of the grace of being able to kiss God, my Son, either. But because the Earth now had the Savior.

 

The Adoration of the Magi: "What made me happy the fourth time was that in the three Magi I saw all of those who, from everywhere in the world and in all periods of the earth, from that moment on, would come towards the Light, towards my Lord, and would proclaim Him to be their King and their Savior and God.

 

The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: "The joy of the fifth event did not come exclusively from my love as a Mother who ceases to suffer because her lost Son is found again. It would have been selfishness. But it was inexpressible joy to hear the 'Gospel' echoing forth for the first time and to understand that a few years in advance it was falling into some hearts and sprouting there into an eternal plant. I rejoiced over these people instructed in advance.

 

Jesus Appears to Mary after His Resurrection: "The sixth joy was an even greater love for you, redeemed creatures. The Risen One told me that the Heavens were open and already inhabited by the holy ones of the Lord who had been awaiting that hour for centuries and that in those Heavens the seats of all the saved were ready. And for me, your Mother, to know that your dwelling was ready was a joy of incalculable depth.

 

Mary’s Assumption and Coronation: "Finally, the seventh joy was not because of my glory. But because, having been made the Queen of the Heavens by the goodness of God, as the Queen I could concern myself with you, my beloved ones, and, chosen as I was to sit at the right hand of God, I could speak, pray, and obtain graces directly for you, with powerful entreaty.

 

"No joy was for me alone. Selfishness, even the most just and holy, destroys love. Every joy came to me through perfect love and was spurred towards an even more perfect love.

"I am now blessed. I could not be more so because I am surrounded by the Triune embrace of God. But I still use my blessedness out of love for you. Even here I apply the law: I love God with my whole self and my neighbor as myself.341 Myself, not because I am Mary, but because Mary found grace before the Lord and is loved by Him; she is thus a holy creature in Him and of Him, part of Him.

 

"Oh, my theology! It has only one key word: 'Love.' I am Queen of the Heavens because I have understood this theology as no other creature has.

 

"Love. You will be saved. Love. Love in words or in silence. Love in action or immobility. Love in fervor or in the suffering of aridity. Love in joy and in pain. Love in victory and in weakness. Love in temptation and in freedom from the Enemy. Always love.

 

"Let there be a point in you, the deepest one, which, in the midst of a whole wounded, stricken, agonizing being stupefied by pain, exhausted by the devil's assaults, nauseated by life events, and tossed about like a ship in a storm, is able to remain still and alive in love. A point in you which has this one mission – to love – and fulfills it for your mind, heart, and flesh. And let that point be your sanctuary. Let the altar be there with the lamp which is always lit, with flowers which are always fresh, and with praise which is always resounding.

 

"Whether you weep or laugh, hope or doubt, are exhausted or not, let the holiest part of your spirit, the one living in that point consecrated for worship of God, always be able to say:

 

Gloria tibi, Domine. Gloria! Laudamus Te! Benedicimus Te! Adoramus Te! Glorificamus Te! Quoniam Tu solus Sanctus, Tu solus Dominus, Tu solus Altissimus. Cum Angelis et Archangelis, cum Thronis et Dominationibus, cumque omni militia caelestis exercitus, himnum gloriae tuae canimus, sine fine dicentes: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus!

 

Glory to you, Lord. Glory! We praise you! Thank you! We adore you! We glorify you! Because You are the only Holy One, You are the only Lord, You alone are the Most High. With Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, with all the militia of the heavenly host, we sing the hymn of your glory, saying without end: Holy, Holy, Holy!

Glory to you, Lord. Glory! We praise you! Thank you! We adore you! We glorify you! Because You are the only Holy One, You are the only Lord, You alone are the Most High. With Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, with all the militia of the heavenly host, we sing the hymn of your glory, saying without end: Holy, Holy, Holy!

[Glory to you, Lord. Glory! We praise you! We Thank you! We adore you! We glorify you! Because You are the only Holy One, You are the only Lord, You alone are the Most High. With Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, with all the militia of the heavenly host, we sing the hymn of your glory, saying without end: Holy, Holy, Holy!]

 

"Before the Elevation comes praise. Before the Consummation comes praise. Be able to say your Mass. Every victim is a priest. [Maria Valtorta was a victim soul.] But one is not a priest if one does not know how to celebrate Mass. In all its parts.

 

"Look at my Jesus. Before being elevated and consummated, He gave praise to the Father.343 And He already knew what awaited Him.

 

"O Maria, let your heart sing. Let it sing even if tears rain down from your eyes. [Maria was then suffering the abandonment of Gethsemane.] Let song cover your moan and the voices of Satan, who wants to convince you to mistrust yourself to keep you from following your mission, who wants to convince you that God does not hear you to keep you from praying, who wants to convince you that you are lost in order to destroy you.

 

"No. You are not. Persevere. A day or an hour of faithfulness at this moment is worth more than the ten years spent in physical pain and penance, but with peace in your heart and God perceptible at your side. Persevere. 'Whoever perseveres until the end will be saved.'344 My and your Jesus says so. And I tell you so. Suffer in peace. I will come soon."

Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1944, May 13 1944. Order her books Here. 

 

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Faith is God.

An astonishing revelation and meditation on the theological virtue of Faith. From the Church approved Volume Two of Luisa Piccarreta’s Book of Heaven; Nihil Obstat, St. Annibale Di Francia; Imprimatur, Archbishop G. M. Leo.

 

                                              ~ ~ ~

                                   

Now, while seeing the confessor, I remembered he had told me that I was to write about Faith in the way in which the Lord had spoken to me about this virtue. While I was thinking of this, in one instant the Lord drew me so much to Himself, that I felt myself outside of myself, in the vault of the heavens together with Jesus; and He told me these exact words: “Faith is God.”

 

But these two words contained an immense light, such that it is impossible to explain them – but I will say what I can. In the word “Faith”, I comprehended that Faith is God Himself. Just as material food gives life to the body so that it may not die, so does Faith give life to the soul – without Faith, the soul is dead. Faith vivifies, Faith sanctifies, Faith spiritualizes man, and makes him keep his eye fixed on a Supreme Being, in such a way that he learns nothing of the things of down here; and if he learns them, he learns them in God.

 

Oh! the happiness of a soul who lives of Faith – her flight is always toward Heaven. In everything that happens to her, she always looks at herself in God; and so, just as in tribulation, Faith raises her in God and she does not afflict herself, nor does she lament, knowing that she is not to form her contentment here, but in Heaven; in the same way, if joy, riches, pleasures, surround her, Faith raises her in God, and she says to herself: “Oh! how much more content and rich will I be in Heaven!” So, these earthly things are a bother to her, she despises them, and tramples them underfoot.

 

It seems to me that to a soul who lives of Faith, it happens as to a person who possessed millions upon millions of coins, and even entire kingdoms, and someone else wanted to offer him a penny. What would he say? Would he not disdain it? Would he not throw it in his face? I add: and what if that penny were all muddy, just as earthly things are? Even more: what if that penny were only lent to him? Now, this person would say: “I enjoy and possess immense riches, and you dared to offer me this miserable penny, so muddy, and only for a short time?” I believe he would immediately remove his gaze from it, and would not accept the gift. So does the soul who lives of Faith with regard to earthy things.

I will espouse you in the Faith.

Now let us go back again to the idea of food: by taking food, the body is not only sustained, but shares in the substance of the food, which is transformed with the body itself. The same for the soul who lives of Faith: since Faith is God Himself, the soul comes to live of God Himself; and by feeding herself with God Himself, she comes to share in the substance of God; and by sharing in Him, she comes to resemble Him and to be transformed with God Himself. Therefore, it happens to the soul who lives of Faith, that, just as God is holy, the soul is holy; powerful God – powerful the soul; wise, strong and just God – wise, strong and just the soul; and so with all the other attributes of God. In sum, the soul becomes a little god. Oh! the blessedness of this soul on earth, to then be more blessed in Heaven.

 

I also comprehended that those words which the Lord says to His beloved souls – “I will espouse you in the Faith” – mean nothing less but that the Lord, in this mystical marriage, comes to endow the souls with His own virtues. It seems to me that it happens as to two spouses: as they join their properties together, the belongings of one can no longer be distinguished from those of the other, but both of them become the owners. However, in our case, the soul is poor – all the good comes from the Lord, who lets her share in His possessions. The life of the soul is God, Faith is God, and the soul, by possessing Faith, comes to graft all the other virtues into herself, in such a way that Faith is like a king in her heart, and the other virtues remain around It, as the subjects that serve Faith. So, without Faith, the virtues themselves are virtues that have no life.

 

It seems to me that God communicates Faith to man in two ways: the first is in holy Baptism; the second is when blessed God, by unleashing a particle of His substance into the soul, communicates to her the virtue of making miracles, like raising the dead, healing the sick, stopping the sun, and the like. Oh! if the world had Faith, it would change into a terrestrial paradise.

 

The soul who lives of Faith.

 

Oh! how high and sublime is the flight of the soul who exercises herself in Faith. It seems to me that by exercising herself in Faith, the soul acts like those timid little birds which, for fear of being caught by hunters, or of some other snare, establish their dwelling at the top of the trees, or in high places. Then, when they are forced to take food, they descend, take the food, and immediately fly back into their dwelling. And some of them, more cautious, take the food and don’t even eat it on the ground, but in order to be safer, they carry it up to the top of the trees, and there they swallow it. 

 

In the same way, the soul who lives of Faith is so timid with earthly things, that for fear of being snared, she doesn’t so much as glance at them. Her dwelling is up high – that is, above all the things of the earth, and especially in the wounds of Jesus Christ; and from within those blessed rooms [wounds] she moans, cries, prays and suffers together with her Spouse Jesus over the condition and the misery in which mankind lies. While she lives inside those holes of the wounds of Jesus, the Lord gives her a particle of His virtues, and the soul feels those virtues within herself as if they were her own. However, she realizes that, even though she sees them as her own, her possessing them is given to her, for they were communicated by the Lord.

 

It happens to her as to a person who has received a gift that he did not possess. Now, what does he do? He takes it and makes himself the owner of it; however, every time he looks at it, he says to himself: “This is mine, but it was given to me by so and so.” So also does the soul whom the Lord transmutes into Himself, by unleashing from Himself a particle of His Divine Being. Now, this soul, just as she abhors sin, also feels compassion for others, and prays for those whom she sees walking on the path of the precipice. She unites herself with Jesus Christ, and offers herself as victim in order to placate Divine Justice, and to spare creatures the deserved chastisements. And if the sacrifice of her life were necessary – oh! how gladly she would make it for the salvation of one soul alone.

Luisa Piccarreta, Book of Heaven, Volume Two, entry for February 28, 1899.

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The Early Christian Martyrs were RIGID in their Faith.

 

They did not waver in their resolve to resist the lures of paganism. They did not bend their principles, and refused to even burn some incense before the idols of Rome. They refused to show any veneration to the false gods and religions paraded before them, if they would only renounce the Lord Jesus. They would not participate in any pagan worship ceremonies, which would have allowed them to escape death in the arena for being Christians. 

 

They did not waffle on their moral code; the virgins would not submit to those who enticed them defile their purity. There was no thought of compromising their faith, which was firm and rigid like a rock, like that rock upon which the true Church is built. It was that very strength and rigidity of their faith in the face of tortures and martyrdom that led to the collapse of paganism, as explained below. 

 

If you have been graced with, or are open to, appreciating the sublimity and truth of Maria Valtorta’s revelations, read what the Lord Himself said about the fruits of that firm faith of those first Christian martyrs:

 

 

“You also fear persecutions. You no longer have the fiber of old. It’s true. But I am always Myself, children. You must not think that I can’t give you an intrepid heart in the hour of trial. Without my help, no one, even then, could have remained steadfast in the face of so much torture. And yet old men and children, young girls and mothers, and spouses and parents were able to die, encouraging others to die, as if they were going to a celebration. And it was a celebration. An eternal celebration!

 

“They died, and their dying was a breach in the dike of paganism. Like water which goes on eroding and eroding and slowly but inexorably breaks man’s sturdiest works, their blood, issuing forth from thousands of wounds, gnawed at the pagan wall, and like many brooks, scattered into Caesar’s militias, Caesar’s royal palace, into the circuses and spas, and among gladiators and animal keepers [...], and the cultured and common folk – everywhere, unstoppable and invincible. 

 

“The soil of Rome soaked up this blood, and the city rises – I might say it is cemented – with the blood and dust of my martyrs. The few hundred martyrs you are familiar with are nothing compared to the thousands and thousands still buried in the entrails of Rome, and the thousands and thousands of others who, having been burned at the stakes in the circuses, became ash scattered by the wind, or, after being torn to pieces and devoured by beasts and reptiles, became excrement which was swept up [...] as manure. 

 

“But if you do not know these unknown heroes of mine, I know them all, and their complete annihilation, even of their skeletons, has been what has fertilized the savage soil of the pagan world more than any manure and made it become capable of bearing the heavenly Wheat. 

 

“Now this soil of the Christian world is becoming pagan again, and poison germinates, not Bread. And that is why you are afraid. You have become too estranged from God to have the fortitude of old in you. 

 

“The theological virtues are dying in the places where they are not already dead. And you don’t even remember the cardinal virtues. In not having charity, it is only natural for you to be unable to love God to the point of heroism. In not loving Him, you do not hope in Him and do not have faith in Him. In not having faith, hope and charity, you are not strong, prudent and just. In not being strong, you are not temperate, you love the flesh more than the soul and tremble over your flesh. 

 

"But I can still work the miracle. Believe, too, that in every persecution the martyrs are able to be such through my aid. The martyrs – that is, those who still love Me. I then take their love to perfection and make them athletes in faith. I come to the aid of those hoping and believing in Me. Always. In any circumstance.

 

“The little martyr […] with his hands clasping the chalice, even beyond death, teaches you where strength is. In the Eucharist. When someone feeds on Me, as Paul states,204 he no longer lives through himself, but Jesus lives in him. And Jesus was able to endure all torments, without bending. Whoever lives by Me will thus be like Me. Strong.

 

“Have faith.”

 

 

Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1944, Feb. 29, p. 185. Available from the “Maria Valtorta’s Readers’ Group,” https://www.valtorta.org.au/

 

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On becoming a Secular (Third Order) Franciscan.

 

I believe I was named after my father’s brother, Frank Rega. Unfortunately, my birth certificate says Frank, instead of my uncle’s real name, Francesco. That was 1942. I would love to have been Francesco, especially now that I am a Secular Franciscan. 

 

I was just a Sunday Catholic who went to public schools. But around the time I received the sacrament of Confirmation, I was thinking of becoming a priest, due to our inspiring parish priest. I used to collect baseball cards and articles about players, and I thought that I could put them in a little suitcase and keep them even if I became a priest. I would give everything up but not that collection!

 

Unfortunately during my High School years I lost the faith to the point of becoming an agnostic – maybe there is a God but we can’t know it. I was reading a lot of Bertrand Russell, who was a non-violent pacifist (good), but he did not consider himself a Christian (bad). Looking back, I wish I had been reading Thomas Aquinas instead. 

 

I went to college and graduated from Rutgers University in 1965 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers was, and probably still is, a liberal left-wing hotbed, and I fit right in. As a Psychology major, some of my classes treated the false theory of evolution as a scientific fact, and I did not disagree. I don’t recall ever going to Mass during this time. 

 

I was seeking after Truth, but did not connect Truth with God. I tried graduate school at the Yale Institute of Human Relations, but dropped out after one year because I did not think I could really learn what life was all about by sitting in a classroom.

 

So I found myself living and working in New York City. After a lot of adventures and various jobs, I ended up back in New Jersey, beginning a career as a computer programmer. Somewhere around the early 1970’s, in my search for Truth, I walked into a Catholic bookstore and purchased a book called The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. This book put my life back on track. After reading it, I truly believed in the Lord. 

 

From an agnostic I returned to the Catholic faith, and to Mass. However it was not the Mass I knew when I was confirmed. After the Vatican II Council, there were a lot of changes and even confusion in the Church. I visited the parish of the priest who had inspired my youthful desire to become one, and at his Mass, for Holy Communion they gave out pieces of cake! 

 

Throughout those post-Conciliar years, I did a lot of reading from Catholic authors, and finally got to St. Thomas Aquinas. Better late than never. But my main attraction was St. Francis, and how he lived close to nature, and to Jesus. I also developed a devotion to the Blessed Virgin, to St. Joseph, and to Padre Pio. 

 

My computer work took me to Philadelphia, where I lived in an apartment within walking distance to the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, which became my parish. Providentially, the cathedral hosted a large secular Franciscan fraternity, known appropriately as the Cathedral Fraternity. Fortunately their monthly meeting was on a Saturday, so although I was working full-time I could join with them. Many of the members participated in a very fruitful apostolate of feeding the hungry and helping the poor at the St. Francis Inn, a facility with a large dining area founded by three Franciscan friars (https://stfrancisinn.org/), located in Kensington. 

 

I was received into the Third Order on March 13, 1982 (my Reception Day), but I was not yet professed. However, I was invested with the Brown Scapular and the cord, sacramentals which have since been replaced for Franciscan seculars by the TAU cross. Unfortunately, the Cathedral Fraternity no longer exists.

 

Next stop in my computer career was Washington, D.C., and I took an apartment near the campus of Catholic University. The Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America (https://myfranciscan.org/) was only about two miles away, and I joined their Secular group, named Mt. St. Sepulchre Fraternity. Since they met on the third Sunday of the month, I was able to participate although working full-time. 

 

It was there that I became a professed Secular Franciscan, on June 19, 1983, at the age of 41. I don’t recall that the fraternity had a special apostolate, other than helping in some way at the monastery with the many visitors who tour the famous rose gardens and replicas of Catholic shrines.

 

After my retirement from the computer world, I moved to coastal Sussex County in Southern Delaware. Around 2004 I saw an announcement in my church bulletin about an effort to form a new Secular Franciscan fraternity to be named after St. Clare. I began going to their gatherings, and after a few years the fraternity was granted official canonical status. Based in Rehoboth Beach, the St. Clare Fraternity meets on Thursdays once a month, which is not a problem for retirees since so many live in the county, although the demographics are changing with new construction everywhere. 

 

Their apostolates revolve around providing food, clothing and other assets for many charitable causes. Since I now had more time as a retiree, I began to write Catholic books, including one on St. Francis titled St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims. Then a few years ago, mainly due to health issues, I formally became an inactive member of the St. Clare Fraternity. 

 

View my Catholic website here http://www.frankrega.com/

 

God requires only faith from you in order to act.

Everything is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God requires only faith from you in order to act. We accuse Him so often of not listening to us and of not satisfying us.

 

On December 31, 1943, Our Lord said to the mystic Maria Valtorta that “...under the devil's lash, your hearts are led to waver in doubt, the first step towards despair. That is what Satan wants. He is not so interested in the material ruins he produces as in the spiritual effects they have on you. It is thus appropriate for Me, the Master, to repeat to you once more the lesson concerning the way to behave so as to obtain.” The Lord then reflects on two points.

 

[First point:] “Mark, in the sixth chapter of his Gospel, verse 5, says, ‘And he could not do any miracles there, only that he cured a few that were sick, laying his hands upon them.’ Only someone considering the perfection of the God-Man […] can comprehend how lovingly I had gone to my homeland. God does not deny and forbid your sentiments when they are honest and holy. He condemns only the ones which you erroneously call sentiments, but which are in reality perversions.

 

“I loved my homeland, then, and, within it, my home town, with a special love. My heart returned every day with loving thoughts to Nazareth, from which I had set out to evangelize, and I returned as well, for I would have wished to benefit and sanctify it, even though I knew it was closed and hostile to Me. If I lavished the power of the miracle everywhere, in Nazareth I would have wanted this power not to leave any case of physical illness, moral illness, or spiritual illness unresolved; I would have wanted to provide consolation for every form of misery, give light to every heart. But against Me was the incredulity of my fellow townsmen.

 

“Therefore, only those few who came to Me with faith and without pride in judgment were granted a miracle [of cures if sickness]. You accuse Me so often of not listening to you and of not satisfying you. But examine yourselves, O children. How do you come to Me? In you where is that constant, absolute faith like that of an innocent child who knows that his older brother, his loving father, and his patient grandfather can help him and make him content in his needs as a child because they love him so much? In you where is such faith towards Me?

 

“Am I not perhaps a foreigner among you, as I was in Nazareth, because incredulity and criticism expelled Me from it as a citizen? You pray. There are still some who pray. But as you ask Me for a grace, you think, without saying so even to yourselves, but thinking in the depths of your spirit, “God does not listen to me. God cannot grant me this grace.” 

 

“He cannot?! What is God unable to do? Consider that He made the Universe from nothing consider that for millennia He has been launching the planets into space and governing their course; consider that He holds back the waters on the shores, and without barriers; consider that from the mud He made that organism which you are; consider that in this organism a seed and a few drops of blood mixed together create a new man, who in being shaped is in relation to the phases of the stars thousands of kilometers away, but also present in the work of forming a being, [In what way are the stars present in the work of forming a being? A mystery that Jesus hints at, but certainly not in the astrological sense that one’s destiny is fated in some way by the position of the stars at one’s birth.] just as, with their ethers and their rising and setting in your skies, they regulate the sprouting of crops and the blossoming of trees; consider that in his wise power He has created flowers endowed with organs capable of fecundating other flowers for which winds and insects act as pollinators. Consider that there is nothing which has not been created by God, so perfectly created, from the sun to the protozoon, that you can add nothing to such perfection.

 

“Consider that, from the sun to the protozoon, his wisdom has ordered all the laws for life, and be convinced that nothing is impossible for God, who at his ease can have all the forces of the cosmos at his disposal, increase them, halt them, and speed them up, provided his Thought so considers. How often, in the course of millennia, have the Earth's inhabitants remained astonished at stellar phenomena of inconceivable grandeur: meteors with strange lights, nighttime sun, comets and stars arising like flowers in a garden, in God's garden, and being launched into space as if by child's play, to amaze you?!

 

“Your scientists give ponderous explanations of the […] stellar bodies to make the incomprehensible development of the skies human. No. Be silent. Say a single word: God. Here is the shaper of those shining, rotating, burning lives! God is the one who, as a warning to you that are forgetful, tells you that He exists by way of the northern lights, the darting meteors tingeing the ether furrowed by them with sapphire, emerald, ruby, or topaz, the comets with a flaming tail like the mantle of a heavenly queen flying across the firmaments, the opening of the eye of another star in the vault of heaven, and the whirling of the sun perceptible at Fatima to convince you of God's will. Your other inductions are the smoke of human science and envelope error in the smoke.

 

“Everything is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God requires only faith from you in order to act. You act as a barrier to God's power with your distrust. And your prayers are contaminated with distrust. And I am not counting those who do not pray, but curse.

 

[Second point:] “Another point in Mark's Gospel is verse 13 in the same sixth chapter: ‘...And they anointed the sick with oil and healed them.’ In empirical medicine at that time oil played a leading role. Nor can it be said that it was more harmful or less effective than your complicated medicines at present. Indeed, it was certainly more innocuous.

 

“But it was not in the oil that the power of healing lay for the sick upon whom my apostles carried out the anointings. As always, a visible sign was needed for human dullness. Who could have thought that a touch of the hand of those poor men who were my apostles, known to be fishermen and common people, could heal? If they had thought so, they would have said, ‘You heal by the power of the prince of the demons,’ as they said to Me. And they would have accused them of being possessed by devils. That was not to be. I thus gave them the human means to be believed by the empirical, if nothing else. But the power was God, who infused it into them to make proselytes for his doctrine.

 

“I said, ‘Those who believe in Me will be able to walk upon serpents and scorpions and do the works I do.’ I never lie, and into the hand of a child believing and living in Me I can infuse divine power. Isn't the history of Christianity filled with such miracles? The early centuries are strewn with them, and the flowering of them has gradually diminished, not because God's power has diminished, but because you are not equal to the task of being ministers of God.

 

“Have faith. Have faith. Have faith. It will save you."

Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1943, December 31. Available from the “Maria Valtorta’s Readers’ Group,” https://www.valtorta.org.au/

 

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War is Hatred

In December of 1943 Our Lord spoke a few short but concise words to Maria Valtorta, while WWII was raging in Italy. 

 

He told her that another sign of His coming to be born on earth was peace. “The world was entirely at peace when I was born. I was God, and God is Love. War is hatred.” Jesus, our Redeemer was the true Prince of Peace, and He could not come to us unless there was peace on earth at his birth. 

 

Jesus is the New Adam, who established a new generation among men, annulling by His martyrdom the perverse generation of the earlier one. As the first of the new generation, He was “born to life [...] when there was no fighting in the world.” Even though because of the influence of Satan, “the massacre of the animals carried out by man and among the animals themselves still continued […] men were at peace among themselves. At least among themselves, they were at peace.”

 

But before the fall of Adam, “not even those two forms of slaughter existed,” − men did not kill animals, and animals did not kill each other!

 

Bombed out railroad station in Maria Valtorta’s hometown of Viareggio, Italy. WWII photo.

 

“War is hatred, and God is not present where there is hatred. To merit God, one must be without hatred. Towards anyone. Any means is useless if God is lacking. […] The first condition in order to emerge from this hell is for you first to emerge from the hatred which robes you and for you to extirpate from yourselves the hatred which is like marrow of your bones.

 

“Now I say to you, ‘Pray.’ Among you there is still a minority capable of heeding Me, of praying and suffering for the world. To these I say, ‘Pray.’ It is time to divert the severity of the torment which has begun with prayer and immolation... 

 

“While the world blasphemes and kills, sing hosannas to the Lord and love. Love is more powerful than strength and defeats even hell. Love overcomes everything, O my beloved ones. [...] And not only this, but the good you do will attract Heavenly Good in an ever-increasing measure, for God asks for nothing except to pour Himself out upon you in love, and you would experience the era of peace promised to good men at My birth.”

 

Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1943, December 21 and 22. Her works are available from the Maria Valtorta Readers’ Group, https://www.valtorta.org.au/

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What to do on Sunday and Holy Days.

What to do on Sunday if you cannot attend a true Mass. Perhaps you are one of the fortunate few that attends a  parish, shrine, or Catholic organization  that observes the Novus Ordo reverently. If not, consider whether or not you are in communion with the parishioners, most of whom do not believe in the real presence, or with pro-abortion Catholics, especially prominent politicians.

 

Determine whether or not your faith and spirituality is weakened after attending the Modernist Novus Ordo Mass [link]. If your only alternative is an irreverent or progressive Novus Ordo, the Eucharist may be valid, but it is also valid for the Eastern Orthodox, and they are not Catholic.  Therefore consider staying home and praying the Tridentine Mass with a Spiritual Communion.

1.  Obtain a Sunday Missal written prior to Vatican II, which has the Latin text alongside the English.  I use My Sunday Missal by Fr. Stedman.

 

2.  Before praying the Mass using the Missal, pray this short prayer, to unite your intentions with those of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the sacrifice of her Son at Calvary.  The Mass is a sacrifice and a worship rite, not a social event.  See this link for the prayer. 

 

 3.   Pray the Mass, it is the most powerful prayer you can pray.  Prayerfully read the text of the Missal, with the specific readings and prayers for that Sunday, known as the Proper of the Mass.

 

4.   Very important, at the time of receiving Communion in the Mass, make your Spiritual Communion.  Ask Jesus to enter your heart with His Real Life, for example as taught in the revelations to Luisa Piccarreta.   The Real Life of Jesus in your heart is the same life He has in the Eucharistic Sacrament. 

 

5.  Additional note:  I make the intention that the priest offering this Mass is St. Padre Pio.  

 

 

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