Someone posted another thread to the News Forum entitled: Pope defrocks priest over ‘visions’ of the Virgin Mary. The thread was comprised of one sentence taken from an article that appeared in The Daily Mail (UK). I feel you deserve more details than that.
ping from the other thread
Got himself into a pickle, it seems!
this doesn’t sound bullish for the Medugorje crowd. Did I spell that right?
What's the title? Is she a priest?
A lot of the “scandal” about Medjugorje is a power struggle between the local bishops and the Franciscans, who were the only priests during the long Muslim rule and revered by the people...
so the people resented a bishop "taking their priests" away....
TO give you an idea of how rabid this feud is: I once heard the Bishop of Mostar declare that the major problem facing the church in Yugoslavia was Medjugorje. Fair enough: But when he said this, the civil war in Bosnia was in the midst of killing 100 thousand people, and ethnic Serb had destroyed many Catholic churches, and the destruction of much of the city of Mostar.
So the problem was an “apparition” that encouraged people to pray for peace and reconcile with their neighbor, not the fact that this “message” was ignored and the result was a devastating civil war...
My take is that if I lived in an area with ethnic hatred, what the hey, anything that would encourage peace should be encouraged...if that had been done in the 1980’s, how many people would be alive now?