Maria Valtorta's astronomic observations consistent with her dating system

The Italian Catholic mystic Maria Valtorta received more than 600 visions of the life of Jesus in the Holy Land mostly between 1944-1947. Over the following decades, scientists and experts verified the thousands of factual details they contain and noted their astonishing accuracy. In the field of observational astronomy, scientists attested that Maria Valtorta's astronomic observations are consistent with her narrative's dating system.

Unsplash / Dana Luig

Reasons to believe:

The consistence of the 263 moon positions and phases mentioned in Maria Valtorta's writings has been verified by various researchers. The same applies to the constellations and planets mentioned throughout the work. Her continual noting of the time of year, seasons, months, climate, Sabbath days and feast days are so precise that every one of her 647 episodes have been dated using the [Julian] calendar of that day and computer programs of the heavens for that period of time.

Yet Maria Valtorta had no personal computer nor any other sort of calculating engine to use and had no astrological knowledge. She lived much of her life paralysed and bedridden, and had no astronomical books at hand.

The very pace necessary to write 10000 handwritten pages in four years means that she didn't have enough time to carry out such in-depth research.

Summary:

Maria Valtorta, an Italian Catholic mystic, was born in 1897 and died in 1961. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary, leading a retired, contemplative life of prayer away from the public eye, in her house in Viareggio, confined to bed most of her life due to paralysis and chronic illnesses. Between 1943 and 1954, she received hundreds of visions, conversations and dictations from Jesus, Mary, certain saints and her guardian angel.

Her "private revelations"detail the life of Jesus, offering an extended narrative of the gospels through more than six hundred immersive visions.

At Jesus' request, Valtorta described the scenes in minute detail (topography, architecture, customs, fauna, flora, weather conditions, astronomic observations, etc.), portrayed the people (names, origins, social position, roles, appearance, personalities, diosyncracies, clothings, i, etc.) and transcribed their words verbatim. She wrote some ten thousand manuscript pages in the space of four years.

After Maria Valtorta's death, researchers from various countries began to go through these thousands of pages, line by line, to verify the details they contained. Take astronomical observations, for example.

The Gospel as Revealed to Me contains 873 night scenes.

With this data, Dr Liberato De Caro (of the Institute of Crystallography, National Research Council (IC-CNR), Bari Polytechnic,), Pr.Lonnie Lee Van Zandt (a Harvard graduate with a doctorate in theoretical physics, and Professor of Physics at Purdue University), and engineer Jean-François Lavère each used astronomy software such as the virtual planetariums Redshift and Stellarium to check that the positions and phases of the moon (263 in all), constellations and planets described in the work were consistent.

The verifications carried out led to some striking confirmations. These observations, coupled with the historical events mentioned in the work, enabled researchers to reconstruct the day-to-day calendar of Jesus' life.

We should remember that computers did not exist in Valtorta's time, that she had no astronomy books at her disposal, that communication media were strongly impacted by the Second World War and that, because of her extreme physical limitations, Valtorta was bedridden. She herself, having quit school at 16 to volunteer as a nurse, was far from having such knowledge. Moreover, the extremely quick writing of The Gospel as Revealed to Me (some ten thousand handwritten pages in four years) left her no time for laborious research or to achieve such a degree of accuracy, from the first to the last page.

Fabrice-Marie Gagnant

Going further:

Scientific article entitled “Astronomical Dating of The Poem of the Man-God” by theoretical physicist, Professor Lonnie Lee Van Zandt, who aas a professor of physics at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, from 1967-1995. (Article Dated November 1, 1994).

More information:

Liberato De Caro's astronomical study: I Cieli Raccontano, Indagine su Gesù nell'opera di Maria Valtorta attraverso l'Astronomia, Ed. CEV, 2014, in 3 volumes(in Italian).