"THIS is not the Gospel. But I want it to be considered one of the `gospels of faith' for those of you who are afraid.

You are afraid of persecutions, too. You no longer have the ancient temper. That is true. But I am always Myself, Sons. You should not think that I cannot give you a fearless heart in the hour of trial. Without My help no one, even then, could have remained firm before such torture. And yet old men and children, young girls and mothers, spouses and parents, knew how to die while encouraging each other to die as though they were going to a feast. And a feast it was. An Eternal Feast!

They died, and their dying was a breach in the dike of paganism. Like water that digs and digs and digs and, slowly but inexorably, breaks up the strongest works of man, so their blood gushing from a thousand wounds, crumbled the pagan walls and, like so many little streams, spread itself into the armies of Caesar, into the palace of Caesar, into the Circuses and hot baths (spas), among the gladiators and animal-handlers, among those assigned to the public baths, among the cultured and the common people: everywhere, unceasingly and invincibly.

The soil of Rome had drunk of this blood and the city arose -- you could say was cemented -- with the blood and dust of My martyrs. The few hundred martyrs whom you all know are nothing with respect to the thousands and thousands still buried in the bowels of Rome; and to the other thousands and thousands who, burned at the stake in the Circuses, became ashes scattered by the wind; or those who, torn to bits and swallowed by wild beasts and reptiles, became excrement that was swept up and thrown out as manure.

But if you do not know them -- these, My unknown heroes -- I know them all. And their total annihilation -- even to their skeletons -- had been what fertilized, more than any kind of manure, the wild soil of the pagan world and made it capable of bearing the Celestial Grain.

Now this soil of the Christian world is becoming pagan again and germinates poison, and not bread. It is for that reason that you are afraid. You have detached yourselves too often from God to have in you the ancient strength.

The Theological virtues are dying -- where they have not already died. And the Cardinal virtues you do not even remember. Not having charity, it is logical you cannot love God to the point of heroism. And not loving Him, you do not hope in Him, you have no faith in Him. Not having faith, hope and charity, you are not strong, prudent, just. Not being strong, you are not temperate. And not being temperate, you love your flesh more than your soul and you fear for your flesh.

But I still know how to work a miracle. Believe also that in every persecution it was through My help that the martyrs knew how to be such: Martyrs -- that is, those who still love Me. It was I, then, Who brought their love to perfection and made of them athletes of faith. I help those who hope and believe in Me. Always. In whatever occurrence.

The little martyr who remains with his small hands clasping the chalice, even after death,² teaches you where strength is: in the Eucharist. When one is nourished by Me, according to the saying of Paul, he does not live anymore for himself but Jesus lives in him.³ And Jesus has known how to endure all torments, without bending. Therefore whoever lives from Me will be like Me: Strong. Have faith."

"MY martyrs had possessed Wisdom. And with them, My confessors as well. And all those who truly love Me and make of this love the aim of their life, possess It.

To the eyes of the world this is not evident. Rather, to be just seems a weakness, something that is vanquished. As if through the turn of the centuries changes had occurred between God and His faithful.

No. If I have lessened the rigor of the Mosaic Law and given you resources of incalculable power to help you practice the Law and reach Perfection, there has been no change in the duty of respect and obedience which you have for the Lord your God. If He has become Good to the point of giving Himself to make all of you good, you should be so still more, and not say: `Let Him think about saving us. Let us enjoy ourselves.' That is not wisdom: it is foolishness and blasphemy. That is the wisdom of the world -- blameworthy -- not Divine Wisdom.

My martyrs were Divinely wise. They had not, like the godless, said to themselves: ' Let's enjoy today because it does not return, and with death ends every joy. And in order to enjoy ourselves, let's make a right of arrogance; and extorting from the weak and the good what it is not permitted to extort, let us by these extortions draw out what fills their own purse, so as then to fill our belly and satisfy the lust of our flesh and mind.' They have not, like the godless, said to themselves: ' To be just is a sacrifice and it is wearisome to be so. What a reproof to see a just man! So let's remove him from our midst because his justice reminds us of God and reprimands our living like beasts.' ⁵

My martyrs had instead overthrown the world's theory and had wanted only to follow God's. The world had therefore put them on trial, outraged them, tormented and killed them, hoping to disturb their virtue. And in its madness, it did not know that any blow given to crumble their soul was like a hammer which made them penetrate into Me, and I into them, with a love of perfect fusion: so much so that, in the prisons or the circuses, they were already in Heaven and saw Me just as, after the moment of sorrow and death, they would see Me for their blessed Eternity.

Not dead, not destroyed, not tortured, not despairing. Just as the travail of childbirth is not death, is not destruction, not torture, not despair, but is life which begets life; but is a doubling of a flesh that was one and now becomes two. Childbirth is satisfaction, it is the hope of being a mother and of having the ineffable joy of motherhood for one's whole life: so was that pain for them hope, security, life, which made them blessed.

The world cannot understand them, these holy, mad fools whose madness was to love God with all the perfection possible to a creature, making themselves voluntarily sterile, since their only marriage was with Me, the Divine; making themselves eunuchs who, for One Spiritual Love, amputated human sensuality in themselves and lived as angels. The world cannot understand these sublimely made souls who, aware of the sweetness of the bridal chamber and of offspring, knew how to renounce both the one and other, and to fly toward torments after having willingly torn their heart in leaving children and mates for love of Me, their Love.

But the world has been saved by them. If you have become the wild beasts that you are after such an example and such a washing with purifying blood, what would you have become, and for how long, without the holy and blessed generation of My martyrs? They have kept you from hurling yourselves into Satan long before the moment that your lusts have fomented for you. They invite you always to stop and put yourselves back on the way that ascends, to leave the path that hurtles downward. They speak words of salvation to you. They speak these words with their wounds, with their words to the tyrants, with their charity, with their care for their modesty, with their patience, purity, faith, constancy. They say to you that only one science is necessary: that which wells up from Eternal Wisdom.

Wiser still than Solomon, they preferred this Wisdom to all the thrones and riches of the earth. And to obtain It and preserve It they braved persecutions and torments; they embraced death in order not to lose this Wisdom. They loved It more than health and beauty, and wanted to have It for their light, because Its splendor comes directly from God, and to possess It means to anticipate in the soul the beatific Light of the Eternal Day.⁶ With their uprightness of heart, they learned this Wisdom and with charity they communicated It even to their enemies. They had no fear of being left deprived of It by sharing it with the crowds who were deprived of It, since Wisdom, living in them, taught them that to give is to receive,⁷ and that the more they distributed the Celestial Waters which the Divine Fount poured into them, the more such Waters increased to the point of brimming them over like chalices of a holy Mass, consumed for the good of the world by the Eternal Priest.

The wise king [Solomon] enumerates the gifts of Wisdom Whose Spirit is intelligent, holy, unique, multiple, subtle...; but all these qualities they, My martyrs, had possessed. In them there was what Solomon calls a vapor of the virtue of God and an emanation of the glory of the Almighty.⁸ They therefore mirrored God again in themselves as no one else in the world. They reflected God again in His qualities, and mirrored Me, Christ-Savior, in My holocaust.

Oh! How in the mouth of every martyr could be placed the words of Solomon proclaiming that he loved and sought Wisdom from his youth and wanted Her for his Spouse! That he wanted Her for a Teacher and as Riches!⁹ And oh, how you could think, without fear of error, that on their lips flowered that prayer to obtain Wisdom which had flowered on the lips of Solomon!¹⁰

O all you whom lust of the flesh has drawn back to the darkness of paganism -- a darkness much more profound than that to which My martyrs brought the Light -- how you should endeavor to make yourselves lovers of, desirous of Wisdom, and pray that It be given you as a Guide in your individual and collective enterprises, so that you may no longer be what you are: cruel maniacs who torture one another, losing your life and substance -- two things which you hold on to; and the salvation of your spirit -- something which I hold on to, I Who died to give your spirits salvation.

'It is through Wisdom that the ways of men are made straight,' ¹¹says Solomon, and that they know what is acceptable to God'. Remember that. And know that nothing else is acceptable to God but your good. Therefore, if you know and follow this way acceptable to Him, you will do good to yourselves on earth and in Heaven."

"O YOU Christians of the 20th Century, who listen to the histories of My martyrs as to fairytales and say: 'It cannot be true! How can it be? After all, they were also men and women! It's a legend.' --Know that it is not a legend. But it is history. And if you believe in the civic virtues of the ancient Athenians, Spartans, Romans, and you feel your spirit excited by the heroism and greatness of civil heroes, why do you not want to believe in these supernatural virtues, and not feel your spirit excited and spurred on to the preferred imitation of the heroism of My heroes?

'After all,' you say, 'they were men and women.' Certainly. They were men and women. You speak a great truth and you give yourselves a great condemnation. They were men and women, and you are brute beasts. You are degraded from your likeness to God, from your sonship of God, to the level of animals guided solely by instinct, and relatives of Satan.

They were men and women. They had turned back into 'men and women' by means of Grace, just as were the First Man and First Woman in the Earthly Paradise.

Is it not read in Genesis that God made the Man ruler over all that was upon the earth, that is, over all except God and His angelic ministers? Is it not read that He made the Woman so that she might be a companion for the Man in his joy and in his dominion over all living things? Is it not read that they could eat of all but the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?¹³ Why? What intimation is there in the words 'that he may rule over'? What in that of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil? Have you ever asked yourselves that? you who ask yourselves so many useless things and never know how to ask from your souls the Celestial truths?

If your soul were alive, she would tell you these truths -- your soul which, when she is in grace, is held like a flower between the hands of your angel; your soul which, when she is in grace, is like a flower kissed by the sun and sprinkled with dew by the Holy Spirit Who warms and illumines her, Who waters her, adorning her with Celestial lights.

How many truths your soul would tell you if you knew how to converse with her, if you loved her as that which places in you your likeness to God, Who is Spirit, as your soul is spirit. How great a friend you would have if you loved your soul instead of hating her to the point of killing her: how great, how sublime a friend with whom to talk of the things of Heaven, you who are so greedy for talk and who ruin each other with friendships which, if they are not unworthy (and sometimes they are), are however almost always useless, and are changed for you into an empty and harmful din of words -- words all of earth.

Have I not said: 'He who loves Me will keep My Word and My Father will love him and We will come to him and We will make Our abode with him?' ¹⁴ The soul in grace possesses Love, and possessing Love, possesses God: that is, the Father Who preserves her, the Son Who instructs her, the Spirit Who illumines her. Hence, she possesses Knowledge, Science, Wisdom. She possesses the Light.

Think, then, what sublime conversations your soul could weave with you. It is these conversations which have filled the silence of prisons, of cells, of hermitages, the silence of the rooms of the holy infirm. It is these conversations which have comforted the imprisoned awaiting martyrdom, the cloistered searching for the Truth, the secluded yearning for the anticipated knowledge of God, the infirm, in bearing -- but what am I saying? -- in loving their cross.

If you knew how to question your soul, she would tell you that the true, the exact significance, vast as creation, of those words: 'rule over', is this: 'So that Man may rule over ALL. Over all three of his levels: his lower animal level; his middle moral level; his higher spiritual level. And that he may direct all three of them to one single end: "To possess God'' -- meriting to possess Him with this iron rule which holds in subjection all the forces of the me, the ego, and makes them handmaids of this single aim: to merit the possession of God.

She, your soul, would tell you that God had forbidden the knowledge of Good and Evil because He had gratuitously lavished upon His creatures the Good, and because He did not want you to know the Evil, for it is a fruit sweet to the palate, but once it has descended into the blood with its juice, it awakens in the blood a fever which kills and produces a burning thirst, so that the more one drinks of that deceptive juice, the more one thirsts for it.

You will object: 'And why did You put it there?' 'And why!' Because Evil is a force which is born by itself like certain monstrous evils -- maladies -- in the healthiest body.

Lucifer was an angel, the most beautiful of the angels: a perfect spirit, inferior only to God. And yet in his luminous being there was born a vapor of arrogance, which he did not disperse. But rather he condensed it, thickened it, by harboring it. And from this incubation Evil was born. It existed before Man did. God had hurled Lucifer out of Paradise --this accursed Incubator of Evil, this Defiler of Paradise. But he has remained the eternal Incubator of Evil. And being unable to defile Paradise anymore, he has defiled the Earth.¹⁵

That metaphorical Tree stands there to demonstrate this truth. God had said to the Man and the Woman: 'You know all the laws and the mysteries of creation. But do not desire to usurp My right to be the Creator of Man. To propagate the human stock My Love will suffice, Which will circulate in you both. And without the lust of the senses, but solely through the throbbing of charity, It will raise up new Adams from your stock. I give you all. I reserve to Myself only this mystery of the formation of Man.'

Satan wanted to take away this intellectual virginity from the Man, and with his serpentine tongue had flattered and caressed the limbs and eyes of Eve, stirring up in them reflections and shrewdness which she did not have before, because Malice had not [yet] poisoned them. Now, she sees. And seeing, she wants to experience. Her flesh was awakened.

Oh! If she had called God! If she had run to say to Him: 'Father! I am sick! The Serpent has caressed me, and a disturbance is in me.' The Father would have purified and healed her with His Breath because, as He had infused life into her, He could have infused innocence into her anew, making her forget the Serpent's poison and putting into her instead a repugnance for the Serpent, as there is in those whom an illness has attacked and, after being healed of that malady, they carry an instinctive repugnance for it.

But Eve does not go to the Father. Eve returns to the Serpent. That sensation, that feeling is sweet to her. 'Seeing that the fruit of the tree was good to eat and beautiful to the eye and pleasing in appearance,' she gathers it and eats it.¹⁶

And 'she understood'. Now Malice descended into her to bite her bowels. She sees with new eyes and hears with new ears the habits and voices of the brute animals. And she was greedy for them with an insane greed.

She began the sin alone. She brought it to term with her companion. Behold why the greater condemnation weighs upon the woman.¹⁷It is through her that man became a rebel toward God and has known lust and death. It is through her that he has not known anymore how to rule over his three kingdoms:¹⁸ that of his spirit, because he has permitted his spirit to disobey God; of his moral part because he has permitted his passions to command him; of his flesh, because he has debased it to the instinctive laws of brute beasts.

'The Serpent seduced me,' says Eve. 'The woman offered me the fruit and I ate of it,' says Adam.¹⁹ And from then on the triple cupidity, the triple greed, seized the three kingdoms of man.

It is only Grace which succeeds in loosening the grip of this ruthless monster. And if this Grace is alive, very alive, kept always more alive by the will of a faithful son, it finally reaches the point of strangling the monster and having nothing more to fear. Neither from internal tyrants, that is, from the flesh and the passions; nor from persecutions; nor from death.

It is as the apostle Paul says: 'None of these things do I fear, nor do I hold on to my life anymore for myself, provided I accomplish my mission and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus to bear witness to the Gospel of the Grace of God.' ²⁰

My martyrs had held on to accomplishing their mission and the ministry they received from Me of sanctifying the world and bearing witness to the Gospel. With nothing else were they preoccupied. Through Grace living in them and protected by them with the same care which they gave to the very pupil of their eye, and through their life which they threw away with cheerful readiness, knowing how to throw away a corruptible castoff to acquire an incorruptible one of infinite value, they thus reverted to being 'men and women', no longer being brute beasts. And as men and women, children of their Heavenly Father, they lived and acted as such.

As Paul says, they 'were not greedy for gold or silver or anyone's garments,' ²¹ but rather despoiled themselves and were willingly despoiled of all riches, even to that of life, 'in order to follow Me' on earth and in Heaven.

' With their hands,' (always as the Apostle says), ' they provided for their needs and those of others,'²² they gave Life to themselves and brought others to that Life.

By laboring they helped those who are weak with that dreaded weakness which is living outside of the true Faith, and prodigally gave themselves to them for this goal: giving their affections, their blood, their life, their fatigue, everything, remembering My words which I spoke to you three days ago: 'To give is to receive;' 'To give is better than to receive,' --those words which, today when I made you open the Book at Chapter 20 of Acts and at verse 35, startled you when you read them [Maria], because you had remembered hearing them a short time ago and had run to seek them.²³ And when you found them, you had wept, because you had confirmation that it is I Who speak.

Yes. It is I, [Maria]. Do not fear. You are not even aware yourself of what truths you become the channel. Like the little bird on the branch which happily sings that song which for millennia God has put into its small throat, and does not know why those given notes and no others come out, and does not know how to say with those notes even its own name or that of its Creator: so you repeat that Word which speaks in you, and you do not even know how deep It is in Its enunciations.

But remain thus: a child. I love children so much. You have seen that. You have not seen Me laugh except with them. They were for Me My joy as Man. My Mother and the Disciple [John], were My joy as the Man-God and Master. The Father, My joy as God. But the children were My playful solace on earth, so bitter.

Remain thus: a child. Your Savior, slapped by so many men, has need of cooling His cheek on the cheeks of children. He needs to lean His forehead on heads which are loving and without malice.

Come, Little John,²⁴ to your Jesus. And remain always a child for Me. The Kingdom of Heaven is for him who knows how to have the soul of a little boy²⁵ and to welcome the Truth with the confident readiness of a little boy.

It is I, do not fear. --I Who talk to you and bless you. Go in peace, Little John.

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 1.   Maria Valtorta, I Quaderni dal 1944, Ed., Emilio Pisani, (CEV, 1985, Isola del Liri): 226-227. The date indicated at the beginning of this and subsequent Locutions is the date on which Valtorta received the Locution.

 2. That is, the little boy Castulo: See Part II above.

 3. Galatians 2:20.

 4. Valtorta, op. cit., 234-237.

 5. Cf. Wisdom 2.

 6. Cf. Wisdom 7:8-14.

 7. Luke 6:38; Acts 20:35.

 8. Wisdom 7:25.

 9. Wisdom 8.

10. Wisdom 9.

11. Wisdom 9:18.

12. Valtorta, op. cit., 249-254.

13. Genesis 1:26-28; 2:15-25; 3:1-3.

14. John 14:23.

15. Isaiah 14:9-21.

16. Genesis 3:6.

17. Genesis 3:14-19.

18. It is a moot point, but it might be asked if the Church's prohibition against admitting women to the priesthood, which she constantly affirms is based on Tradition stemming from Christ, finds its source in the theological fact stated here.

19. Genesis 3:8-13.

20. Acts 20:24.

21. Acts 20:33.

22. Acts 20:34.

23. From here on Christ now addresses Valtorta directly, rather than the readers.

24. "Little John": the term of endearment or "pet name" which Christ gave to Valtorta because of her love for St. John the Apostle, and her imitation of his love for Christ in laying her head upon Christ's Breast, as it were, to receive His revelations, as did St. John.

25. Christ's use of the term "boy" [fanciullo] here, is perhaps an allusion to the soul and attitude of St. John the Apostle, to be imitated by "Little John."