Supplement pages to Bulletin # 70 (June 2013) of the Maria Valtorta Readers’ Group - Page 1

TRANSLATIONS FROM QUADERNETTI – PART 3

CHRISTSPEAKS OF THEEUCHARIST

– From the Mystical Revelations of Maria Valtorta –

[These are more dictations from a book not yet published in English – Maria Valtorta – Quadernetti* (The Little Notebooks), passages from which will be printed in future Bulletin Supplements. These translations are reprinted with the permission of this site’s webmaster.

See http://www.bardstown.com/~brchrys/index.html]

*Quadernetti (Edizioni Pisani / Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Via Po 95, 03036 Isola del Liri (FR), Italia, 2006)

— INTRODUCTORY NOTE —

Reams have been written by theologians and spiritual writers on the Holy Eucharist, or Sacrifice of the Mass. Along with the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, the Eucharist is one of the central mysteries of the Christian Faith. Indeed, the Eucharist is itself a daily re-Incarnation of the living Christ in the virginal hands of His priest, as was His first Incarnation in the virginal womb of the Blessed Virgin. This is and has always been the ancient perennial faith of Catholic Christians. And many of those reams of paper have been written precisely to defend this ancient faith against heresies down the ages that undermined or denied that the Eucharist is the real Presence of the risen, living Christ—Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Indeed, at the very moment when Christ told His disciples of His future gift of the Eucharist, and the need to eat His Body and drink His Blood, St. John tells us: "...many of His disciples drew back and no longer went about with Him" [Jn 6:60, 66].

And so, too, in our own day: a recent Gallup poll tells us that nearly 70 % of those who call themselves "Catholic"have drawn back and no longer go about with Him. They no longer believe that the Eucharist is indeed the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the living , risen Christ, present under the appearances of bread and wine. Much of this loss of faith today is attributed to the irreverent, often illicit, and even invalid celebration of the Eucharist by dissident priests and laity in this post-Vatican II era. This sad situation has understandably stirred up a longing among the faithful for the reverence and ritual fidelity of the former Latin Tridentine Mass.

In the brief article presented here and specially translated for this web site from Valtorta's recently published [2006] Quadernetti collection of Christ's Dictations and Revelations, we have the Master's own view of His Eucharist as He instituted It at the Last Supper the night before He died. If this presentation in any way helps to restore some of our reverence for and understanding of what the Eucharist is and was meant to be in the mind of Jesus, it will have served its purpose...

—Translator.

[Nov. 18, 1947]1

Jesus :

Listen well, Maria, this is a great lesson: The most proper name of the Mass or Sacrifice of the Altar, as you all now call it, is the "Breaking of the Bread." First, because the Mass originated on the evening of Holy Thursday. And secondly, because the Mass is the perpetual remembrance of My love which extends beyond that hour and that moment.

My Passion, Crucifixion and Death were the historical hour and moment of My love, but the Eucharist is the always of My love for all of you.The Mass is the immolation of the Christ—contemplated not just in relation to the material consummation of My sacrifice, with My sufferings, wounds, beatings, crucifixion and death: caused by men and willingly suffered by Me in obedience to My Father's Will for the salvation of the world. The Mass is also the loving and willing immolation of a God: of the Word Who breaks Himself in order to give Himself as Bread, as Food for men, humiliating Himself even more than by His death on a Cross.

Nor is "humiliating" an improper word. Think, Maria, of those who sometimes receive Me, those into whom I descend: I, God, the Pure, the Holy. I began at the table of the Last Supper to fuse Myself with the sacrilegious, with sinners, rebels against the Ten Commandments of Sinai and My Two Commandments of love. I began these fusions of Myself with sinners by descending into Judas. Since then, I: the Saint of saints, the Pure of the pure, the Most Perfect, have been "welcomed" by impure lips still warm with lust, by lips blaspheming My Father, by homicidal hearts, by fevers of concupiscence: by beings in whom there is denial, heresy, commerce with Hell, all the rottenness of fallen man, all the duplicity of false sentiments, all the calculating exhibition of a false faith, which in them is not true faith. Only God, and those with Him in Heaven, know the horrors that are consummated at the altar. And these horrors are much greater, immensely greater than the sacrilegious waves of Good Friday...

Yes, Maria. The Mass is the Breaking of the Bread, the Eucharistic sacrifice, which recalls the Sacrifice of Calvary. Because at the table of the Last Supper, already contemplating My immolated Body and My Blood shed for men, I had said: "This is My Body and this is My Blood, the Blood of the new eternal Testament which will be shed for you and for many for the remission of sins." But the Mass is above all the sacrifice of My love, the remembrance and perpetuation of My divinely, and therefore infinitely, insane love for men.

And it was the Breaking of the Bread (or "the Mass" if you prefer) that you saw, Maria, in the vision of the supplemental Pasch, when I Myself, taught the Bishop of the Church of Christ, and the Bishop of Jerusalem: Peter, and James of Alpheus, to celebrate it.2

After the supper of the brothers, came the consumming of My Body and My Blood: left by infinite love in the Food and Drink of salvation. By the grace of the Lord, My priests can summon that Body and Blood from Heaven; nor do the Body and Blood refuse that priestly summons. They can summon It in order to transubstantiate3 the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ—therefore into Jesus Christ: alive, true, complete, present in the consecrated Species, now transubstantiated3 into the Holy Body and Blood, the Soul of Jesus, and the Divinity of the Word of God, One with the Father and with Love.

After the fraternal agape,4 came union of their Divine Brother with His brothers of Earth, with the holy brothers, among holy brothers whom love made equal, though greater ones were there: the priests; and with the little ones: the faithful—union with Him Who knows only how to love, and Who asks love and union with his loved ones.

The need for instruction: one must keep present the fact that the Apostles, deacons and priests of the first centuries of the Christian era, were in the situation of instructing pagans, that is, those who were truly illiterate in the Holy Religion. This need for instruction caused additions to the Breaking of the Bread—Itself so simple and brief. These additions instructed those who aspired to Christianity how to enter into the Sheepfold of Christ: by knowing the Shepherd and Wisdom, by knowing the ancient and eternal Law, and the Words of the Master.

Hence the reading of the apostolic epistles and the Gospel were introduced. In the first times, just at the beginning, instead of those readings there was direct preaching: that is, the recounting of ancient times, or the verbal counsels of the apostles, or else the verbal instruction of the sapiential books. And so also there was the verbal narration of My works in the three years of My public life, and of My Birth, Death and Resurrection.

Later, as the Church was growing, there was an insufficient number of true eyewitnesses—i.e., Apostles and disciples—for the growing number of churches. Moreover, though the disciples were full of good will in repeating the episodes of My works and life, they were still subject to man's shortcomings: to involuntary variations of these episodes, and to arbitrary interpretations of them. Though this was done with a right purpose, yet, it was done...humanly. Hence, the Heads of the Priesthood wanted fixed texts to be read in the Meetings, and then to be explained to the catechumens in that part of the Meeting which preceded the Breaking of the Bread and the praying of the Our Father: just as I intoned this Prayer at the First Breaking of the Bread, and also at the second supplemental Pasch2 —in the presence of the faithful, and after consuming the Species.

Truly, I had then made the Communion precede the Our Father. For centuries now the opposite has been done, and you believe, O men, that you do well. To do this is not a sin, but reflect: What is the Our Father? The prayer of Jesus to the Father. The divine prayer which I taught to men. The perfect prayer. If there were only that prayer, and nothing else but that were said well, you would have all, O men, for your spirit and for your flesh. And you would give to God that which pleases Him, if you lived the Our Father.

I had said: "Our Father". With every right I could say to the First Person: "Father". But you,...although God is your Father—you can say it with much less right. Because too infrequently do you reflect in yourselves and in your works the divine likeness to your Father. Sins and inclinations disfigure the Father's image in you, sometimes even canceling it out.

But see: I transfuse Myself into you. I come into you. I assimilate Myself to you. I deify you at My contact. I come in the Species, and I am in you. And you—voice of man fused with the voice of the Son of God, and your mind on fire from the love that I bring with Me, you are a sanctified altar (I speak of one who eats the Bread of Heaven without sacrilege) which sings and is fragrant from the Holocaust that radiates upon it: the Body of the Lamb of God—you can say "Father" to the Father, with every right. For you have in you the Son of the Father and your Brother. You can pray, knowing what you say. You can offer and ask with perfect power: I give you My Power living in you.

A holy prayer, the Our Father: because said at the moment that Grace—the Christ—makes of His Body and Blood your food, just as He has transubstantiated3 the species of bread and wine into His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. Thus the Eucharistic Species are transformed into you: into your blood, into your flesh. You live from Me, even in your mortal flesh... This is why Viaticum for the dying is always Life, even if sometimes it is not additional life added to one's finished life. This is why the Eucharist is the life in you that keeps you alive, Maria, soul of Mine.5 I am your oil that pours itself into the lamp of your exhausted body and keeps you alive. I am your Physician. I am your Donor of blood. I am your Lord Who wants you to be: My lamp, My echo, in this spent, cold, dark world, mute of blessed voices.

The other parts of the Mass are adaptations, sometimes necessary, resulting from heresies that emerged down the ages and had to be fought. Anxious adaptations—oh! all good—these adaptations made by My servants. But through man's own tendency to amplify, tangle, and make things heavy, My servants added, amplified, made heavy, and even entangled—especially for little souls—the so beautiful, simple, initial Breaking of the Bread, and the catacomb Meetings so divinely inspired. But they did it wanting to honor Me, to love Me and make Me loved. And therefore they did a good work, though one not necessary or useful for the Eucharistic Rite.

These adaptations are the superstructures from times of religious peace. Do you think that you Christians today are not in times of religious peace? just because you are calumniated and scorned? and because some priests fall under the fury of a son of Satan? Oh! You do not know! When the times prophesied have come, those who are believers at that time and know of the present times, will be able to say: "For them there was peace; for us there is an atrocious war." And those superstructures will no longer be possible. They will not withstand the catapults of Satan. Nor will the faithful have time to redo them when they have fallen away.
But the essential, the unchangeable will remain: the Breaking of the Bread, the Meeting together of the faithful.

Because those come from Me, and from the Holy Spirit Who inspired the Apostles. And that which comes from Us is eternal.

This is the lesson, Maria.

You will give these pages to the new Isaac,6 just as they have been written under My Dictation, reserving for yourself to copy them afterward into the directions.7 You will tell him [Isaac] to copy them with the typewriter and to send you the copy for Rome, so that you may transcribe it or join it to the directions.7 Thus he will see that I love him, and that when I dictate to you and give you the strength to follow Me—sometimes I do not give it to you fully for My own inscrutable reasons—you do not err in one word.

And now rest in your double warmth: of love for Me, and fever for yourself.5 Stay in peace, soul of Mine.

______

— NOTES —

1.  Maria Valtorta, Quadernetti (Edizioni Pisani / Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Via Po 95, 03036 Isola del Liri (FR), Italia, 2006): 65-69.

2.  This "supplemental Pasch" was a truncated form of the Paschal Meal of Holy Thursday. Jesus celebrated this supplemental and abbreviated form of the Pasch—after His resurrection—for the disciples who were not present for the Holy Thursday Pasch. See Maria Valtorta's vision of it as described in The Poem of the Man-God, Trans., David G. Murray, (Edizioni Pisani / Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Via Po 95, 03036 Isola del Liri (FR), Italia, 1990), Vol. 5, No. 632, pp. 857-862.