Talk:Maria Valtorta

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[edit] On the Index

Noted that the book was placed on the Catholic Index in 1959, and did not receive an imprimatur.

Actually the book and its translations do carry imprimaturs from several Bishops. The Wikipedia page has a link to the imprimatur of Bishop Danylak.

[edit] Factual Accuracy

Regarding the factual accuracy box, please clarify exactly the items that you are disputing. As I read it, the article never said that the book has "permission" from the Church, but that the index that once prohibited the book was abolished. The debate as to what that means continues. As the article says:

Valtorta followers argue that this in effect nullified the suppression of 1959 since the Index no longer existed after 1965. Others view the abolition of the Index as not reversing the Church's opinion of the work.

The article never claims that the "Church" has given permission. At the moment it seems that it is anyone's guess what the Church position is unless someone manages to corner some Church official on a Rome street and question them. And I doubt if one would get an answer even then. There are a few Bishops and Cardinals that suppport the book and have provided imprimaturs, but the Holy See as a whole seems to want to keep quiet. After Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi's letter, the Church has remained silent, as the article said. If the Holy See wanted to, they could just type up a letter tomorrow and order everyone not to read the book - they have enough stationary anyway. They do not seem to want to do that.

If you have a reference to the contrary, please provide it. I would be interested in seeing it. I will be glad to remove or reword any specific items whose factual accuracy you are disputing. Else the factual accuracy box needs to be removed. Thank you History2007 (talk) 04:15, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

I've been doing more research on this and am realizing how controversial it is. Part of the controversy, though, appears to be that there is a lot of misinformation b.c. the Valtorta publishers are making exaggerated claims on their website that the Catholic Church disputes through their websites. And there is some confusion as to the initial papal reaction, which was not written. I'm compiling some research and have ordered a book through inter-library loan. There are very few books available that focus on Valtorta (none at my university, the largest library in the state), according to some keyword and subject searches I did. So give me a week or so to get that together. You will notice that in the article here, most of the body is not cited with specific citations, an obvious contradiction to Wikipedia general policy. Carinamc (talk) 06:02, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok, fine. I will be glad to learn more about this topic as the discussion continues. The fact is that this "is" a controversial topic and the original "papal approval" was probably questioned by many people because a "papal ban" was placed on it by a 2nd Pope. You may also be interested that I realized the support for it may have come from the somewhat liberal Cardinal Augustin Bea who had the ear of Pope Pius XII so to speak, for he was the Pope's confessor. The opposition probably came from Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani who was super conservative and who also banned Faustina Kowalska's work. Interestingly enough I later realized the two Cardinals were not exactly best friends and Cardinal Bea was the main obstacle that stopped Cardinal Ottaviani at Vatican II [1]. So it seems (but there is no proof I could find) that Cardinal Ottaviani waited for Pope Pius XII to die, then presented the next pope with a paper to sign to ban Valtorta.

But anyway, one point you make that is valid is that there need to be plenty more in text citations to make the article more Wikipedia friendly. But that just requires routine editing and once I have some free time I will do that. But the heart of the arguments will remain the same: The book was on the index, the index went away, the Holy See is now keeping quite and Valtorta's followers (including various Bishops) keep reading the book, although there are some people who are still angry about the book. There is really no way to dispute these basic and simple facts. It is just a question of presenting them with references.

However, there is one thing that is clear in all these debates. Valtorta's work is such that many people will read it with or without Church approval. In fact they were publishing and reading it while it was on the "forbidden index" decades ago, and they seem intent to keep reading it. I must say that personally, I found this very long book hard to put down once I started reading a few pages. It is a "very unusual" piece of text (the most unusual I have seen to date) and as a hardened scientist who questions everything, I have no explanation for why it is so hard to categorize it. In any case, I look forward to seeing your references. Please post them on this talk page, for it is on my watch list. Thank you. History2007 (talk) 08:04, 4 February 2008 (UTC)