What is the real truth about the visions of Medjugorje?

The bishops of Jugoslavia say the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin are fraudulent; millions disagree. Who is right? Simon Caldwell investigates 0 n Tuesday last week, the Madonna of Medjugorje came of age. The 21st anniversary of the first reported apparition on a hillside in Herzegovina was marked in this country by a statement to the Catholic press from the Medjugorje Apostolate of England and Wales (formerly the Medjugorje Network).
In the statement, the organisation boasted that worldwide interest in the apparitions has been mounting every year and that now "millions of people from all five continents make their private pilgrimages to this shrine, including many cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns".
Indeed, it is true that many positive spiritual "fruits" have been linked to the claims of apparitions: almost every Catholic knows someone who claims their lives have been changed by a visit to the shrine. Some pilgrims come back with stories about spinning suns, and rosaries turning to gold. others undergo conversions that are sincere and lasting, and some become vigorous promoters of Our Lady Queen of Peace, known to devotees as the "Gospa", and her mission to bring about world peace through reconciliation and prayer. So it is ironic that Medjugorje has become one of the biggest threats to the unity of the Catholic Church today.
What many devout pilgrims to Medjugorje may not realise is that the Church does not want them to go there at all. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has forbidden all public pilgrimages to the shrine since 1995. Bishop Ratko Peric of Mostar. who, as local ordinary, is the only man alive to whom the Church has given authority to determine the veracity of the apparitions, is convinced they are fraudulent: so was his predecessor, the late Bishop Pavao Zanic, so is the exYugoslavian bishops' conference, so are the members of three official commissions, each of which ruled negatively, and so are all the Mostar diocesan clergy and most of the Franciscans there.
There will be one final investigation. conducted by Rome. and it will conclude only when either the reports of the apparitions end or the last of the seers dies, since Church norms warn that errors might arise if the study of the "fruits" are not preceded by the study of the "events". But a definitive ruling is unlikely to come in the near future because three of the original six visionaries are saying the Gospa promised them apparitions for life, and a second generation of seers has also emerged.
This is convenient for the visionaries since they derive income from their status as seers. They have courted and won celebrity status and some have since toured the world with the Gospa, whom they can summon on demand anywhere. She has an apparent flexibility which has surprised even some of her most ardent devotees. On one trip to England, the seer Ivan Dragicevic was said to have postponed a scheduled apparition so he could watch a soccer match instead, promising that Our Lady would appear after the final whistle. Ivan, who is married to former Miss Massachusetts beauty queen Loreen Murphy, was once touted by US tour operator Peter Miller as able to offer a personal introduction to the Madonna for just $500. He owns a BMW and a Mercedes as well as a German-style mansion on the local millionaires' row. It stands opposite that which belongs to fellow seer Mirjana Dragicevic, who has converted part of her home into a guesthouse for pilgrims, including apparitions as part of the deal. All of the seers are married and all but one of them own hotels in Medjugorje, in stark contrast to, say, Lucia Dos Santos and St Bernadette Soubirous, who went on to lead rather less worldly lives after they received apparitions at Fatima and Lourdes.
It was the belief of the late Bishop Zanic that the whole thing began as a joke, and at first that's how it appears. The children would laugh hysterically during the Gospa's early appearances, not least when Jakov Colo asked if his football team, Dynamo Zagreb, would win the championship. After an initial week of visions, the children said the Gospa would appear for "just three more days", that the visions would end by 4 July 1981. But since then she has spoken on an additional 30,000 occasions, has given the seers 10 secrets each, promised great signs from heaven that never materialised and — contrary to the teachings of the Church over two millennia — has declared "all religions are equal before God". She became the number one apologist for a group of disobedient Herzegovinian Franciscans only when Fr Jozo Zovko, the parish priest at St James Church, Medjugorje, where the apparitions were said to be appearing, established himself as the children's "spiritual adviser". But even then she would continue to drop the occasional gaffe, describing, for instance, The Poem of the Man God, a book by Maria Valltorta, as "good reading" (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the CDF, had said it was a "heap of pseudoreligiosity").
What really swayed the local bishops against the Gospa, however, was her partisan approach to "the Herzegovina question". This is the Vatican's term for a de facto schism involving a large minority of Herzegovinian Franciscan friars who not only refuse to obey their bishop but also defy the Father General of their Order and Rome itself.
In the 1980s two such friars, Frs Ivica Vego and Ivan Prusina, were expelled from their Order for disobedience by a Vatican tribunal, acting on the advice of Bishop Zanic and the Franciscan Father General in Rome, but they continued to celebrate the sacraments. Thirteen times the Gospa told the seer, Vicka Ivankovic, that the bishop was wrong and her "saints" were innocent, even threatening him with God's "justice" unless he reversed their expulsion (Fr Vego, for the record, soon showed just how saintly he was by impregnating a Franciscan nun).
When Bishop Zanic later investigated the apparitions, he should have had the cooperation of the Franciscans. Instead, they publicly slandered him, calling him a "wolf", "Satan" and a "hypocrite". It was hardly a surprise, then, that Bishop Zanic soon concluded that the six children were lying, and publicly accused Fr Zovko and his sidekick, Fr Tomislav Vlasic, of putting words into the mouth of Our Lady. Indeed, he was not only concerned about the spiritual well-being of his people but also about their corporal welfare. In 1985 he wrote to Fr Rene Laurentin, a chief promoter of the visions, complaining that "a fierce frenzy has taken hold of many of the faithful who were good until now; they have become excessive and peculiar penitents ... one can look forward to a religious war here". Bishop Zanic recognised the friars as Croatian nationalists
who during-the 1980s tried to destabilise communism by using stories of apparitions to reinforce the religious and nationalist convictions of the Croat people. He was also deeply aware of their grievance against Rome. The Franciscans functioned autonomously under Turkish occupation for 400 years, but were now being ordered out of their parishes by the Church in a purge that began in the Second World War when, in defiance of the Vatican, they fought alongside the Ustasha, the Croatian fascists whose cruelty shocked even the SS. Indeed, all Ustasha atrocities linked to the Church involved the rabidly nationalistic Herzegovinian Franciscans, the most notorious being Fr Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, the Butcher of Jansenovac, the Ustasha concentration camp where an estimated 90,000 people perished.
Pope Pius XII first moved against the friars by appointing a secular rather than a local Franciscan bishop to the See of Mostar in 1942. The rebellion that ensued came to a head in 1975 when Pope Paul VI issued the decree, Romanus Pontificubus, which gave the friars a deadline of a year to hand over contested parishes. Predictably, they refused.
Promoters of Medjugorje insist that the Herzegovina question and the apparitions are not connected. The Diocese of Mostar insists they are intimately linked. Bishop Zanic said the Gospa was used to justify the disobedience of the friars, while Don Ante Luburic, chancellor of the diocese, in 1997 went as far as to describe Medjugorje as a place of "religious disorder, disobedience and anti-ecclesiastical activity".
Sadly, this situation has been exacerbated by the trusting support for the friars of "millions of people from all five continents", for the Church has made little progress on the Herzegovina question since 1941. During the Bosnian War. as Croat chequered flags fluttered outside St James's Church and rosary beads were sold alongside Nazi paraphernalia, an
estimated £10 million was raised in the West for war orphans under the banner of the Queen of Peace. But all there has ever been to show for the money is a 40-place crèche in Medjugorje for the children of working mothers. Few, not least the Bishop of Mostar, have a clue where the rest of the money went, but some sources suggest that about 70 per cent ended up in the hands of want ids and organised criminals. This is not fanciful: in the mid-1990s, the Charity Commission froze the assets of Britain's Medjugorje Appeal when it was found to be buying handcuffs for the HVO Croatian militia.
The Yugoslavian bishops, unanimous in their rejection of the Gospa, raised the Herzegovina question in the presence of the Pope at last year's Synod of Bishops in Rome when Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo warned of the serious threat posed to the unity of the entire Catholic Church as a result of the disobedient monks "serving in Medjugorje who impose their own points of view with the aid of pseudocharisms".
The Pope, for his part, has been silent on Medjugorje, leaving the matter to the discretion of the local bishops. Indeed, with some 300 reported cases of private revelations going on in the world at any one time, he would have little time to do anything else if he was to investigate and rule on each one personally.
Nevertheless, Medjugorje promoters continuously insist the Pope has privately signalled his approval of the apparitions and list a number of comments he has supposedly made in their favour, perhaps most famously, "Let the people go to Medjugorje if they convert, pray, confess, do penance". An American Catholic once asked Archbishop Pio Laghi, then papal nuncio to the United States, if there was any truth in the remarks, and he received a reply which read: "Although there have been made observations about Medjugorje attributed to the Holy Father or other officials of the Holy See, none of these have been acknowledged as authentic." Perhaps the most telling indication of all was the Pope's visit to Bosnia in April 1997, when he not only declined to visit Medjugorje (he visited the Muslim community of Mostar just 15 miles away) but also failed to mention the disputed shrine even once.
In short, all the arguments are stacked against the possibility that the Medjugorje apparitions could be
authentic. The most compelling argument in their favour remain the so-called "fruits" — the converted lives, the increase in piety and devotion, the recovery of lost faith, and so on.
On this subject, Bishop Peric, unsurprisingly, has an opinion. "The fruits, so often mentioned, do not prove that they flow from apparitions or supernatural revelations of Our Lady," he said. "But in the measure that they are authentically Christian, they may be interpreted as a product of the normal work of divine grace, by faith in God, by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ, and by the Sacraments of the Catholic Church. And this is to say nothing of the negative fruits."
According to Church teaching, fruits of authentic supernatural interventions are first born in those who receive them, yet the two men closest to the children from the outset do not appear to have been converted in the proper sense.
Fr Vlasic, who fathered a child by a nun in a mixed-sex convent in Zagreb in the 1970s, now lives in Italy,
where, funnily enough, he's trying for the second time to set up a mixed religious community. Fr Zovko, on the other hand, is one of 16 Herzegovinian friars either suspended by Bishop Peric, or expelled from the Franciscan order by the Father General, Giacomo Bini, a man
who for the last eight years has also threatened to suspend the entire Herzegovina province. Like his rebellious confreres, Zovko ignores the penalties of the bishop — not only continuing to celebrate Mass and hear confessions, though he has no faculties to do so, but building, without the bishop's permission, a huge convent in stak Siroki Brijeg, near Mostar, the source of funding of which remains a mystery. Last year, Bishop Peric wrote to each of the 120 friars to ask for their obedience, and about a third refused to give it. Earlier in the year, the rebels used a bogus archbishop, Srecko Franjo Novak, an expelled seminarian, to confirm 700 children in three churches. The confirmations, of course, were invalid and caused a great deal of anxiety to loyal clergy and to the bishop.
To many, Medjugorje is not so much about apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but of disobedience to the legitimate authority of the Church: about friars who defy their superiors, and Catholics from overseas who ignore the directions of Church not to go on pilgrimage there. Most seriously of all, it is a manifestation of the disobedience of the cardinals and bishops who go there too: by wilfully ignoring the wishes of the local ordinary these men are offending against the principle of collegiality, as defined in section 23 of Lumen Gentium.
They are also helping to perpetuate what could be one of the most subversive hoaxes in the history of the Catholic Church.