"For over a thousand years St. Cecilia...has been one of the most greatly venerated of the maiden martyrs of the early Church, and is one of those named in the canon of the Mass. Her 'acts' state that she was a patrician girl of Rome and she was brought up a Christian. She wore a coarse garment beneath the clothes of her rank, fasted from food several days a week, and determined to remain a maiden for the love of God. But her father had other views, and gave her in marriage to a young patrician named Valerian..." So begins the account of this popular virgin-martyr and patron saint of musicians in Butler's Lives of the Saints.1 The presentation offered here, however, is an alternate account drawn from the Visions and Dictations given to the great Italian mystic of our own day, Maria Valtorta [1961†], published in her I Quaderni del 1944 ["The Notebooks for 1944"], and translated especially for this web site. Three Visions are recounted here shown by Christ to Valtorta, followed by His own Commentaries on the Visions which He subsequently dictated to her. Also included here as a kind of finale, is a brief Dictation given in the Notes following Vision III, in which Christ alludes to Valtorta's own holiness from her martyrdom as a victim soul, thus virtually "canonizing" her by equating her with St. Cecilia. May this account of the marriage and martyrdom of St. Cecilia, like so many other such accounts given us though Valtorta's great sufferings and labors of love, inspire modern day Christians to a similiar whole-hearted commitment to the Master Whom both Cecilia and Valtorta so loved. – Translator
–I– [July 22, 1944, St. Mary Magdalen] Valtorta : "A beautiful and long Vision which has nothing to do with the Holy Penitent3 whom I have always loved so much. I write it down adding pages to this notebook because I am alone and I use whatever I have at hand. I see the catacombs. Although I have never been in the catacombs, I understand that these are [the catacombs]. What kind I don’t know. I see a dim meandering of narrow corridors dug in the earth, low and moist, all made to twist around like a labyrinth. You walk straight and seem to be able to continue, at most to be able to turn into another corridor, but instead find yourself before an earth wall, and it’s necessary to turn around, to go back until you find another corridor that goes further. In them are niches and more niches, ready to receive martyrs. Ready in this sense: that each one is slightly dug out in the wall to give a pattern to the diggers. So it is at the beginning [of the catacombs]. But the more you penetrate into them, the deeper and more complete are the burial niches, all [going] in the direction of the wall, like so many berths in a ship. Others, instead, are already filled with their holy remains and closed up with a rough stone awkwardly inscribed with the name of the martyr or the deceased and with Christian signs, besides a word of farewell and of commendation. But these already closed and completed niches are just in that section which I suppose is the central part of the catacomb, because here wider surroundings often open up, like large and small rooms that are higher, adorned with engravings, and are more illuminated than the others by little oil lamps scattered here and there out of devotion or for the convenience of the faithful whose own little lanterns have for some reason gone out.
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