Valeria Copponi

Valeria’s Copponi’s story of receiving locutions from heaven started when she was in Lourdes accompanying her military husband on pilgrimage.

There she heard a voice that she identified as her guardian angel, telling her to get up. He then presented her to Our Lady, who said, “You will be my cenacle”—a term she only understood years later when a priest used it in the context of the prayer group she started in home city of Rome, Italy.

These meetings, at which Valeria delivered her messages, were first held twice monthly on Wednesdays, then weekly at the request of Jesus, whom she says that she saw at the church of Sant’Ignazio in connection with a meeting with the American Jesuit, Fr. Robert Faricy. Valeria’s calling has been confirmed by various supernatural healings, including one from multiple sclerosis, which also involved the miraculous water at Collevalenza, the ‘Italian Lourdes’ and home to the Spanish nun, Mother Speranza di Gesù (1893-1983), currently up for beatification.

It was Fr. Gabriele Amorth who encouraged Valeria to diffuse her messages outside the prayer cenacle. The attitude of the clergy is predictably mixed: some priests are skeptical, while others participate fully in the cenacle.

The following is from Valeria Copponi’s own words, as they are stated on her website and translated from the Italian: http://gesu-maria.net/. Another English translation can be found at her English site here: http://keepwatchwithme.org/?p=22

“I am an instrument Jesus uses to make us taste his Word for our times. While I am not worthy of this, I accept with great fear and responsibility this great gift, handing myself over totally to His Divine Will. This extraordinary charism is called “locutions.” This involves interior words that come, not from the mind in the form of thoughts, but from the heart, as if a voice “spoke” them from within.

When I begin to write (let us say, under dictation), I am not aware of the sense of the whole. Only at the end, when rereading, do I understand the meaning of the entirety of the words “dictated” to me more or less quickly in a theological language that I do not understand. Initially, the thing at which I marveled the most was this “clean” writing without deletions or corrections, more perfect and more exact than an ordinary dictation, without any fatigue on my part; all comes out smoothly. But we know that the Spirit blows where and when He wills, and so with great humility and acknowledging that without Him we can do nothing, we dispose ourselves to listen to the Word, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”