Its purpose is to set in order, and render intelligible, the principal teachings contained in the writings of Luisa Piccarreta, and then to relate them to the Catholic faith.

The work does not seek to replace the Book of Heaven. On the contrary, it tries to lead the reader back to it continually. This is why each question generally comprises a short answer, a development, Luisa’s texts in English and in Italian, a Catholic articulation, and a summary formula to be retained.

The 214 questions do not claim to contain the immense matter of Luisa’s writings. The work presents itself as an instrument of study, meant to help the reader enter these texts more deeply and go on reading them directly.

It is addressed first to those who already know something of the teachings on the Divine Will and wish to gain a more ordered understanding of them.

A beginner may nevertheless use it. Two self-contained booklets are available for download: the condensed version of the 214 questions, followed by the complete set of their Formulas to Remember; and the practical guide Living in the Divine Will, which extends the doctrine into concrete practice and is accompanied by an anthology of texts from the Book of Heaven.

The complete work is intended rather for one who wishes to understand why a statement is advanced, to find the texts of Luisa that ground it, and to see how it is articulated with the Catholic faith.

Because a subject this broad becomes more accessible when it is broken down into precise questions.

The form also allows several levels to be distinguished: a short answer, to grasp the essential at once; a development, to enter into the reasoning; the source texts, for verification; then the Catholic articulation, to situate what Luisa received within the wider frame of the faith.

It was first called The Amen Fiat Catechism of the Divine Will. The word was used in an analogical and pedagogical sense: a vast matter set out methodically in the form of questions and answers. It never meant that this was an official catechism of the Church, or that this book spoke in her name.

But a title is not always read as it was intended. That one could suggest an authority this work does not claim, and it was set aside to remove the misunderstanding. The work now bears the name of what it is: Questions and Answers on the Divine Will.

Nothing else has changed. It is a private work. It does not claim to teach in the name of the Church, nor to give Luisa’s own teachings the status of the deposit of faith. It expressly acknowledges that a private revelation remains subject to the judgement of the Church and adds nothing to the public Revelation definitively accomplished in Christ. It describes itself as a provisional work, “the fruit of a reading, not of an authority.”

It possesses whatever authority belongs to the arguments and the sources it presents — no more.

The reader is never invited to believe a proposition simply because “the work says so.” He can return to Luisa’s texts, to their Italian text, to Scripture, to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and to the magisterial references indicated.

The work therefore acknowledges itself to be fallible and capable of improvement. This reserve does not weaken its desire to state clearly what it holds to be established; it simply distinguishes the labour of a private author from the Church’s own judgment.

They do not belong to it as a new revelation.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that private revelations, even when authentic, do not serve to complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but can help the faithful to live it more fully in a certain period of history (CCC 67).

This is why the work lays down as a rule of reading: “Nothing that follows claims to add to the deposit of faith.” Luisa’s teachings are to be received within the Christian faith, never as a parallel or superior authority.

Because relating them in this way makes it possible to situate, to distinguish, and to clarify.

The Catholic articulation accompanying most of the questions does not seek to make the Church say that she already teaches every formulation proper to Luisa. It seeks rather to determine the Catholic truths within which those formulations must remain intelligible: the distinction between God and the creature, the primacy of grace, human freedom, the sacraments, the Cross, ecclesial communion, Christian hope.

The doctrine received from the Church therefore functions as the norm of interpretation, not as ornament added to Luisa’s citations.

The work works from an Italian transcription of Luisa’s writings. Every important citation is checked volume by volume and date by date, and the Italian is reproduced so that the reader may return to the text used as the working reference.

A transcription must, however, be distinguished from a typical and critical edition established under ecclesial authority. It is precisely such an edition that the competent authority has called for. According to the Postulator’s official communiqué of 10 August 2024, it will be the sole edition officially recognised by the ecclesiastical Authority and is to become the reference for the groups of the Divine Will.

The work’s present method — verification against the Italian, systematic indication of volume and date, reproduction of the source text — therefore does not replace a critical edition, and the work makes no such claim. When the typical edition becomes available, it will naturally be the reference against which this work must be measured.

So that the translation does not become a screen between Luisa and the reader.

The Italian text allows one to check an important word, a construction, an image, or the exact force of a particularly strong expression. It also makes it possible to see when an Italian term has a wider or different range of meaning than its English equivalent.

This is why the work normally gives the English translation followed by the corresponding Italian, with the volume and date of the passage.

The work was written in French. Its own prose is therefore translated from French into the other languages.

This must be distinguished from Luisa’s words: these are referred to the Italian text used as the working source. The translation of the commentary and the citations of Luisa do not proceed in exactly the same way.

Like every human translation, these editions can still be refined where a lexical choice proves ambiguous or a better equivalent is found.

Of course.

Some Italian words carry a spiritual history, an affective nuance, or an older usage that a modern equivalent may render poorly. Other expressions take their meaning from several passages rather than from an isolated dictionary entry.

A serious translation must therefore remain revisable. This is also one of the reasons the work retains the Italian and gives precise references: a translation is a mediation; the source text remains the point of verification.

Two excesses must be avoided: weakening them in advance because they surprise, or isolating them from their context and taking them in their crudest sense.

Appendix E of the work was designed precisely for the most difficult passages. Its method is to look at what the text actually says, what it does not say, and then to seek the Catholic theological grammar that permits it to be interpreted correctly.

Mystical language readily uses absolute, nuptial, paradoxical, or analogical expressions. It therefore calls for attentive reading of series of texts rather than a theology built from an isolated sentence.

No. The knowledges matter, but the spiritual life does not wait for one to become a specialist.

The work distinguishes the initial entrance into the Fiat from the progressive establishment in that life. The soul begins by sincerely giving its will to God and calling the Divine Will into its acts. It then grows in knowledge, in fidelity, and in self-emptying.

Reading the Book of Heaven accompanies this growth; it is not a preliminary examination to be passed before one may begin.

With something very simple: to offer one’s will to God and ask that his Divine Will take first place in what one is about to think, say, and do.

The work proposes in particular the prevenient act of the morning, by which the soul fixes its intention to live the day in the Divine Will, and then the actual acts, by which it renews this attention throughout its occupations.

It is better to begin faithfully in small things than to seek at once to multiply practices.

The initial reception of the Gift can be very simple; becoming stably established in it is another matter.

The work insists precisely on this distinction. Sincerely giving one’s will opens the soul at once to the action of the Fiat; but between that entrance and a fully formed possession there extends a long road, of fidelity, of self-emptying, and of death to one’s own will.

There is therefore neither a spiritual elitism that reserves entrance for a few perfect souls, nor a shortcut that thereafter dispenses with interior transformation.

An essential place.

The work states that the sanctity of the virtues is not rejected by that of the Fiat: it is concentrated, consummated, and brought to completion. Jesus indeed led Luisa herself through obedience, patience, suffering, and the exercise of the virtues before manifesting to her more fully the living in his Will.

The newness therefore does not consist in living without the virtues, but in letting the Divine Will purify, even in their deepest motives, whatever human effort may still mix with self-love or self-seeking.

The work has not used these three classical expressions as the explicit framework of its plan. The realities they designate are nevertheless fully present.

Purification appears in death to one’s own will, in self-emptying, in the virtues, and in the purification of intentions. Illumination is manifested notably in the knowledges of the Divine Will and in infused knowledge, described as an interior light. Union runs through Luisa’s mystical marriages, the exchange of hearts, and the whole doctrine of participation in the Divine Life.

The traditional terminology therefore offers a useful light for situating the path described in Luisa’s writings, without any need to make each of her expressions or degrees correspond artificially to one of the three ways.

They never become superfluous.

Justification comes entirely from the grace of Christ: it is received in Baptism and, when lost, restored through Reconciliation. The Eucharist nourishes and increases union with Christ.

The work presents sanctifying grace and the sacramental life not as a lower stage that the Fiat would abolish, but as Christian life itself, within which the Gift is to grow. Of that Christian life the work says: “The Gift never takes its place; it presupposes and crowns it.”

They are not techniques required to make the Divine Will operate.

The Rounds express the soul’s response of love to the works of God: it traverses Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification in order to recognise the action of the Fiat, to deposit its “I love you” there, to give thanks, to adore, and to ask for the Kingdom.

The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion deepen union with the redemptive work of Jesus and reparation.

The Rosary, the liturgy, adoration, and the other authentic forms of Christian prayer are not set in competition with these practices. Everything can be lived in the Divine Will.

Fiat means literally “let it be done.”

In Luisa’s writings the word can designate the efficacious word of the Divine Will — the creating, redeeming, or sanctifying Fiat — and, by extension, that Divine Will itself considered in its operation.

This is why the work often uses “the Fiat” to serve as a concise designation for the Gift and the action of the Divine Will, without making it a reality separate from God.

Fusion never means the disappearance of the human person or a confusion between God and the creature.

It designates the free gift by which the soul ceases to make its own will the first principle of its acting and asks the Divine Will to reign in its acts.

The work insists on this point: what must “die” is not the human faculty of willing, still less the personality, but self-initiative when it sets itself up against God. The human will remains real and free.

The Book of Heaven does not present the Divine Will as a succession of actions comparable to ours.

Its act is single, immense, and eternal: Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification are not in God three fragmented operations, as they appear successively within our history.

When the soul enters the Fiat, it is introduced by participation into that act which infinitely surpasses it. This does not make it eternal or divine by nature; it means that God can make its created act share in an operation whose source remains in Him.

The language belongs to Luisa’s writings themselves. It expresses the action of the Fiat received within a human act.

The act remains truly that of a free creature; it does not become an act of the divine essence in the proper sense. But the Divine Will can communicate to it its operative mode and its effects, according to the participation Luisa describes.

The fundamental distinction therefore stands: God acts truly; the creature acts truly; it never becomes God by nature.

It is within this frame that one must understand the passages where Jesus speaks of human acts “confirmed by God as divine acts.”

This is one of the boldest forms of language in the Book of Heaven, and it must not be weakened.

Jesus himself compares the act done in the Divine Will to the eucharistic consecration. He tells Luisa that he consecrates the soul as a privileged host, repeating over her the words of the Consecration (vol. 12, June 20, 1918). Elsewhere he goes further: the matter of the host undergoes the transubstantiation of the Divine Life, and “so it happens to the soul” (vol. 23, October 2, 1927).

From this comes the language of multiplication, which must be received as it is given:

“If she does ten acts in my Will, ten times she multiplies me; if she does twenty, a hundred, a thousand and more, that many times over do I remain multiplied. It happens as in the sacramental consecration: as many hosts as are set out, that many times over do I remain multiplied. The difference is that in the sacramental consecration I need the hosts in order to multiply myself, and the priest to consecrate me; in my Will, in order to remain multiplied, I need the acts of the creature.”

Book of Heaven, vol. 14, March 24, 1922

Nor does the act remain on earth. It ascends, and Heaven takes hold of it: the creature is shown before the whole Celestial Court (vol. 33, November 19, 1933), and her act causes a sun to rise which carries adoration, thanksgiving, and glory to all the inhabitants of the divine homeland (vol. 35, December 14, 1937).

There remains the one thing this language does not say: the divine essence is not multiplied, and no plurality of gods is produced. The eucharistic analogy supplies its own measure here. Christ is truly present and truly multiplied in the consecrated hosts, without his unity or his simplicity being touched. So it is with acts accomplished in the Divine Will: what Jesus describes there is real, and that reality leaves God one, simple, and indivisible.

It is not a division of God.

In Luisa’s vocabulary, the Divine Will can reign in God and, without ceasing to be the one Divine Will, reign also in the soul and there pray, love, and act “with its divine modes.” This is what the texts call its bilocation.

The expression therefore seeks to hold together two truths: God never divides himself; yet his presence and his operation within the creature are real.

In this passage from volume 19, Jesus compares four persons standing in different relations to the light of the sun: one barely exposed to it, another more so, a third receiving its effects abundantly, and the last living as though immersed in its light.

“These people are the image of the four degrees of the living in my Will.”

Book of Heaven, vol. 19, July 26, 1926

But the text adds at once that there will be a difference of degrees according to what creatures will want to receive, and that the first degrees serve as spurs and paths toward the last.

The four degrees therefore designate the great positions figured by this particular comparison; they do not constitute an inventory of every possible measure of grace, knowledge, or sanctity.

It has no endpoint.

The work devotes an entire question to the act ever growing. In volume 29, July 2, 1931, Jesus explains that God placed in man no determined act and no limit, but an act called to grow continually.

Other passages speak of new degrees of grace, of love, of sanctity, of Divine Life, and of glory. The knowledges themselves enlarge the soul’s capacity: new “heavens,” new “suns,” new “seas.”

Two things must therefore be held together: a soul can be truly established in the Fiat, and its participation in the infinite Good of God can nevertheless go on growing always.

Several levels must be distinguished without being opposed.

The sanctifying grace received in Baptism is already a true participation in the Divine Life. The actual graces are the helps by which God acts and calls within concrete circumstances.

When Luisa speaks of the Divine Will communicating its Life to the soul, the work maintains an essential safeguard: participation, and not essence. The Divine Will remains uncreated; the creature receives by grace a participation in the Life of God while remaining wholly a creature.

In the passage of March 23, 1931, Luisa uses the Italian expression amore di compiacimento.

This English edition renders it as love of complacency, following the older theological sense of complacency: a loving delight in a good, a rejoicing in it and in what God accomplishes. This is the sense the word carries in the classical vocabulary of the amor complacentiae.

The term is nonetheless open to misunderstanding, since in present-day English complacency far more readily suggests self-satisfaction or smugness — the opposite of what Luisa describes. Readers should hold to the Italian source, and a rendering such as love of delight may in some contexts serve better than the literal calque.

Because her writings mean to manifest a newness proper to the mode of operation attributed to the Fiat within the creature.

This newness must nevertheless never be understood as contempt for the saints, for the virtues, or for the whole preceding spiritual tradition. The work expressly states that the sanctity of the virtues is not rejected: it is taken up, concentrated, and brought to its completion.

Two opposite reductions must therefore be avoided: weakening Luisa’s expressions until they retain no newness of their own; or interpreting them as though all previous sanctity had become inferior, vain, or superseded.

The newness these texts claim must remain within the one Christian sanctity and within the universal call to the perfection of charity.

In 2019, theological, Christological, and anthropological ambiguities had been noted in her writings. The official communiqué of the Postulator, Mgr Paolo Rizzi, states that these ambiguities “were not in themselves doctrinal errors” but called for further study.

After the responses of the Postulation, assisted by a theologian expert in mysticism, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith concluded that no statements manifestly contrary to the doctrine of the Church were to be found in Luisa’s writings and thought, and issued in June 2024 the nihil obstat for the resumption of the Cause. This was formally notified by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints on 8 July 2024.

More recent official information indicates that the Cause is proceeding and that work on the typical edition is under way.

It means that the doctrinal examination of the writings has been made, and that it is favourable.

This is not a holding formula. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — the competent organ of the Church in this matter, and no other — examined Luisa’s writings and concluded that no statements manifestly contrary to the doctrine of the Church are found in them. The ambiguities noted in 2019 had already been characterised, in the official communiqué, as not being in themselves doctrinal errors; the clarifications requested were furnished and received. The obstacle has been lifted.

What this means for what follows must be measured. In a cause of beatification, the doctrinal examination of the writings constitutes a distinct stage. That stage has been passed. What remains before us — the recognition of heroic virtues, then the miracle — no longer bears upon the doctrine contained in these writings. On that side, the Church has said what she had to say.

One must also know how to read what the Church does not say. She does not declare the supernatural origin of these communications — but that silence is no reservation directed at Luisa. Since the Norms of 2024, the Church as a rule pronounces on the supernatural character of no phenomenon whatever, even when she grants her most favourable determination. This is not caution regarding Luisa: it is now her ordinary manner of proceeding.

The typical and critical edition subsequently called for goes in the same direction. Its notes are to clarify expressions open to erroneous interpretation: they are aimed at the faulty readings that have circulated, not at the text. One does not surround with such care a writing one distrusts.

What remains true, and what this work recalls on its own account: none of these acts guarantees any particular interpretation of the writings, its own included.

Because it is to establish the ecclesially recognised text of the writings.

The Postulator’s communiqué states that the continuation of the Cause must necessarily be accompanied by this edition, produced by the actor of the Cause under the vigilance of the Archbishop of Trani-Barletta-Bisceglie. It is to include an introduction and notes intended in particular to clarify expressions open to erroneous interpretation. It will be the officially recognised edition and the reference for the groups of the Divine Will.

The work acknowledges this situation: its present work rests on an Italian transcription and remains to be measured against that future edition when it becomes available.

A proper and important place.

The Book of Heaven speaks explicitly of the formation of priests called to know and to transmit the truths of the Kingdom. The work devotes a specific question to this mission and an entire Part to the Church, the sacraments, and obedience.

The spirituality of the Divine Will is therefore not meant to develop apart from ecclesial life or independently of the Church’s pastors. The 2024 communiqué itself asks that its diffusion be harmoniously inserted into the life of the local Churches.

With simplicity.

A critical edition may refine a transcription, restore a context, correct punctuation, or help an expression to be understood differently. Ecclesial authority may also require that an interpretation be reformulated or abandoned.

Such a development should not be experienced as a threat. If the aim is truly to receive what God wishes to give through these writings, then understanding them better is a good.

The work has deliberately presented itself as provisional in precisely this sense: it seeks to state forcefully what it holds to be establishable today, while acknowledging that it must loyally confront the Church’s future determinations.

Because the acknowledgment of its limits belongs to its status.

“Fallible” does not mean that everything in it is doubtful or interchangeable. It means simply that no particular divine assistance guarantees any of the author’s formulations.

“Capable of improvement” means that better translations, new connections between texts, or future ecclesial indications may permit a truth already perceived to be expressed more exactly.

The work therefore seeks a simple position: to weaken nothing out of fear of what the texts say, while never claiming an authority it does not possess.