Posted on 09/08/2009 3:59:27 PM PDT by NYer
In 1981, a year after the death of ex-Yugoslavia's communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, events in Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia-Hercegovina, began to stir the Christian world. Six Croatian Catholic children-four girls and two boys, then aged from ten to sixteen-claimed to have experienced visions of the Virgin Mary.
Even now, after twenty-eight years, three of the Medjugorje seers still report nightly visitations, usually around 6:40 local time, according to their official website. One of them, Ivan Dragicevic, who was sixteen years old when the apparitions commenced, holds prayer sessions on Mondays and Fridays, at 10:00, with additional communications from the Virgin. When the visionaries travel, they say, the Virgin increases the number of her messages to accommodate their itineraries.
As a result, Medjugorje is said to have drawn some 30 million pilgrims. But the visions were always controversial, especially within the Catholic Church. Bishop Pavao Žanic of Mostar-the nearest major city-who officiated in 1981, refused to support the authenticity of the children's revelations. Bishop Žanic died in 2000 and was succeeded by Bishop Ratko Peric in 2003, who also repudiated Medjugorje. Rumor circulated in Bosnia over the past year that Benedict XVI shared their incredulity.
And this summer, at the end of July 2009, Benedict acted on his doubts. He has removed from the clergy one of two local priests most active in supporting the visions, Tomislav Vlašic, and threatened him with excommunication. (The suspension of the other, Jozo Zovko, from pastoral duties was confirmed in 2004.) Vlašic is also prohibited from residing in Franciscan facilities. The story has received little coverage in the United States, but has excited widespread comment in Ireland, from where millions of people had gone to Medjugorje, and Britain, which also contributed a significant contingent.
Simon Caldwell of the Catholic News Service recently wrote that Vlašic was moved last year to a Franciscan monastery in the Italian city of L'Aquila, "after he refused to cooperate in a Vatican investigation of his activities for suspected heresy and schism. He also was being investigated for 'the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspected mysticism, disobedience towards legitimately issued orders and charges contra sextum (against the Sixth Commandment not to commit adultery)."
These harsh phrases appeared over the signature of Cardinal Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But Vlašic had already moved from Bosnia to the Italian city of Parma in the mid-1980s. And Franciscan minister general Fr. José Rodríguez Carballo has said that Vlašic requested his own laicization.
So what happened at Medjugorje? The visionaries, now approaching middle age, claim they were visited by the Virgin on tens of thousands of occasions. When Bishop Žanic was reluctant to support them, the children's proponents accused him of submitting to Communist government pressure. Still, even after Croatia became independent in 1991, the Catholic hierarchy rejected the supernatural character of the incidents at Medjugorje.
While it is difficult and tragic to cast doubt on a religious occurrence that brings comfort to ordinary people, the Croatian and Bosnian Catholic bishops were aware that Medjugorje had questionable aspects in its local, political, and secular background.
Members of the Franciscan Province of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, located in Hercegovina, took up the children's cause. What had once been an obscure hamlet "between hills" (the meaning of the name Medjugorje) was transformed. New facilities were added to the local church of St. James; guest houses proliferated, along with souvenir shops. During my first visit to ex-Yugoslavia in 1990, I went to Dubrovnik-where the international airport served flights filled with passengers to and from Medjugorje-but knew nothing about them, aside from observing their fervor.
The location itself is remarkable, in that it sits at the western point of a triangle formed with two of the most important Islamic and Jewish spiritual sites in the Balkans, both of which have also drawn many wayfarers. Northeast of Medjugorje is the Sufi shrine of Blagaj. In its appearance, Blagaj could not be more different. While Medjugorje sits in a dusty basin, Blagaj stands at the source of a river, under steep limestone cliffs. Blagaj was built in the sixteenth century and survives as a rather modest complex, including a guesthouse and a tekija or Sufi meditation lodge. The river has been seeded with trout and a fish restaurant accommodates visitors-but in nothing like the numbers who go to Medjugorje.
Directly east of Medjugorje is the old Ottoman town of Stolac, outside of which one finds another hamlet, Krajsina, and the tomb of the "wonder-working rabbi," Moshe Danon of Sarajevo, who died there in 1830 while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Until the Holocaust, the grave of Rav Danon was visited by large groups of Bosnian Jews, who composed songs and devotional tracts about the virtue of making the journey.
On the road to Stolac sits Radimlja, a large aboveground necropolis of centuries-old stone sarcophagi, decorated with human and natural motifs, as well as crosses and other religious symbols. Although not considered a spiritual site, Radimlja is nonetheless a significant Bosnian cultural asset. The stone memorials are, more than any other feature in the landscape, the object of cultural rivalries, claimed by Croats, Muslim Bosnians, and Orthodox Christians.
I have visited all these places, some of them repeatedly. Blagaj is admirable for its simplicity. The grave of Rav Danon is saddening, because photographs and pamphlets demonstrate that it was once crowded with Jewish visitors, who were slain in the Holocaust. Radimlja is mysterious, rather than spiritual, but fascinating in revealing the premodern culture of the region. There are also reports of Serbian Orthodox shrines nearby, but since the Balkan wars of the 1990s they are not easily found.
I have also been to Medjugorje. In 1999 I copublished an article with a then-colleague, Laura Peterson, in a Californian Catholic monthly describing the hubbub at the town. But Peterson and I also heard the voices of discord. At Medjugorje, we listened to a Canadian woman who had been there twenty-five times. She told us, "It's the peace. . . . There's nothing like this in the West. If I didn't have a family, I'd sell my home and move here. [The West] just doesn't have the strength of faith they have here."
Such a comment was counterintuitive, to say the least, given that the surrounding area had been devastated during the Croatian and Bosnian wars. Muslims and Serbs had been driven from the district; Serbs in Trebinje, a city further east, had expelled Muslims and Croats, destroying many old mosques; Ottoman monuments in Stolac were demolished by Croats, and the surviving Sarajevo Jews were afraid to visit the grave of Rav Danon. And that seemed to justify the question put forward by a Franciscan critic of the Medjugorje story, Fr. Ivo Sivric, who was born in the village. With exquisite understatement, he commented, "The lack of reconciliation and division in Herzegovina contraindicate the presence of the Queen of Peace and the apparitions." Others asked why the messages from the Virgin were apocalyptic and punitive, filled with end-times rhetoric.
Some have even alleged that at Medjugorje, Mary had replaced Jesus at the center of worship. For most Bosnians, the most significant elements in the Medjugorje narrative are precedents from church and local history. The Franciscans in Bosnia have two provinces: one based in Hercegovina and the other, the Province of Srebrena Bosna, headquartered in Sarajevo. The Bosnian Franciscans had been granted special privileges to tend to the religious needs of Catholics, after the Muslim conquest of the land in 1463. This was a break from the Ottoman custom of recognizing the Orthodox churches as Christian representatives. But the Hercegovinians have a reputation as hard-headed nationalists, while the Franciscans in central Bosnia are considered by Muslims as well as Christians as dedicated to interreligious civility and local patriotism.
At Medjugorje, for almost thirty years, many have seen a demonstration of Hercegovinian militancy, and even of heresy. Once the local bishop rejected the visionaries, priests sent to the area by the regular ecclesiastical authorities were beaten up, prayer was held in local churches without the presence of clergy, and, some allege, the Medjugorje group was on the road to schism from the Roman church.
Serbs have loudly denounced Medjugorje as a Croatian conspiracy, while Bosnian Muslims have tended to remain subdued about it, at least in public. Local Muslims are mostly silent, especially after a war that took so many lives. But many admit they perceived in Medjugorje a Croatian ultranationalist production.
More could be said about the matter, but Benedict XVI appears to have made up his mind about Medjugorje. And many Croats, as well as Muslims and other Bosnians, are likely to quietly welcome his action.
For your discernment.
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Thank you for the ping! I agree with this article. I also wish Pope Benedict (if indeed he is in agreement with the two local Bishops) would come out with an unequivocal decision and statement so that there would be no more confusion.
A funny side story, one day a group of us were chatting at church and the subject of Medjugorje came up. Someone asked our priest why he did has not lead a parish visit there.
He said he would visit as soon as Mary did.
>>I also wish Pope Benedict (if indeed he is in agreement with the two local Bishops) would come out with an unequivocal decision and statement so that there would be no more confusion.<<
He can’t. Until the visions stop.
That’s why those visions will go on a LLLOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time.
Smart Priest!
I hear ‘ya. What a mess!
LOL!!
the Pope will not state directly that the apparitions did not happen, he can, however, state that the church does not find credibility in them....Catholics can or cannot accept Fatima, Lourdes etc. without being at odds with the church....pretty much up to each individual to make up his or her mind....as for myself....everything is possible with God.
I was duped by Medjugorie for several years. Things started sounding fishy to me, like the everyday apparition for Ivan. That would ammount to hundreds and hundreds of visits. Not one of the visionaries became a priest or a nun, etc.
I’m not buying it.
There were no Catholics in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the Turkish conquest (mid 15th century). There was the Orthodox Church and the Bogomil Bosnian Church. The Bogomils converted to Islam when the Tukrs arrived. Bosnian Muslims today are descendants of these double apostates.
Large scale Catholic influence in western Herzegovina began with Austrian Empress Maria Theresa's forceful conversion of Orthodox Serbs into Catholic Croats, and the practice of creating national identity accoridng to the faith and not language.
This can be verified by the dates of the oldest Catholic churches and monasteries in the region (18th century). Therefore speaking of Ottomans granting special priviledges to Franciscans is gobbldygook, something Mr. Schwartz was fed erroneously by historical revisionists who helped him write this piece.
>>state that the church does not find credibility in them..<<
He has. The Bishop in the area has stated numerous times that there is “nothing supernatural” going on there. That is all the Vatican needs to do. Those who are into Medjugorje want more from the Vatican than any other apparition site.
It’s typical of the Progressive establishment that has pushed the Holy Mass to being a circus. When the GIRM came out it didn’t say the people should hold hands or the laity use the Orans position. To the libs, it didn’t say they couldn’t. SO they disregard that the GIRM only tell one WHAT to do and that it doesn’t say I can’t lay prostate in the aisle either. They take advantage of what they can to get their way.
It’s only the machine that is driving “Catholic Disneyworld” and those who WANT to believe that disregard the Bishop.
How much obedience is going on when the “seers” and the establishment in that area are Disobeying the Bishop? Those are the “fruits”
Don’t worry, lots of people are.
It’s a cash cow.
Au contraire. They have certainly condemned ongoing visions (e.g. Bayside, Scottsdale), but they will typically not approve a vision until they've come to a halt.
The process starts with the Bishop. It isn’t a matter of “condemn” it’s a matter of stating that nothing supernatural is going on there.
http://www.miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/discernment/
“Process of Ecclesial Approval
The local bishop is the first and main authority in apparition cases, which can be defined as instances of private revelation. Bishops evaluate evidence of an apparition according to these guidelines:
1. The facts in the case are free of error.
2. The person(s) receiving the messages is/are psychologically balanced, honest, moral, sincere and respectful of church authority.
3. Doctrinal errors are not attributed to God, Our Lady or to a saint.
4. Theological and spiritual doctrines presented are free of error.
5. Moneymaking is not a motive involved in the events.
6. Healthy religious devotion and spiritual fruits result, with no evidence of collective hysteria.
Judgment can find that an apparition shows all signs of being an authentic or a truly miraculous intervention from heaven, that it is clearly not miraculous or there are not sufficient signs manifesting it to be be so, or that it’s not evident whether or not the alleged apparition is authentic.
If a Marian apparition is recognized by the bishop, it means that the message is not contrary to faith and morals and that Mary can be venerated in a special way at the site. But, because belief in a private revelation is not required by the church, Catholics are at liberty to decide how much personal spiritual emphasis to place on apparitions and the messages they deliver.”
Therefore if the Bishops of either diocese refused to investigate (as is the case in Bayside) the Vatican steps in.
In the case of Medjugorje, the Bishop ruled that nothing supernatural is going on and the players have ignored it.
Personally, I think JPII, while a wonderfully spiritual man, was really poor at guiding his flock. Benedict has already moved to close that circus down.
Well the bishops have certainly stated that nothing supernatural is going on at Medjugorje, I agree with that. The Vatican, I believe, is trying to dull the thud of a full ecclesial condemnation by dealing with the individual priests, first, who were promoting this.
At some point, the visionaries will have to explain why the Virgin would give a specific date for a miracle at Fatima, but will not divulge a date for the long-awaited “sign” at Medjugorje. This has left the Church and her bishops open to ridicule, embarrassment, and disobedience in the name of a phenomena that has demonstrated no legitimate supernatural characteristics.
We have an extremely traditional parish.
I am continually amazed at the people who believe in this AND Bayside AND Conyers, GA, etc.
We had a very Holy Priest. IMO he was a walking saint who went to his reward earlier this year. When he saw pamphlets about Medjugorje, he would get visibly angry and throw them away.
That always said something to me.
LOL
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