In 1981, the town of Medjugorje gained worldwide notoriety when news spread about the appearance of the Virgin Mary to 6 Bosnian children. Since that time, Medjugorje has become one of the largest and most popular pilgrimage sites for Catholic Christians and tourists worldwide.
Local clergy remain tentative however, on confirming the supernatural nature of the events in Medjugorje and have urged the visionaries to refrain from further public manifestations ahead of the official confirmation of the Church. But lately, the Vatican has taken a more definite stance on the Catholic shrine:
The Pope has begun a crackdown on the world’s largest illicit Catholic shrine – by suspending the priest at the centre of claims that the Virgin Mary has appeared more than 40,000 times.
Benedict XVI has authorised ‘severe cautionary and disciplinary measures’ against Father Tomislav Vlasic, the former ‘spiritual director’ to six children who said Our Lady was appearing to them at Medjugorje in Bosnia.
The Franciscan priest has been suspended after he refused to cooperate into claims of scandalous sexual immorality ‘aggravated by mystical motivations’.
In 1985 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict – banned pilgrimages to the site, but this has been widely ignored.
Despite this, pilgrimages continue on the site and one of the visionaries, Mirjana Solo, claims visions from Mary continue to the present day. Here is a recent video interview and message from Mirjana Solo:
Medjugorje is not by any means an isolated incident, and is simply one of many similar incidents that have been alleged over the decades. In 1989, Judiel Nieva of Agoo, Philippines, claimed to have received visions and messages from the Virgin Mary which gained general approval and support from locals until Nieva was discredited in 1993. The Catholic Church adheres to a strict process to investigate claims and Nieva’s case joins the numerous cases of unapproved or disapproved incidents of Marian apparitions.
In the midst of this, one wonders at the seeming popularity of apparition incidents and miracles. Some voices in the Catholic Church itself are already skeptical of such incidents and they allude to more temporal concerns at work:
Andrea Gemma, 77, a bishop and once the Vatican’s top exorcist, told a magazine in Italy: ‘In Medjugorje everything happens in function of money: Pilgrimages, lodging houses, sale of trinkets.
‘This whole sham is the work of the Devil. It is a scandal.’ He said the Vatican would soon crack down on the group
A couple of years back, Claus Larsen did an expose in Denmark and his story is a lucid account of what can only be termed “miracle business”. From Larsen’s report:
My thought was, “How can he just stand there so nonchalant, when so many miracles are supposedly happening all around him? Shouldn’t he be awestruck by the wonder of God?” Perhaps when you see that many miracles, they tend to become rather mundane. God only knows.
Meanwhile, true visions or not, the money machine at Medjugorje has paid off quite well for the seers. From the dailymail:
Instead the seers have grown wealthy as a result of their claims – and so has their town, which has boomed as a result of the ‘Madonna gold rush’. Some today own smart executive houses with immaculate gardens, double garages and security gates, and one has a tennis court. They also own expensive cars and have married – one of them, Ivan Dragicevic, to an American former beauty queen.
Amen I say.
For one who advocates critical thinking, this article is quite biased. The truth is that the Vatican has not ruled neither for nor against Medjugorje. Now why would that be after 28 years if the Vatican’s position were that Medjugorje was the work of the devil? The extremely large body of evidence that supports the case for apparitions in Medjugorje has been completely ignored.
^ The article simply reports the case as it stands–meaning that the Vatican has suspended Medjugorje’s priest and the tentative stand of Bosnian bishops.
Your question is the biased one. The silence of the Vatican is not an endorsement. My question would be: Why is it that in 28 years the Vatican has not endorsed Medjugorje despite the “extremely large body of evidence that supports the case for apparitions in Medjugorje”?
Michael Davies’ exhaustive book on the events on Medjugorje is an excellent resource on this:
http://www.mdaviesonmedj.com/
Includes profiles on the wealthy lifestyles of the Medjugorje’s visionaries and official Vatican statements on the subject. Also features Medjugorje’s attempt to falsify a papal blessing from Pope John Paul II back in 2002.