Poem of The Man God

The Poem of the Man God (Italian title: Il Poema dell'Uomo-Dio) is a multi volume book of about five thousand pages on the life of Jesus Christ written by the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta. The latest editions of the book bear the title: The Gospel As It Was Revealed to Me.

The book was first published in Italian in 1956 and has since been translated into 10 languages and is available worldwide. It is based on the over 15,000 handwritten pages produced by Maria Valtorta between 1943 and 1947. During these years she reported visions of Jesus and Mary and claimed personal conversations with and dictations from Jesus. Her notebooks (published separately) include close to 700 detailed episodes in the life of Jesus, as an extension of the gospels.

Valtorta's handwritten episodes (which had no temporal order) were typed into separate pages by her priest, and reassembled as a book. The first copy of the book was presented to Pope Pius XII, and the three Servite priests who attended the 1948 papal audience stated that he gave his verbal approval to "publish this work as is". However, the Holy Office did not follow through with the publication and about a year after the 1958 death of Pius XII, placed the book on the Index of Forbidden Books. The Forbidden Index was formally abolished by the Vatican in 1965.

The last Vatican statement on the book was by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi in 1993, writing a letter to the publisher that the book can be published as is, provided a statement is made near the front that it "cannot be considered supernatural in origin." This was stated, although there is no evidence he ever led any formal investigation into Valtorta or the book. Furthermore, the Church has already indicated in the person of Pius XII, that the work may very well be of supernatural origin. Expanding the aforementioned quote, His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, had said: "Publish this work just as it is; he who reads will understand." And he added: "One hears talk of so many visions and revelations. I do not say that all are true; but some of them could be true." Father Berti asked the Pope if they should remove the inscriptions: "Visions" and "Dictations" . And he answered that nothing should be removed. The book has also received an imprimatur and the approval of a number of Catholic bishops. The information in the book has been subjected to a range of non-theological analyses, from geographical studies to astronomical simulations to verify the chronology of Jesus.