Medjugorje: Encounter with the Queen of Peace

Medjugorje is without doubt the most influential apparition of the twentieth century after Fatima. The parish records of St. James Catholic Church in Medjugorje show that over fifty thousand priests and religious—among them hundreds of bishops and cardinals—have come to Medjugorje, inspired by the presence of the Virgin. Second, other than Guadalupe, no other Marian apparition in history has been the direct cause of as many conversions as Medjugorje. Guadalupe brought about the conversion of eight million Aztecs. Medjugorje has now attracted over thirty million pilgrims, the vast majority of whom have had their lives transformed or touched by their encounter with the Queen of Peace (not to speak of the tens of millions of others who have never visited Medjugorje but have been third-party recipients of the graces mediated by the Virgin).

The significance of these two facts will be evident to anyone who has studied the Church's time-tested canons for the discernment of supernatural phenomena. The Church's great doctors of the spiritual and the mystical life have said for centuries that an authentic supernatural revelation will bear two marks: it will attract the religious and it will cause conversions. Satan posing as an angel of light can bring about many extraordinary signs and wonders, but the one thing he cannot and will not do is bring about a conversion. Judged by these two criteria of an authentic supernatural revelation, Medjugorje has no parallel in Christian history beyond Guadalupe: it has attracted tens of thousands of priests and religious and it has caused hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of conversions (along with unprecedented levels of reception of the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist).

These two facts about Medjugorje no one can dispute since they have been so publicly chronicled. It is also to be noted that there are over a thousand documented cures attributed to Medjugorje.

The apparitions began much like many of the other famous apparitions of the last hundred and fifty years. On June 24, 1981, two peasant girls, Mirjana Dragicevic, seventeen, and Ivanka Ivankovic, sixteen, were walking from their village of Bijakovici past the hill of Podbrdo when Ivanka saw a luminous figure, a lady bathed in light, on the hill. She told her companion Mirjana to look at the Gospa, Croatian for "Our Lady," but Mirjana thought she was joking and refused. (Similarly the Beauraing visionaries initially dismissed Albert's urgent pleas to look at the apparition of the Virgin as a prank.) Nevertheless, Ivanka persisted, and when they reached the Pavlovic house, she persuaded Mirjana to return to the hill with Milka Pavlovic, thirteen. They had tried to bring their friend Vicka Ivankovic, seventeen, as well, but was told by her mother that she was asleep. When they reached Podbrdo all three now saw the Lady. They were soon joined by Vicka, who was too frightened to look but summoned two boys, Ivan Dragicevic, sixteen, and Ivan Ivankovic, twenty. Ivan Dragicevic, later to become one of the six principal visionaries, fled without looking, but the other five now saw a beautiful lady with black hair and a grey gown holding a baby and gesturing to them to come to her. The children were too scared to go up but prayed for some time and then returned home.

Although their friends and families were skeptical, Mirjana, Ivanka, and Vicka returned to Podbrdo the next evening at about 6:00 p.m. along with the younger Ivan, Milka's sister Marija, seventeen, and her cousin Jackov Cholo, ten. Neither Milka nor the older Ivan came with them. A few curious villagers followed them. They saw the Lady again and this time accepted her invitation to come closer. Although the adults present could not see the Lady, they were astonished by the speed with which the visionaries ascended the mountain. As soon as they reached the Lady, they were on their knees praying the Lord's Prayer; the adults noticed that they were all spontaneously looking in the same direction. Ivanka's mother had died quite recently, and she asked the Lady if she was in Heaven. The Lady said yes and told her that her mother wanted her to be obedient to her grandmother. She told them to pray seven Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes and the Creed daily. Like many visionaries before her, Mirjana said that they found it hard to convince people of the Lady's presence, to which she simply smiled. She then said "Go in God's peace" and left.

On the 28th, when the visionaries asked why she wouldn't appear in the church so that everyone could see her, she said, "Blessed are they who have not seen and who believe."

On the 26th, thousands of people assembled at Podbrdo—not just from the five villages that made up the parish of Medjugorje but from neighboring towns. The visionaries and some of the others who had gathered there saw a glowing light at the top of the hill at 6:15 p.m. and on reaching the top saw the Lady there. Vicka brought some holy water which she sprinkled on the Lady, who smiled. When they asked her who she was, she replied, "I am the Blessed Virgin Mary." They asked why she had come there and she said, "I have come here, because there are many devout believers here. I have come to tell you that God exists, and He loves you. Let the others, who do not see me, believe as you do." She also said, "Peace, peace, peace. Be reconciled."

The Communist authorities were now becoming concerned about the situation. They interrogated the visionaries on June 27 and 28 and had them evaluated by a psychiatrist, who pronounced them normal and of sound mental health. Communist regimes often imprisoned dissenters in psychiatric wards on trumped up charges of mental instability. But this stratagem could not be applied here because of their own psychiatrist's report. On the 30th, two Communist social workers abducted the visionaries just before the time of the now-daily apparition. Although the visionaries could not therefore be at Podbrdo, they forced the workers to stop the car at the time of the apparition. They saw a light far away on Podbrdo. The light came to the roadside and the Gospa appeared to them there.

There is a curious footnote to this story: one of the most prolific critics of Medjugorje, who furnishes the source material for most of the other critics, is a Croatian priest in the United States whose cousin was one of these social workers; moreover his nephew was the high-level Communist official sent to Medjugorje with express orders to end the "disturbance"; apart from the conflict of interest issue here, apparently much of this Croatian critic's source material came from these two hostile "sources."

As if the visionaries didn't have enough problems with the civil authorities, they were soon to run into even worse problems with the clergy. Their parish priest, Fr. Jozo Zovko, was a skeptic from the beginning—and remained a skeptic although his bishop, the bishop of Mostar, the diocese to which Medjugorje belonged, urged him to believe. There was soon to be a role reversal, with the bishop turning hostile and Fr. Zovko befriending the visionaries. On the 30th, the authorities arrested their friend Marinko for helping with the crowds. On the same day the visionaries asked Fr. Jozo if the apparitions could be held in the church, but he turned them down.

On the next day, July 1, the authorities moved in. The police blocked off access to Podbrdo and then came to Bijakovici to arrest the visionaries. The visionaries made a quick getaway and headed for the parish church of St. James. Meanwhile, Fr. Jozo, who was praying in the church, heard a voice telling him, "Protect the children." This was the sign from Heaven he had been praying for. Stepping outside he saw the terrified visionaries running toward the church. He took them to the rectory, where the apparition took place on that day. Following the apparition, he celebrated Mass. Thus began a new era in the history of the Medjugorje apparitions. From that day, a regular pattern was established: the apparitions would be in the church or on church property, following which there would be the celebration of Mass.

Fr. Jozo, however, had to pay a price for the "protection" of the children. As at Lourdes and Marpingen and in so many other sites of Marian apparitions, the civil authorities decided to fight fire with fire: what better way to end an "outbreak" of faith than by persuading the perceived "guardian" of faith to do the dirty work? The initial reaction of the newly installed bishop of Mostar, Pavao Zanic (consecrated in 1980), to the apparitions was not just positive but exuberant: "The children are not lying," he said. "If there were just one child one could say: 'This kid is so hard-headed that not even the police can make him speak.' But six innocent simple children like these would have told all in half an hour if anybody had been manipulating them." The bishop's train of thought here was and still is formidable (although he himself has long since abandoned it). But his strong support for the apparitions soon came to the attention of the authorities.

On July 4, 1981, Branko Mikulic, the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina (one of six republics in the erstwhile Yugoslavia), had branded the alleged apparitions as counter-revolutionary. The State Security Police, the UDBA (the Yugoslavian version of the KGB), summoned both the bishop of Mostar and Fr. Jozo Zovko to their offices in Sarajevo, threatening them with imprisonment unless they stopped supporting the apparitions. The two reacted differently to the same threat. Fr. Jozo continued his support; the bishop kept silent. The bishop then called Fr. Jozo to his office and discussed both the threat from the UDBA and a warning he received from his own diocesan priests who said that the bishop's support for the apparitions was elevating the prestige of their rivals, the Franciscans. Fr. Jozo was imprisoned by the UDBA on August 17, 1981, and sentenced to three and a half years of hard labor, although this was reduced to a year and a half. Neither during his trial nor his imprisonment did he receive any support or communication from Bishop Zanic. Fr. Jozo's imprisonment convinced the bishop that the UDBA was serious, and he began reversing the positive stand he had initially adopted. On his release from prison, Fr. Jozo visited Bishop Zanic at his office. The bishop told him that he had no choice but to back off from Medjugorje in view of the threats from both the state and from his diocesan priests; he said even the local Franciscan authorities were advising silence on Medjugorje because they needed the help of the UDBA.

The bishop's silence about Medjugorje erupted into open hostility when he realized that the phenomenon was beginning to attract thousands of people from around the world and also the support of such eminent theologians as Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Fr. Rene Laurentin. Also, the chief champions of the apparitions in Medjugorje were the Franciscans, who had engaged in a long and bitter feud with the secular clergy. As bishop, he had two advantages: one, it was he who would ultimately decide on the authenticity of the apparitions; and two, he was both the repository of all data relating to the case and its principals and the disseminator to the world of the interpretations of the data. He issued several statements attacking both the visionaries and the Franciscan supporters of the apparitions. He also instituted a commission made up of individuals he personally appointed to investigate the apparition.

It was well known that the commission's report would be negative but, shortly before the report was published, the Vatican stepped in and removed all affairs relating to the apparition from the jurisdiction of the bishop. Henceforth the view of the bishop of Mostar on any issue relating to Medjugorje was to be considered nothing more than a private opinion. A letter from the Vatican in 1998 confirmed that this was the case even on the question of whether or not pilgrimages could be made to Medjugorje; the Vatican has no objection to private pilgrimages. The responsibility for investigation of the apparitions was transferred to the Yugoslavian Bishops Conference. In an interim report in 1990, the Conference said that they could not confirm whether or not there was anything supernatural involved at Medjugorje but that they would provide pastoral support for pilgrims to Medjugorje. It was rumored that in a 1991 meeting to be held in Mostar the Conference was going to forbid transmission of the messages from Medjugorje. But this meeting never took place. Shortly before it was to be held, war broke out and Yugoslavia was not only divided into different republics but Bosnia-Herzegovina, the republic to which Medjugorje belonged, became the center of some of the most savage and bloody battles in Europe since the Second World War.

Medjugorje itself was miraculously untouched by the violence all around it. A number of media reports noted this puzzling fact: how is it that Medjugorje, which lay at the very center of the bloody war in Bosnia, was entirely untouched by the fire and fury all around it throughout the war? The Wall Street Journal, in a November 9, 1992, front-page story, reported, "The war has enhanced Medjugorje's fame as an oasis of peace and mystery.... The sole air raid on the town ended with a few bombs exploding harmlessly.... 'You have to believe that either we are very lucky,' he (Dragan Kozina, the town's mayor) said, 'or that someone is protecting us.'"

From the first apparitions in 1981, the visionaries continued to see the Gospa daily and were endlessly investigated by scientists and reporters during the apparitions. In judging the authenticity of an apparition, what matters ultimately (in addition to the theological content of the messages) is the actual state of the visionary during the apparition. At the beginning of the typical Medjugorje apparition, the visionaries would suddenly and simultaneously cease whatever they were doing, kneel down, and turn their eyes toward the same point on the wall facing them and move their lips without any sound; this naturally inexplicable coordination would be followed by the state of ecstasy. The scientists and psychiatrists who have rigorously studied the phenomenon almost from its inception and more recently in April and July 1998 in Bologna, Italy, are unanimous on two conclusions: (a) the visionaries are normal people, and (b) their physiological processes during the apparitions show no clinical signs of hallucination, hysteria, neurosis, catalepsy, or pathological ecstasy. Moreover, the visionaries are insensitive to pain and various other kinds of sensory stimulation during the ecstasy. The April 1998 study included a whole battery of tests from neurological examinations and computerized polygraph tests to numerous other physiological and psychological tests. This latter study confirmed that the visionaries still continued to experience the same state of apparitional ecstasy observed in earlier studies (such as in 1985).