Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero and Maria Valtorta

Portrait of Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero (1885-1916), created by AI from known photographs.

Before she had received her visions, Maria Valtorta was struck by the similarity, which she discovered, between her meditations and the dialogues held by Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero (1885-1916) with Jesus. From there arose a spiritual companionship that she extended to the writings of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, her spiritual godmother.

When the visions constituting The Gospel as Revealed to Me began, Jesus repeatedly insisted that for the dissemination of the work, the method adopted by the promoters of Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero's spiritual journal (Vade-mecum) should be followed. This was not heeded, which Maria Valtorta regretted.

Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero

She was born in Turin on August 6, 1885, into a deeply Christian family where devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was very present. This oriented her religious vocation towards the Order of the Visitation (Visitandines), to which St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, promoter of this devotion, had belonged. Her vocation was very early: she made a temporary vow of chastity with the permission of her confessor in 1900 (she was 15) and began in 1902 to write her spiritual journal in which she recorded her dialogues with Jesus.

In 1906, she entered the monastery of the Visitation in Pinerolo (Piedmont) but the mystical path she proposed worried the superior. She then went to the monastery of the Visitation in Como where she received the name Benigna Consolata.

Until her death, she lived an unknown life, faithful to all her duties and absorbed in God. Benigna perceived Christian holiness as a "multitude of little acts", a perspective close to that of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

Having offered herself as a sacrifice on June 30, 1916, the feast of the Sacred Heart, she quickly wasted away and died the same year (September 1, 1916).

Her reputation quickly spread, and excerpts from her writings, soon translated into ten languages, began to be published from 1917 onwards. In these daily written pages, she expressed her inner light, all animated by limitless trust and total surrender to God's infinite love for each one. Her biographers called her the apostle (or the little secretary) of divine mercy.

Maria Valtorta felt in deep spiritual harmony with Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero, explicitly linking this affinity to the legacy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whom she considered her "spiritual godmother." All three, though living in different contexts — cloistered Carmelite for Thérèse, monastery for Benigna, bedridden immobility for Maria Valtorta — developed a spirituality centered on the merciful Love of Christ. The Theresian "little way," based on trust and offering to Love, found in Benigna a marked emphasis on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and reparative surrender, while in Maria Valtorta it unfolded in a mystical participation in the Passion and a detailed contemplation of the Savior’s life. Their major common point lies in spiritual fruitfulness lived in suffering and smallness, as well as in a mission essentially interior yet of universal scope: to make known, love, and repair the unrecognized divine Love.

In the work of Maria Valtorta

Autobiography

p. 267 - "I had so pained my God...! Fogazzaro Fogazzaro convinced me that no fault is so great that it is not amenable to redemption, that no memory of past blame should be an obstacle to our advancing in Goodness, and that we must not offend the good Lord by thinking He is so little a Father as to be more a Judge than a Savior.

I later found this holy doctrine in the writings of Blessed Claude de la Colombière and especially of Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero, which are nothing but dictations from Jesus."

p. 266 - “Ruysbroeck—one of the few I understand, together with St. Paul, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis of Assisi, among those distant in time, and St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and Sr. Benigna, among contemporaries—says, 'When God comes into you, the fact is that you were already in Him, for He never goes out from Himself...'"

pp. 347-348 - "I want you to be a Victim of Divine Justice in addition to the comfoty for my Love.” (Jesus Christ to Sister Benigna).

“My burning hunger to save souls spurs me to seek out victims whom I associate with my work of love,” Jesus had said to Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero.

I was still not familiar with this Sister at that time. But the need to offer myself to Justice as well, as I had offered myself to Love, was urgent in my heart. By pure chance I became aware of this little Secretary of Jesus.

For some time different people, both consecrated and lay, had been asking me if I had taken my thoughts from her writings, for they were the same as hers. I did not even know that Sister Benigna had lived! The wish to know her came to me. And Jesus, always courteous, had me find the way. A card written by her fell into my hands. I had the connection. I wrote to the Visitation Sisters in Como to receive the complete works of the Servant of God. [...]"

pp. 357-358 - "I wrote, then, to the Visitation Sisters in Como to obtain the writings of Sr. Benigna. They arrived in Lent, I think. It was certainly springtime.

On reading those writings, I recognized that I really had had the same thoughts, and, knowing that those sentences had been dictated by Jesus, I was moved to the point of tears. So I, a poor creature, had in my love been able to find phrases and thoughts similar to those of my Savior? Was He so present, so active in me that He had me say the same things He had said to Sr. Benigna to give souls a new means of sanctification and new proof of his love?

Even now, when, without realizing, I write a letter or speak, expressing my own thought, and then find that thought in nearly the same form in a sentence of the Visitation Sister’s vade-mecum, I tremble with joy. At times I refrain from reading those writings for months so as not to be influenced unwittingly—but then I give up, for even after months and months I always possess an intense likeness to these thoughts.

And from this I draw a conclusion. If three souls that have lived in different countries and manners such as Thérèse, Benigna, and I have the same expressions, it is a sign that when God totally occupies a heart with Himself, He gives it the same sentiments. Sparks of his Charity proceeding from a single fount, but issuing from three canals differing in merit—and of these three mine is the most rudimentary and defective—possess the same light. Notes of the same poem of love, they have the same sound, though one of the three instruments, my own, is played by a creature still so far from perfection.

Previously I had had one friend in the Little Flower. Now I had two, since Benigna has also become a heavenly friend for me. In between them, great victims, I safely proceed on my way, which is a Calvary. They encourage me and smile at me and indicate to me a Light which is ever closer.... My Jesus conceals Himself therein."

p. 385 - "Suffering more and more, I went forward. I believed that everything would soon be consummated. Human impatience, how foolish your are in regard to the divine calm of the Eternal!

The third talk was on the “Fight against Tuberculosis,” as it had been the year before. No, that’s not right: the third one was on Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero, and the fourth, on the Anti-TB Day, coupled with Catholic University Day, since the two came very close together."

Notebooks 1943

August 23 - [Jesus said:] "I cannot avoid saying what I say, and you cannot avoid receiving what I tell you. But that doesn't eliminate the fact that good sense is needed in using my gift.

"Act as with Sister Benigna. Not an open, resounding dissemination, but a slow, ever broader outpouring-and it should remain nameless. This is for the protection of your spirit, which pride might disturb, and your person, which doesn't need other forms of agitation. When your hand is still in peace during the wait to rise again in glory, then-only then-will your name be mentioned."

October 11 - [Maria Valtorta:] "I was praying this morning at 5:30 and was holding in my hands the prayers of Sister Benigna Consolata. I was reading the point on "How One Should Act in a State of Aridity." Every day I read a point, which remains as a religious thought throughout the day. I was reading this: "Call Him with the sweetest names," and I asked Jesus, "What are the sweetest names for You?"

He replied instantly, with the words I have written. I think lie wants to speak to Me about the Song of Songs to take me to real incandescence. I think so…because He sometimes changes the subject after a point, and nothing remains but for me to follow behind Him.

Believe me, Father [Migliorini], I wept with sweetness and even materially felt myself to be enveloped by and enkindled with flames."

December 9 - [Jesus said:] "Conserve, then, all the work of my 'spokesman' until the time I indicate and give the world's poor, according to their condition, what should be given. And pray so as not to let yourselves be carried away by humanity in your choice.

For the events of the day, [Father Migliorini] has already been able to observe the concomitance and can testify to it. Aside from this, I repeat, act as did the director of Benigna, who was in better times than these and was holding less explosive material in his hands, I would say, so as to remain in character with the present time, full of explosions which do not involve so much chemical powders as infernal substances."

Notebooks 1944

September 24 - [Jesus said:] "I said and from the outset, that my 'spokesman' ought to be left in peace, wrapped in veils of silence which would be lifted after his death. When the prayers and desires of one whom I love and who is pleasing to Me because of his constantly upright intention inclined Me to be condescending, for the protection of my instrument I established clauses and guidelines. I said, 'Let them act as was done with Sister Benigna Consolata.' When I saw that there was excess, that they were grazing in fields where even human prudence said, 'They should not be touched,' I stopped all dictations relating to the times and specified that this was a punishment for those pursuing human curiosity and turning even something grandiose, supernaturally grandiose, almost into a peevish game among children who, to tease their rivals, say, 'I know and have, and you don't know and don't have. Look how much I have. Look. Look. I know, I know...'But this is not child's play. God's interests are at stake here and the peace of a heart. Be careful, all you men!"

October 16 - [Maria Valtorta said:] "Yes, Lord, lead me by the hand (I was reading a sentence dictated to Sister Benigna by Jesus which was my thought for the day). I want what You want, and nothing else. But I am afraid of the world..."

Jesus replies to me‑He, who knows what kind of fear I am talking about:

"If they should impose silence on you in not recognizing that by my name and will you do what you are doing, answer as Peter and John replied to the Sinedrium. after the healing of the lame man: 'Judge for yourselves whether it is right before God to obey you rather than God. We [I] cannot fail to speak about what we [I] have seen and heard.'750 Besides, you could not keep Me from coming to you and forcing you to see and hear. And it would be foolishness in you to listen to the world, that wants to impose silence on God, rather than God, who wants to give light to the world. If I will, who can go against Me?"

October 20 - [Jesus said:] "Go in peace. Your Jesus does nothing without a perfect purpose. And, as for everything else you want to know, I repeat, 'Act as with Sister Benigna.'"

"My blessing for the good. My blessing upon the nascent Work. It comes within the orbit of the preparation of spirits for the advent of my Kingdom, of unity to offer resistance to the Disintegrator of the world, who is speeding up his works and sharpening them in order to destroy promptly and completely. You can, then, give the Work itself what you possess: sufferings, prayers, and actions."

Letters to Mother Teresa Maria

Volume 1 - February 7, 1946, p. 58 : "Now the Work was never protected with the prudence first advised, then ordered by Our Lord: from May 1943, at the first hint by Father Migliorini to make copies and distribute them, he said: ‘Act as you did with Sister Benigna Consolata Ferrero. It is only when the spokesperson is in the grave that the dissemination of the Work will be undertaken, with the necessary precautions.”’ This was repeated at least six times in two and a half years, and always in an increasingly firm tone.

Unfortunately, none of this was heeded. From 1943, while my mother was terminally ill, I had the pain and shame of learning that I was known as the one who received the dictations, due to the imprudence and indiscretion of the superior of the nurse sisters attending my mother.

Yes! What shame! What embarrassment! Because those are the feelings we experience when creatures enter our royal secret.

No, being known and praised does not bring us any joy, only pain, as if we were being exposed, along with the fear of an involuntary feeling of complacency. At least that is what I feel when I understand that someone knows that I am the spokesperson...

And starting in 1943, they continued to make a fuss around it, acting more and more broadly, more indiscreetly and disobediently. They began to distribute booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, news, indiscriminately, without regard to the recipient, without verifying whether they were delivered… Meanwhile, it was as if I was receiving a blow to the chest: I understood everything, I cried, I worried… But the system continued… and still does. Now, you tell me that it is Father Migliorini himself who allowed you to inform the spiritual Fathers, and that has been for two years already! Well, goodness, that is perfect! Truly, God’s orders are well executed! Am I then the only one naive enough to respect the order?"

Volume 2 - January 11, 1947, p. 20 : "The other evening, I was talking to Jesus about these conversions. I asked Him: ‘Are You beginning to work as You did with the writings of Sister Benigna Consolata?’

He answered me: ‘You do not know how many people you have saved by your Mission. You too are my Secretary. She: Benigna Consolata. You: Mary of Sorrows. You are therefore even more mine and that of my Mother, and you bear my strongest sign: Suffering. You are very dear to me because you are Mary and because you suffer. Suffering on Earth. Consoled, Blessed here in Heaven.’"

Layperson (laic) living in the world but following the rules of life of a particular religious order.