The ''Book of Azariah'' is a book by the Italian author and

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mystic

Maria Valtorta Maria Valtorta (14 March 1897 – 12 October 1961) was a Catholic Church, Catholic Italian writer. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary who reported personal visions of Jesus and Mary, conversations with, an ...

. It was written in 1946 and 1947 in

Viareggio Viareggio () is a city and ''comune'' in northern Tuscany, Italy, on the coast of the Ligurian Sea. With a population of over 62,000, it is the second largest city in the province of Lucca, after Lucca. It is known as a seaside resort as well a ...

, Italy, where Valtorta was bedridden for several decades. In the book, Valtorta does not provide a specific biblical reference to Azariah himself, but simply refers to the spirit as her

guardian angel A guardian angel is a type of angel that is assigned to protect and guide a particular person, group or nation. Belief in tutelary deity, tutelary beings can be traced throughout all antiquity. The idea of angels that guard over people played ...

. The book consists of a set of “lessons”, provided by Azariah on Sundays, with starting points in the 58 Masses of the

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of the

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prior to the

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of the

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in 1965.

For instance, on May 26, 1946, the fifth Sunday after

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, the Mass’

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Gospel Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...

was John 16:23-30Biblegateway, John 16
/ref> and Azariah's comments, in part, are quoted as follows:

Generosity ought to be responded to with generosity. We, spirits who see men from the height of the Heavens and follow them with divine light as our guide, view the wonderful prodigies provoked by this competition in generosity between the soul giving itself to Him who has given Himself to it and God, who gives Himself even more to reward the generous one giving himself to Him. And we can truly say, in response to the questions of many about the humanly inexplicable ascents and descents of souls, that the rise or fall is linked to and follows from the degree of generosity with which a soul adheres to the Lord.

Sources

, 1972 ''The Book of Azariah'', *

, 1949 '' The Poem of the Man God'',

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Book of Azariah, The Catholic spirituality Angels in Christianity Italian non-fiction books 1947 non-fiction books Channelled texts