The Poem of the Man-God (Italian title: Il Poema dell'Uomo-Dio) is a work on the life of Jesus Christ written by Maria Valtorta. The current editions of the work bear the title The Gospel as Revealed to Me.
The work was first published in Italian in 1956 and has since been translated into many languages. It is based on about 10,000 of the over 15,000 handwritten pages produced by Maria Valtorta in her notebooks. The large majority of the work was written in about three years between January 1944 and April 1947. During these years she reported visions of Jesus and Mary, in addition to personal conversations and dictations from Jesus.
The work was placed on the (now abolished) Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1959, and has remained controversial since its publication. Various scholars, historians and Biblical experts continue to both support and criticize the work to this day.
Writing and publication The handwritten notebooks After writing her autobiography based on the advice of her priest, Father Romualdo Migliorini, O.S.M., in 1943 the bedridden Valtorta began handwriting a series of what she claimed were messages from Jesus. These were later typed by her priest and arranged chronologically to produce the work.
Although Valtorta wrote about 15,000 pages during the years 1943–1947, only 10,000 of these (mostly written from 1944 to 1947) were used in her main book which was at first called The Poem of the Man-God. The additional pages were later published as The Notebooks. The Poem contains over 650 reported episodes in the life of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
The papal audience Father Corrado Berti, O.S.M., professor at Marianum Pontifical Faculty of Theology at Rome, sent a preprint copy of the Poem to Pope Pius XII in 1947. Then on 26 February 1948, Pope Pius XII received Fr. Berti, Fr. Miglorini, and their prior Fr. Andrea Chechin in private audience which was reported in L'Osservatore Romano the next day. Fr. Berti reported that in the meeting Pius XII stated:
Publish this work as it is. There is no need to give an opinion about its origin, whether it be extraordinary or not. Who reads it will understand. One hears of many visions and revelations. I will not say they are all authentic; but there are some of which it could be said they are.
However, in 1949 the Holy Office summoned Fr. Berti and ordered him not to publish the work.
The imprimatur question Cardinal Edouard Gagnon wrote that the statement by Pius XII at the meeting with the three priests was "the type of imprimatur granted by the Holy Father before witnesses," and that it was in complete conformity with the demands of canon law. Fr. Melançon, C.S.C., said that Gagnon's doctoral thesis in canon law gave him the qualifications to make such a determination. In contrast, Fr. Anthony Pillari said that the only valid imprimatur for the work was issued in 1993 for the Malayalam translation and does not carry over to other languages. Similarly, Rene Laurentin et al. maintain that Pius XII never took an official position beyond his original statement in the February 1948 private audience.
Pillari noted that, in 1952, ten scholars (including Archbishop Alfonso Carinci) who supported Valtorta petitioned Pius XII to take some steps to allow the publication of the work, given the opposition from the Holy Office, but Pius XII took no action. Pillari said that after the significant change brought by the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC/17 c. 1385), the issue of Valtorta's work having or not having an imprimatur is currently irrelevant. He pointed to the article "The End of The Imprimatur" by J. Coriden, which said that the 1983 change significantly narrowed the scope of the works needing an imprimatur, to the extent that most theological and religious writings are now exempt from the requirement to have one, except in a few cases such as specific books used for teaching theology.James Coriden, "The End of The Imprimatur" The Jurist 44, 1984
Publication
According to Paul Collins, Maria Valtorta was at first reluctant to have her notebooks published but, on the advice of her priest, in 1947 she agreed to their publication.Rookey O.S.M., Peter M., Shepherd of Souls: The Virtuous Life of Saint Anthony Pucci, (Jun 2003) CMJ Marian Press pp. 1–3 However, the initial four volume edition of the work was published without an author name.
In 1952, the two priests Migliorini and Berti found a publisher for the work, and in October of that year Maria Valtorta signed a contract with Michele Pisani, whose publishing firm was based in Frosinone, southeast of Rome.Stefano Lorenzetti "Tipi Italiani" Il Giornale August 24, 2014 The first edition of the work was published in 1956 in Italian. Later, the firm was managed by Emilio Pisani, the son of Michele Pisani. In 2014, Emilio Pisani stated that he had spent about 50 years with the work and that by then translations into 15 languages had been published and translations into around another 15 languages were in progress. Asked by Il Giornale about the number of copies sold, Pisani responded that he did not have an exact number at hand, but there were millions of copies.
Ecclesiastical reaction
Index of Forbidden Books On 16 December 1959, the Holy Office placed the 4-volume work (the first volume entitled The Poem of Jesus, and the remaining 3 volumes titled The Poem of the Man-God) on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The decree was published in L'Osservatore Romano on 6 January 1960, accompanied by a front-page, anonymously written article under the heading "A Badly Fictionalized Life of Jesus". Fr. Anthony Pillari noted that the L'Osservatore Romano article stated that the work was placed on the Index because it went against rule 1385 of the Code of Canon Law which required an imprimatur prior to publication.
On 1 December 1961, an official statement by the Holy Office published in L'Osservatore Romano stated that the second edition of the Poem published in ten volumes effectively contained the same material as the previous edition and remained subject to the same prohibitions.L'Osservatore Romano (in Italian). December 1, 1961. p. 1.
On 15 June 1966, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith abolished the Index and all formal sanctions against reading books placed on the Index ended. The decree was published in L'Osservatore Romano by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani.
After the Index On 31 January 1985 and 17 April 1993, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote two letters about Valtorta's Poem. He stated that, in his opinion, recommendation of Valtorta's work was not opportune considering it was formerly on the Index, and that it cannot be considered supernatural in origin. Fr. Anthony Pillari states that this was Ratzinger's personal opinion and not that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had not held formal discussions on the issue, and hence had no juridic value.
In May 1992, Archbishop Dionigi Tettamanzi wrote to Emilio Pisani, Valtorta's publisher, and requested that the Poem include a statement that indicates the material in the work are literary forms to narrate the life of Jesus and cannot be considered of supernatural origin. Fr. Anthony Pillari states that was the personal opinion of Tettamanzi, not of the Catholic Conference of Bishops, since no formal meeting was recorded as having taken place on the subject, which caused Tettamanzi's position to have no juridic value. Pillari also states that given that Tettamazi was in Genova, he had no jurisdiction over the publisher which was in Frosinone. René Laurentin et al. state that in their opinion, Tettamanzi's letter effectively affirmed that reading the work was permitted, provided its contents were not assumed to have a supernatural origin.
Support Astronomical analysis
Emilio Matricciani, professor of engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan, and physicist Liberato De Caro of the Italian National Research Council, state that following the earlier work of physicist Lonnie Van Zandt in 1994, they have analyzed some of the descriptions of the night sky mentioned in various parts of Valtorta's work. They state that although Valtorta's Poem includes no dates, the fact that it mentions the visibility of a three way conjunction of planets on a Sunday night in March from Gadara can lead to the partial determination of dates for that episode, given that the conjunction takes place on rare occasions.
They state that a Planetarium software system establishes that the only possibilities for this observation would be AD 31 or AD 33. They also state that other sky observations mentioned in the narrative shows that chapter 609 of the work, which describes the crucifixion of Jesus, corresponds to the date April 21, AD 34, as Van Zandt had computed. According to the authors, the estimation of the joint observability of these sky objects and the position of the moon during specific episodes would have been almost impossible without a computer system. Matricciani and De Caro also state that the date April 21, AD 34 is one of the two possible dates that Isaac Newton had computed in 1733 using a different approach based on the visibility of the crescent of the moon.Newton, Sir Isaac (1733). "Of the Times of the Birth and Passion of Christ", chapter 11 in Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: J. Darby and T. Browne), pp. 144–168.
Geographic descriptions
Gianfranco Battisti, professor of geography at the University of Trieste, analyzed and compared the geographic descriptions of ancient Palestine in the works of Anne Catherine Emmerich and Maria Valtorta.Gianfranco Battisti "Geographie del Sacro" Documenti Geografici, Associazione dei Geogfi Italiani, July–December 2019. An English version of the article appears in the book "Hidden Geographies" edited by Marko Krevs, Springer Publishing 2021, pp 71–85. Battisti stated that Valtorta's work has many more geographic descriptions than the book attributed to Emmerich by Clemens Brentano. Battisti wrote that in his view the approximately 500 locations and toponyms in Valtorta's Poem are well placed. He stated that geographic data support Valtorta's book and her work may shed light on the current understanding of ancient geography.
As two examples of details in Valtorta's book, Battisti mentioned the account of the travel from Engannim to Shechem in chapter 193 of the Poem and the detailed description of Masada in chapters 390 and 391. He wrote that Valtorta's description of how the road from Engannim to Shechem rose through the valleys in Samaria was surprising. He also stated that in his view the details about Masada in Valtorta's work are unexpected, given what was available about Masada when her book was written.
Alignment of dates with Medjugorje Damian Mac Namara, a professor of engineering, performed an analysis of the date of birth of the Virgin Mary in the Poem. Valtorta does not provide a specific date for that event, but the messages associated with Medjugorje directly state that the date was August 5, 17 BC.Damian Mac Namara, On the Chronology of Mary in the Writings of Maria Valtorta and Its Relation to the Medjugorje Birth Date Proceedings of the International Conference on Christian Phenomena, Limeric, 2025.
Mac Namara stated that some of the details casually mentioned in Valtorta's description of the sky and environment at the time of the birth of Mary turned out to be essential to his analysis. He concluded that although Valtorta wrote her descriptions in the 1940's, the date provided by the Medjugorje messages aligned with the chronological framework that can be derived from the Poem.
Mathematical and statistical analysis