‘Mystical City of God’ is the most Church-approved work outside of the Bible “Stunning Insights Into the Life of Our Lord and Our Lady”
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by Bradley Eli, M.Div., Ma.Th. • ChurchMilitant.com • August 31, 2017
As Ven. Mary of Agreda’s cause for beatification moves forward, interest grows in her life’s work, Mystical City of God.
After her early years of bilocating to the Native Americans in the southwestern United States, she began receiving revelations while in her Franciscan convent over a period of 40 years from the Blessed Virgin Mary. The subject matter of the revelations included the totality of salvation history from the creation and fall of the angels to the Blessed Mother’s glorious Assumption into Heaven.
These revelations are recorded in four volumes titled Mystical City of God. It’s often noted that no other Catholic work has received as much analysis and approval by Church authorities than this work. The work is available on the internet for free in pdf format.
Looking at just one of the many approbations given to this work, here’s what the great medieval institution, the Catholic University of Louvain, had to say about her writings:
The strong and the weak, the wise and the ignorant, and in fine, all the world will gather richest fruit from the reading of these books: for they contain what is most sublime in theology and in a style so simple, easy and perspicuous that, in order to enter deeply into an understanding of the holy mysteries, no more is necessary than to read them with sound judgment.
It continues:
Combined with this simplicity are found many doctrines and valid proofs, free from contradictions and not easily found in other writings. This history explains more than a thousand difficulties in holy Scripture, in a manner equally natural and wonderful. At every step are encountered exquisite interpretations, until now unknown, and which had been hidden beneath the mere letter but are laid open in these writings and brought to the light. In short, the whole work is a beautiful web of Scripture passages, which though spun from its different books, are directly and specially woven into a whole for the purpose intended by the Venerable Mother.
It concludes:
In addition, thereto the instructions given by the most holy Virgin at the end of each chapter contain the purest morality, instruct, entertain and at the same time sweetly inculcate the love of virtue and abhorrence of vice, painting them in the most vivid and natural colours. They do not only convince the intellect, but they contain such a special unction that they enkindle a sacred ardor in the soul. In meditating upon them, one certainly will experience a delight not met with in ordinary writings; and the more they are read the greater is the delight experienced. Finally, the whole work contains something so unwonted and attractive that, once begun, the reading of it can scarcely be relinquished.
