The Bible’s command is clear and direct. In the Old Testament, God says, 

“You shall not commit adultery” 

Exodus 20:14

Adultery refers to sexual unfaithfulness within marriage, especially when one spouse is involved with another person outside the marriage covenant. The law treats this seriously because marriage is meant to reflect loyalty and stability. This is important for the two adults involved, and as well for the children that God grants them. 

The New Testament does not weaken this command; it intensifies it. Jesus teaches that the issue begins in the heart, where lust can already plant the seeds of unfaithfulness. In this way, the commandment reaches beyond outward behavior to inner desire, motives, and imagination:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” 

Matthew 5:27–2.

The commandment is not only about a physical act. It protects the covenant of marriage, calling for faithfulness, trust, and integrity between husband and wife. Scripture presents marriage as a sacred bond, and adultery as a violation that wounds people, families, and communities.

Why It Matters Today

This commandment speaks strongly to modern life. With increasing divorce rates globally and in a culture shaped by dating apps, pornography, casual relationships, encouraging self-pleasure and constant digital access with unlimited apps and possibilities, the line between faithfulness and temptation can feel easier to cross than ever before. 

Moreover Impurity and unfaithfulness is what we see in movies, in music, in our neighborhood. It has become a lifestyle of the “modern” world filled with celebrating pleasures and the desire to enjoy the only life we have – why suffer? Faithfulness and chastity has become synonyms of being boring and old-fashioned.

However is that part of faith really boring? Let’s remember that God invented sexual intercourse. It is something very beautiful – and after all it is the force that can create new humans and God wants us to get it right. We are called to use this powerful energy responsibly and in the right circumstances and with the proper marital protection. 

The Bible’s teaching reminds readers that virtue and marriage is not disposable and that personal purity still matters in thought, word, and action.

It also challenges the idea that commitment can be replaced by convenience. Adultery today may include secret emotional affairs, online flirting, hidden messages, or cultivated fantasies that erode trust long before any physical act occurs. Jesus’ teaching shows that faithfulness begins well before behavior; it begins in the heart.

Own desires and self-fulfillment

As we have seen, the barrier to adultery is lower than ever. However in my view this commandment also calls us to faithfulness beyond sexual encounters. When two people come together, it is like two planets colliding with both having their own history and mess that was piled up during a lifetime.

I have been married for 6 years and I can tell that it is very hard. Initially when being in love, everything seemed so rosy. After our first child, we got stressed to handle work, childcare, the house and everything on top. Each of us and everyone around us had different view of what was right and wrong and what was the best for the child. This led to a lot of disagreements which can be very very very tiring over time. Only with marriage I also discovered how many couple therapists there are. The demand must be really high and we surely needed one as well.

If I would not be a katholic christian and firmly believe and want to stay true to my word and to the one partner until I die, I am sure, I would not be married anymore. And the reason would not be because I am tempted so much by others. It is rather that the constant battles, the will to be right and both of our egos being as high as skyscrapers do not help for calm and peace. Some of this might be personality, but some I think is also this desire of everyone to fulfil themselves and to think that they deserve better in any circumstance. 

However, I freely chose my partner and I think I chose him for a reason. I have lessons to learn and to develop myself. If I would leave, I am sure that with another partner the same or similar issues would pop up sooner or later. Data seems to back this theory as divorce rates are sharply increasing with the number of times someone gets married.

So I am sticking with it, learning and developing. Trying to focus on the positives and on what I can change myself. I am also seeking to be an example for my son, so that he may learn how disagreements are settled and that despite having arguments two people can still love each other.

A Call to Faithfulness

Seen biblically, “You shall not commit adultery” is not merely a prohibition. It is an invitation to honor marriage, protect love, and live with self-control. The command calls people to treat spouses with loyalty and to guard their inner life against desires that undermine covenant love. 

It also calls us to stand by our word. If we promise to someone before God and our families that we love them until our death, we better do stick to our word. 

For today’s world, that message remains deeply relevant. Faithfulness is still countercultural, but it is also life-giving: it builds trust, strengthens families, and reflects the moral vision of Scripture. The commandment ultimately points to a larger truth that love is not just about feeling, but about covenantal commitment.

Further insights

Jesus himself gives much more depth to the topic than I ever could. Below is an extract from the visions of Maria Valtorta where He addresses this commandment in a speech rather at the beginning of his official journey:

« Today I say to you: “Do not fornicate.”

« Do not look round endeavouring to read the word “lustful” on somebody’s face. Love one another. Would you love anyone who read that word on your face? No, you would not. Well, then, do not try to read it in the worried eyes of your neighbour or on his forehead that blushes and bows to the ground. And then… Oh! tell Me, especially you men. Which of you has not tasted this bread made with ashes and excrement, which is sexual satisfaction? And is lust only what carries you for one hour between the arms of a prostitute? Is lust not also the desecrated union with your wife, desecrated because it is ratified vice as it is reciprocal sensual satisfaction, which, however, evades its consequences?

Marriage means procreation and its act means and must be fecundation. Otherwise it is immoral. You must not make a brothel of your nuptial beds. And that is what they become if they are soiled by lust and are not consecrated by maternity. The earth does not reject the seed. It receives it and makes a plant of it. The seed does not escape from the furrow after being laid there. But it takes root at once and it strives to grow and bear fruit, that is the vegetable creature born of the union between soil and seed. Man is the seed, woman is the soil, the fruit is the son. It is sinful to refuse to bear fruit and scatter strength in vice. It is prostitution performed on the nuptial bed, and in no way differs from the other prostitution, on the contrary it is aggravated by disobedience to the commandment that says: “Be one flesh and multiply by bearing children.”

Therefore, women deliberately barren, legal and honest wives in the eyes of the world, but not in the eyes of God, you can see that you may be considered prostitutes and you fornicate just the same even if only with your husbands, because you do not seek maternity but too often you are only after pleasure. And do you not consider that pleasure is a poison that contaminates every mouth that tastes it? It burns with a fire that seems to satisfy, instead it falls out of the fireplace and devours, more and more insatiable, leaving a sour taste of ash on the tongue as well as disgust, nausea and contempt both of oneself and of the partner in pleasure, because when a conscience revives, and it does revive between two heats, one can but feel such contempt of oneself, being lowered below the level of beasts.

“You shall not fornicate” it is said. A great deal of the carnal actions of men are fornications. And I do not take into consideration the inconceivable obsessive union which Leviticus condemns with the following words: “Man: you must not lie with a man as with a woman” and “You must not lie with any animal, you would thereby become unclean. And woman will do likewise and will not offer herself to an animal, because it would be a foul thing.” But after mentioning the duty of husband and wife in marriage, which is no longer holy when it becomes barren through malice, I am going to speak of the true and proper fornication between man and woman performed out of reciprocal vice or for compensation in money or in gifts.

The human body is a magnificent temple that contains an altar. God should be on the altar. But God is not where there is corruption. Therefore an impure body has a desecrated altar without God. Like a drunken person who wallows in mire and in the regurgitations of his own drunkenness, man lowers himself in the brutality of fornication and becomes worse than the most impure worm and beast.

Tell Me, if among you there is anyone who has perverted himself to the extent of dealing with his body as one deals in fodder or animals at the market, which benefit did he gain? Take your hearts in your hands, examine them, question them, listen to them, note their wounds, their pangs and then tell Me: was the fruit so sweet as to deserve such pain to a heart that was born pure and that you have compelled to live in an impure body, and to beat to give life and heat to lust, and to be worn out by vice? Tell Me: are you so perverted that you do not sob secretly, hearing the voice of a child calling: “mummy”, or thinking of your mothers, you women of pleasure who have run away from home or have been driven out of them, so that the rotten fruit may not contaminate with its oozing rottenness the other good ones? Thinking of your mothers who probably died broken-hearted, having to say: “I gave birth to disgrace?”

“Do you not feel your hearts shudder with shame, when you meet an old solemn looking man because of his white hair and you consider that you have soiled your fathers’ heads with handfuls of mud and have exposed them to the scorn of their native country?

Do you not feel your entrails writhe with regret when you see a happy wife or an innocent virgin and you have to say: “I have given up all that and I will never be like that again!? »

Do you not realise how miserable you are when you are thirsty for the kiss of a child and you dare not say: “Give me it” because you have killed lives at their birth, you have rejected them as boring burdens and as a useless hindrance, detached from the tree that had borne them, and thrown out to make dung, and now those little lives shout at you: “murderers!”?

But, above all, are you not terrified of the Judge Who created you and is waiting for you to ask you: “What have you done of yourself? Did I, perhaps, give you life for that? How dare you come to My presence, you nest swarming with worms and putrefaction? You have had everything of what was your god: pleasure. Go to the place of eternal malediction.”

(…)

And yet, o soul oppressed by all the lust of the world, do not weep. Listen: you are a filthy rag. But you can become a flower once again. You are a dunghill. But you can become a flower-bed. You are an impure animal. But you can become an angel. Once you were an angel. And you used to dance on the flowery meadows, a rose amongst the roses, as fresh as they were, sweet-smelling with virginity. And you happily sang your childish songs, and then you would run to your mother, to your father and say to them: “You are my love.” And the invisible guardian who is at the side of each creature would smile at your blue-white soul… And then? Why? Why did you tear off your wings, those of a little innocent being? Why did you tread on the hearts of your father and mother to run after other unreliable hearts? Why did you compel your pure voice to utter false sensual words? Why did you break the stem of the rose and desecrate yourself?

Repent, daughter of God. Repentance invigorates, purifies and elevates. Can man not forgive you? Not even your father could forgive you? But God can. Because the bounty of God is not to be compared to human goodness and His mercy is infinitely greater than human misery. Honor yourself by making your soul honorable through an honest life. Justify yourself with God committing no more sins against your soul. Obtain from God a new name. That is what matters. You are vicious. Become honest. Become the sacrifice and the martyr of your repentance. You knew how to make a martyr of your heart to give pleasure to your flesh. Now make a martyr of your flesh to give eternal peace to your heart.

Go. You may all go away. Each with his burden and his thoughts, and meditate. God awaits everybody and rejects none of those who repent. May God grant you His light that you may know your souls.»

Maria Valtorta, The Poem of the ManGod, chapter 123, Jesus at the «Clear Water»: « You Shall Not Fornicate. »

Jesus also stresses this important topic again as part of the Sermon of the Mount:

“« You heard that in the old days it was said: “You shall not commit adultery.” Those who among you have heard Me in other places know that I have spoken about that sin several times. Because, look, as far as I am concerned, it is a sin not for one person only, but for two or for three. I will make Myself clear. An adulterer sins with regard to himself, he sins with regard to his accomplice, and despair or to commit a crime. That with regard to the accomplished sin. But I will say more. I say: “Not only the accomplished sin, but the desire to accomplish it is already a sin.” What is adultery? It is to crave for him, who is not ours, or for her, who is not ours. One begins to sin by wishing, continues by seduction, completes it by persuasion, crowns it by the deed.

How does one begin? Generally with an impure glance. And that is connected with what I said before. An impure eye sees what is concealed from a pure eye and through the eye thirst enters the throat, hunger enters the body and fever the blood. A carnal thirst, hunger, fever. Delirium begins. If the person looked at is honest, the delirious looker-on is left alone on tenterhooks, or will denigrate in revenge. If also the person looked at is dishonest, he ‘will reply to the look and the descent into sin begins.

I therefore say to you: “If a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her because his thought has accomplished the deed of his desire.” If your right eye should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to be without one eye than to be thrown into the infernal darkness forever. And if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to hell. It is true that it is written that deformed people cannot serve God in the Temple. But after this life, the deformed by birth who are holy and those who are deformed out of virtue, will become more beautiful than angels and will serve God, loving Him in the happiness of Heaven.

It has also been said to you: “Anyone who divorces his wife, must give her a writ of dismissal.” But that is to be condemned, for it does not come from God. God said to Adam: “This is the helpmate I made for you. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” And Adam, full of superior intelligence, because sin had not yet dimmed his reason made perfect by God, exclaimed: “This at last is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh. This is to be called woman, that is: another I, because this was taken from man. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife and the two become one body.” And in an increased splendour of light the Eternal Light approved smiling Adam’s word, which became the first indelible law. Now, if owing to the ever increasing hardness of man, the human lawgiver had to give a new law; if owing to the ever increasing inconstancy of man, the lawgiver had to put a restraint and say: “If you have dismissed her you cannot take her back”, that does not cancel the first genuine law, passed in the Earthly Paradise and approved by God.

I say to you: “Whoever divorces his wife, except for the case of fornication, exposes her to adultery.” Because what will the divorced woman do in ninety per cent of the cases? She will get married again. With what consequences? Oh! How much there is to be said about that! Do you not know that you can cause involuntary incests by such system? How many tears are shed because of lust. Yes: lust. There is no other name for it. Be frank. Everything can be overcome when the spirit is righteous. But everything is an excuse to satisfy sensuality when the spirit is lustful. Woman’s frigidity, dullness, ineptitude for housework, shrewish tongue, love for luxury, everything can be overcome, also diseases and irascibility, if one loves holily. But as after some time one does not love as on the first day, what is more than possible is considered impossible and a poor woman is thrown on to the road and to perdition.

He who rejects her commits adultery. He who marries her after the divorce, commits adultery. Death only dissolves a marriage. Remember that. And if your choice is an unhappy one bear the consequences as a cross, being both of you unhappy but holy, without making also the children unhappy, as they are innocent and suffer more because of such unfortunate situations. The love for your children should cause you to ponder one hundred times, also in the case of death of your partner. Oh! I wish you could be satisfied with what you already have had and to which God said: “Enough!” I wish you, widows and widowers, realised that death is not an attenuation but an elevation to the perfections of parents! To be a mother in the place of a dead mother. To be a father in the place of a deceased father. To be two souls in one and receive the love for the children from the cold lips of the dying partner and say: “Go in peace, without worrying for those who were born of you. I will continue to love them, on my own and on your behalf, I will love them twice and will be their father and mother and they will not suffer the unhappiness of orphans, neither will they feel the inborn jealousy that the children of a remarried consort experience with regard to him or her who takes the sacred place of mother or father called by God to a new abode.”

“God does not stay with the impure. Because impurity corrupts what is the property of God: souls, and in particular the souls of children who are angels spread over the earth. Woe to those who tear off their wings with the cruelty of devilish beasts and throw those flowers of Heaven into the mire, by letting them taste the flavour of material things! Woe… It would be better if they died struck by thunderbolts rather than commit such sin!

(…)

Woe to you, rich and fast living people! Because it is amongst you that the greatest impurity thrives and idleness and money are its bed and pillow! You are now sated. The food of concupiscence reaches your throats and chokes you. But you will be hungry. And your hunger will be terrible, insatiable and unappeasable forever and ever. You are now rich. How much good you could do with your wealth! Instead you do so much harm both to yourselves and to other people. But you will experience a dreadful poverty on a day that will have no end. You now laugh. You think you are triumphing. But your tears will fill the ponds of Gehenna. And they will never cease.

Where does adultery nestle? Where does the corruption of young girls hide? Who has two or three licentious beds, in addition to his own matrimonial one, on which he squanders his money and wastes the strength of a healthy body given to him by God that he may work for his family and not to wear himself out through filthy unions which place him below unclean beasts? You heard that it was said: “You shall not commit adultery.” But I tell you that he who looks at a woman lustfully, that she who wished to go with a man, has already committed adultery in his or her heart, simply by that. There is no reason which can justify fornication. None. Neither the abandonment nor the repudiation of a husband.

Nor pity for the repudiated woman. You have one soul only. When it is joined to another soul by a pact of faithfulness, it must not lie. Otherwise the beautiful body for which you sin will go with you, o impure souls, into the inexhausted fire. Mutilate your body, rather than kill it forever by damning it. Come to your moral senses, o rich men, verminous sinks of vice, so that you may not disgust Heaven… »”

Maria Valtorta, The Poem of the ManGod, chapter 174. The Sermon of the Mount. The Beatitudes (Part Five). Encounter with the Magdalene

Jesus also addresses the value of virginity and the disadvantages of masturbation, referring to lonely hours:

“I insist on the value of purity. Chastity is always the source of clear ideas. Virginity refines and then preserves intellectual and emotional sensitiveness, elevating it to such a perfection that only a virgin can experience.

There are many ways of being a virgin. By compulsion, and this applies particularly to women, when no one ever proposed to them. The same should apply to men. But it does not. And that is bad, because only heads of families, with unhealthy minds and often diseased bodies, can be born of youth soiled with lust before time.

There is wanted virginity, that is the virginity of those who consecrate themselves to the Lord with the ardour of their souls. A beautiful virginity! A sacrifice pleasing to God! But they do not all persist in their purity like lilies which stand upright on their stalks, looking towards Heaven, unaware of the mud on the ground, open to the kisses of God’s sun and His dews.

Many are faithful only in a material way. But they are unfaithful in their thoughts, which regret and wish for what they sacrificed. They are virgins only by half. If their flesh is intact, their hearts are not. Their hearts ferment, boil, exhale fumes of sensuality, the more refined and reproved, the more it is the invention of a mind that caresses, nourishes and continually enlarges the images of satisfactions, illicit even for those who are free, more than illicit for those consecrated to God.

Then you have the hypocrisy of the vow. Its appearance is there, its essence is not. And I tell you that between those who come to Me with their lilies broken by the brutality of a tyrant, and those who come with their lilies materially intact, but covered with the slaver of a sensuality they have caressed and cultivated to fill their hours of solitude, I will call “virgins” the former, and “non virgins” the latter. I will give the former the crown of virgins and a double crown of martyrs, because of their flesh which has been wounded and of their hearts which have been ulcerated by a mutilation they did not want.

The value of purity is such that, as you have seen, the first thing Satan was anxious about, was to deceive Me about impurity. He knows very well that

efforts aimed at this capital point, in order to defeat Me.

Bread, hunger, are the material forms for the allegory of appetite, of the appetites that Satan takes advantage of for his own purpose. The food he offered Me to make Me fall intoxicated at his feet is quite a different thing! Greed would have followed, then avarice, power, idolatry, blasphemy and the abjuration of the divine Law. But that was the first step to catch Me. Exactly as he did to injure Adam.

The world sneers at pure people. Those who are guilty of lewdness strike them. John the Baptist is the victim of the lust of an obscene couple. But if there is still some light in the world, this is due to the pure of the world. They are the servants of God, they understand God and repeat God’s words. I said: “Happy the pure in heart, they shall see God.” Also in this world: since the fumes of sensuality do not perturb their hearts, they “see” God, they hear Him, they follow Him and they show Him to other people.”

Maria Valtorta, The Poem of the ManGod, chapter 47. Jesus Meets John and James.

In this one, Jesus talks to a Roman woman who thinks about divorce:

“« Oh! It’s all over with him.»

« No. Everything is beginning now. You are still his wife. The duty of a good wife is to make her husband good.»

« He says that he wants to divorce me. And he will certainly do that. So…»

« He will do it. But he has not done it yet. And until he does so, you are his wife also according to your law. And as such it is your duty to remain as wife in your place. And your place is second to your husband in the house, with regard to your daughter, the servants and the world. You are thinking: he has set the bad example. That is true. But that does not exempt you from setting virtuous examples. He went away. True. You must take his place with your daughter and the servants.

Not everything is blameworthy in your customs. When Rome was less corrupt, women were chaste, industrious, an d they served the divinity with their lives of virtue and faith. Even if their poor condition of pagans made them serve false gods, the idea was good. They offered their virtue to the Idea of religion, to the need of respect for religion, for a Divinity Whose true name was unknown to them, but Whom they felt existed and was greater than licentious Olympus and the degraded deities that people it according to mythological legends. Your Olympus does not exist, neither do your gods. But your ancient virtues were the fruit of the firm belief that people had to be virtuous if they wanted to be watched over with love by the gods; they were the fruit of the duties you felt you had towards the gods you worshipped. To the eyes of the world, particularly of our Hebrew world, you seemed to be foolish for honouring what did not exist.

But to the eternal true Justice, to the Most High God, the Only and Almighty Creator of all creatures and things, those virtues, that respect, those duties were not vain. Good is always good, faith has always the value of faith, and religion has always the value of religion if he who follows, practises and possesses them is convinced of being in the truth.

I exhort you to imitate your ancient chaste, industrious and faithful women, remaining in your place, the column and light in your house and of your house.

Do not think that you will be bereft of the respect of your servants because you are alone. So far they have served you with fear and at times with a hidden feeling of hatred and rebellion. From now on they will serve you with love. The unhappy love the unhappy. Your slaves know what sorrow is. Your joy was a bitter goad for them. Your grief, by divesting you of the cold light of mistress, in the most hateful sense of the word, will reclothe you with a warm light of pity.

You will be loved, Valeria, by God, by your daughter and by your servants. And even if you were no longer a wife, but a divorced woman, remember (and Jesus stands up) that a legal separation does not destroy the duty of a woman to be faithful to her marriage oath.

You would like to embrace our religion. One of the divine precepts of it is that woman is flesh of the flesh of her husband and that no person or thing can separate what God has joined into one flesh only. We also have divorce. It came as the wicked fruit of human lust, of the sin of origin, of the corruption of men.

But it did not come spontaneously from God. God does not change His word. And God had said, inspiring Adam, who was still innocent and spoke therefore with intelligence not dimmed by sin, the words: that husband and wife, once united, were to be one flesh only. And the flesh is separated from the flesh only through the calamity of death or disease. The Mosaic divorce, granted to avoid dreadful sins, gives woman only a very poor freedom. A divorcee is always inferior in the opinion of men, whether she remains such or marries for the second time. In God’s judgement she is an unhappy woman if she was divorced through the ill-will of her husband and remains a divorcee; but she is a sinner, an adulteress, if she is divorced through disgraceful sins of her own and she marries again. But you want to embrace our religion to follow Me. So I, the Word of God, as the time of the perfect religion has come, say to you what I say to many people. It is against the law to separate what God has united, and he or she is always adulterous by getting married again while the consort is still alive.

Divorce is legal prostitution, as it puts man and woman in a position to commit lustful sins. Only seldom a divorcee remains the widow of a living man, and a faithful widow. A divorced man is never faithful to his first marriage. Both he and she, by passing to other unions, descend from the level of men to that of brutes, which are granted to change female at each appeal of sensuality. Legal fornication, dangerous to families and to the Fatherland, is criminal towards innocent children. The children of a divorced couple must judge their parents.

The judgement of children is a severe one! At least one of the parents is condemned by the children. And the children, through the selfishness of the parents, are doomed to a mutilated affective life. Then, if to the family consequences of divorce, that deprives innocent children of their father or mother, a new marriage is added of the consort to whom the children have been entrusted, to the doom of an affective life mutilated of a member, a further mutilation is added: that of the more or less total loss of the affection of the other member, who is divided or completely absorbed by the new love and by the children of the second marriage.

To speak of marriage, of matrimony in the case of a new union of a divorce or divorcee, is to profane the meaning and the essence of marriage. Only the death of one of the consorts and the consequent widowhood of the other can justify a second marriage. However, I think that it would be better to yield to the always just verdict of Him Who controls the destinies of men, and to remain chaste when death has put an end to the matrimonial state, devoting oneself to the children and loving the dead consort in the children. A holy, true love, deprived of all materialism. Poor children! To experience, after the death or the ruin of a home, the hardness of a second father or of a second mother and the anguish of seeing caresses shared with other children who are not their brothers!

No. There will be no divorce in My religion. And he who divorces by civil law to contract a new marriage will be an adulterer and sinner. Human law shall not change My decree. Matrimony in My religion will no longer be a civil contract, a moral promise, made and ratified in the presence of witnesses appointed for that purpose. But it shall be an indissoluble bond stipulated, confirmed and sanctified by the sanctifying power I will give it, as being a Sacrament. To make you understand: a sacred rite. A power that will help to practise all matrimonial duties in a holy way, but that will also be the sentence of indissolubility of the bond.

So far marriage has been a mutual natural and moral contract between two people of different sexes. When My law comes into force, it will extend to the souls of the consorts. It will therefore become a spiritual contract sanctioned by God through His ministers. Now you know that nothing is superior to God.

Therefore what He has united, no authority, law or human whim will be able to separate. Your ritual “where you are Caius, there I am Caia” lasts in life to come in our, in My rite, because death is not the end, but a temporary separation of the husband from his wife, and the obligation to love lasts also after death. That is why I say that I would like widows to be chaste. But man does not know how to be chaste. And also because of that I say that consorts have the reciprocal duty to improve the other consort.

Do not shake your head. That is the duty and it is to be accomplished if one really wants to follow Me.»

« You are severe today, Master.»

« No. I am the Master. And I have in front of Me a creature who can grow in the life of Grace. If you were not what you are, I would exact less of you. But you have a good temperament and suffering purifies and hardens your character more and more. One day you will remember and bless Me for being what I am.»

« My husband will not draw back…»

« And you will go forward. Holding your innocent child by the hand, you will walk on the way of Justice: without hatred, without revenge; but also without vain expectations and regret for what has been lost.»

« So You know that I have lost him!»

« I do. But not you: he has lost you. He did not deserve you. Now listen… It is hard, I know. You brought Me roses and innocent smiles to console Me… I… I can but prepare you to bear the wreath of thorns of forlorn wives… But consider.

If we could go back in time to that morning when Fausta was dying and your heart were put in the condition of choosing between your daughter and your husband, having definitely to lose either one or the other, which would you choose?…»

The woman becomes pensive, pale but strong in her grief after the few tears shed at the beginning of the conversation… Shethen bends over the little girl who is sitting on the floor enjoying herself putting some white little flowers round Jesus’ feet, she picks her up, embraces her and shouts: « I would choose her because I can give her my very heart, and I can bring her up as I have learned one should live. My creature! And be united to her in the next life. I… always her mother; she… always my daughter!» and she smothers her with kisses while the little one clings to her neck with loving smiles. « Tell me, oh! tell me, Master, who teach people to live heroically, what must I do to rear this child so that we may be both in Your Kingdom? Which words, what acts shall I teach her?…»

« No special acts or words are required. Be perfect so that she may reflect your perfection. Love God and your neighbour that she may learn to love. Live on the Earth with your affections in God. She will imitate you. That for the time being. Later My Father, Who has loved you in a special way, will see to your spiritual needs, and you will become wise in the faith that bears My Name. That is what is to be done. In the love of God you will find all necessary restraint against Evil. In the love for your neighbour you will have assistance against the depression of solitude. And teach both yourself and your daughter to forgive. Do you understand what I mean?»

« Yes, I do… It is just… Master, I leave You. Bless a poor woman… who is poorer than a beggar who has a faithful companion…»”

Maria Valtorta, The Poem of the ManGod, chapter 529. Jesus Speaks to Valeria of Matrimony and Divorce.The Miracle of Little Levi.

Picture by the author