The miracle of Medjugorje,
the holy town that took on the Vatican
Forty years after six
children claimed to have met the Virgin Mary, a town in Bosnia is now one of
the holiest in Europe. Why did it take so long to get the Vatican’s blessing?
Dominic Hauschild makes the pilgrimage
Dominic Hauschild
Thursday November 28 2024, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In June 1981 a handsome but painfully shy teenager with shaggy black hair
is walking with a friend through an apple orchard. The sun is low and crickets
chirp loudly as a warm afternoon breeze ripples through the leaves. The boy’s
name is Ivan Dragicevic. He is 16, an ethnic Croat and a Catholic, like most of
his village — the remote Bosnian farming community of Medjugorje — but not
particularly religious. There is little on his mind beyond football and girls.
His feet kick up a fine red dust that stains the hems of his trousers. From the
hills Ivan sees someone sprinting towards him. Her name is Vicka Ivankovic, and
what she is about to tell him will change their lives — and those of
millions of people around the world.
“Ivan, the
Madonna,” says Vicka, 17, breathlessly. “They said that the Madonna has
appeared up there. Let’s go, you and me.” Vicka leads Ivan up a hill called
Podbrdo, south of the village. There, the pair see a white flash of light in
the shape of an angelic figure. Vicka looks at Ivan, but he has already turned
on his heel and fled.
“The first day she
appeared we ran off,” says Ivan, now a pudgy 59-year-old, lounging on a cream
leather sofa in his home in Medjugorje, about 90 miles southwest of the
capital, Sarajevo. His black mop has long since receded and turned grey. He
wears wire-framed spectacles and a tight white T-shirt emblazoned with the logo
of the Boston Celtics basketball team.
“I arrived at home
and thought, isn’t that impossible? Can it be that I can see such a thing? But
on the second day, when we came back, I started to talk with the figure. We
went back again and, being with her every day, I relaxed more and more,” he
says.
Ivan Dragicevic and
Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti in 1984, with the youngest ‘visionary’, Jakov Colo
UMBERTO PIZZI
Ivan and Vicka are
two of six people from Medjugorje, all now in their fifties, who claim that for
the past four decades they have had frequent visions of — and conversations
with — Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. “Every meeting with Our Lady I
listen,” Ivan says. “But I don’t just listen, I also talk to her every day.”
Mary gives the visionaries, as they are known, messages to pass on to the
world. Over the past four decades more than 40,000 such messages have been
received, written down and relayed to millions of Catholics worldwide in books
and via broadcasts on the internet.
“The most important
thing is to pray,” reads one, given to Ivan in September 1981. Another: “Peace,
peace, peace. Only peace.”
The other
“visionaries” are Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti, 59, Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo, 59,
Ivanka Ivankovic-Elez, 58, and Jakov Colo, 53. They were aged between 10 and 17
when the visions began. They are not related and, though they were raised in
the same village, most were little more than acquaintances at first. Most —
Ivan included — say Mary comes to them at 6.40pm every evening. Jakov, the
youngest, says he receives just one message a year: on Christmas Day. Last
Christmas, he says, Mary came to him at 2.20pm cradling the baby Jesus and
called on the world to “surrender your life and heart” to God.
Within days of
those first visions thousands of pilgrims flocked to Medjugorje, increasing as
its fame grew. By 2015 an estimated 30 million people had been to the village
and annual visitor numbers had surpassed a million. Today Medjugorje (permanent
population: 4,000) is on its way to rivalling the better-known Marian shrines
of Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal. Recent estimates put its annual
tourist numbers close to three million — still a little under half the numbers
received by Lourdes and Fatima. This August alone, priests at Medjugorje handed
out 325,000 communion wafers.
As I walk along the
main drag of the village, people from all over the world are milling around St
James’s, the lemon-coloured stucco parish church framed by twin bell towers. At
Christmas a massive crib and manger scene is erected in its courtyard, which
doubles as the stage for the yearly Christmas Eve nativity play — complete with
live donkeys and cows.
Dozens of gift shops
are crammed along the street in the centre of town and on the walk up to
Podbrdo — now known as Apparition Hill. They hawk cheap plastic souvenirs,
including statuettes of Mary, or €2 (£1.70) jars of dirt collected from the
hillside. Racks of multicoloured and glow- in-the-dark prayer beads line the
shelves.
A few miles
southwest of town a floodlit cross in the hills gives off an unearthly golden
glow at night. This is Krizevac — Cross Mountain — another magnet for pilgrims.
At its peak is a towering white cross, within which is embedded a splinter of
the True Cross — supposedly the actual wooden crucifix on which Jesus died, the
majority of which resides in a basilica in Rome. The fragment was gifted to the
parish in 1933 by Pope Pius XI as part of a plan to put crucifixes on hilltops
and mountains worldwide to mark the 1,900th anniversary of Jesus’s death.
The tourist influx
since the 1980s has brought an estimated £83 million to the village, although
there is no formal data. The analysts Future Market Insights calculated that
worldwide revenue from faith-based tourism reached about £12 billion last year
and could hit £32 billion by 2033.
Medjugorje,
however, is mired in controversy and scandal. Over the decades critics within
and without the church have accused the six visionaries of lying, or of moral
failings that are incompatible with receiving visions of the virgin mother. The
year their visions began they were arrested and interrogated by the communist
authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of Yugoslavia, resulting in a
temporary ban from appearing in public.
The Catholic Bishop
of Mostar denied the authenticity of the visions, leading to a rift with the
local Franciscan monks who provided the children with spiritual guidance in the
1980s. One local monk, Tomislav Vlasic, was defrocked in 2009 and
excommunicated in 2020 after allegedly fathering a child with a nun. Another,
Jozo Zovko, was suspended three times by Rome for disobedience to the church
and was stripped of his priestly duties.
In 1985 Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) banned official
pilgrimages to Medjugorje, although individual Catholics were still free to
visit. The Vatican has commissioned multiple investigations into the nature of
the visions, including one in 2010 initiated by Pope Benedict and headed up by
a former vicar general of Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini.
After four years
the Ruini Commission signalled its approval that the first seven apparitions of
Mary at Medjugorje could be considered as genuine “supernatural” events — but
serious doubts lingered over the enduring visions. Benedict’s successor, Pope
Francis, lifted the ban on official pilgrimages in 2017, saying it was
undeniable that people were having meaningful religious experiences in
Medjugorje. He remained “suspicious” of the apparitions, however. The Pope, who
has never visited Medjugorje, once warned worshippers: “The Virgin Mary is not
a postmistress who sends messages every day.” When I visited this summer the
village and its faithful awaited a full, detailed Vatican report, which wasn’t
to emerge until September, some months later.
The events of June 1981 were not in isolation. Two months later, on
August 6, witnesses claimed they saw the word MIR — the
Bosnian-Croat word for peace — written in the sky in burning letters.
At the same time
the so-called Miracle of the Sun was observed — a spectacle first seen in
Fatima in 1917, in which the sun appears to zigzag in the sky for minutes at a
time. It was attested to by about 150 witnesses, though sceptics ascribe it to
a mass hallucination or an optical illusion. It has allegedly been seen in
Medjugorje many times since.
Numerous other
miracles have been claimed in Medjugorje over the years. Since 2001 a bronze
statue of the Risen Christ by Andrej Ajdic, a Slovenian sculptor, placed behind
St James’s Church in 1998, has been “weeping” from its thigh. The liquid is
wiped away by worshippers on scraps of cloth that are then treated like relics.
And, as at Lourdes, where Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette in the mid-19th century,
numerous healings have been reported in Medjugorje — something the Vatican has
also been looking into.
David Parkes, 74,
is a singer and former Irish professional footballer who captained both
Shamrock Rovers and Waterford. At a modest hotel resort a short drive outside
the main village of Medjugorje Parkes sips a sismis kola, a Bosnian concoction
of Coca-Cola mixed with soda water, while he reminisces about playing against
the legendary Brazilian forward Pelé, or with the British great Bobby Charlton.
Raised Catholic, he
lost his faith in God after his son Kenneth was born severely ill with cystic
fibrosis. Kenneth died last year. Parkes’s football career was cut short after
he contracted Crohn’s disease in 1977.
“I lost half my
body weight to sweating, diarrhoea and vomiting,” he says. “I had ten major
surgeries. My last surgery was on January 7, 1989, and the doctors gave me just
two weeks to live.”
Unable to play
football, he turned to his other passion, singing. The year of his last
surgery, his band held a benefit concert to help his wife, Anne, pay for his
funeral costs. While there he was given two free tickets to Medjugorje. “I went
kicking and screaming,” he says. “I thought they were all religious maniacs.”
In Medjugorje he
was strong-armed by Anne to a service led by an American priest, Peter Mary
Rookey, who was believed to possess the gift of healing through prayer. “When
Father Rookey started to bless people, they were all falling to the ground. I
thought it was mass hysteria — once one does it, they’re all going to do it,”
Parkes recalls. Then Rookey handed Parkes a crucifix and began to pray over
him.
“Next thing I
remember I’m lying on my back on the ground. When I got up I had a heat that
went from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. From that point onward,”
Parkes snaps his fingers, “there was no vomiting, no aches, no pains. I spent a
week in hospital for them to carry out the tests, and I was home for ten days
when I got the phone call to say there was no sign of Crohn’s disease anywhere
in my body.”
Parkes became a
convert to the Medjugorje phenomenon. He now works as an organiser and
entertainer for the religious tour group Marian Pilgrimages. What does he make
of Pope Francis’s scepticism over the apparitions? “He’s not been here, as far
as I’m concerned,” he says.
On the other side
of the village is the Castle — a mock medieval fortress, built in the late
1990s by Patrick and Nancy Latta, originally from Canada. A successful car
salesman in his home country, Patrick married Nancy, a Supreme Court lawyer,
after his two previous marriages failed. Now 85, Patrick’s Damascene moment
came when his new wife gave him a book of the messages of Mary to the
Medjugorje seers. “I opened it to the shortest message. It said, ‘I call you to
conversion for the last time.’ ”
Despite never
having been to Bosnia, the couple moved to Medjugorje in 1993 — in the middle
of the Bosnian war. “I said, ‘Nancy! The mother of God lives there. I’m going
to be her neighbour,’ ” Patrick says, laughing. “We spent three years in a war
zone transporting food. We slept on top of the truck and bombs flew over our
heads while we prayed the rosary.”
If Medjugorje is a
Disneyland for Catholics, as some say, Patrick and Nancy’s home is its
fairytale castle. Using the money they made selling Patrick’s car dealerships,
they built it complete with parapets, bridges and turrets and now invite
pilgrims and priests to stay there. Around the back is a grotto and a lifesize
nativity scene. In her low-ceilinged kitchen, Nancy, 65, is playing host to a
group of seminarians from Argentina. She shrugs when I ask about the Pope’s
reluctance to authenticate the visions.
“The church in her
wisdom waits for the right time,” she says. “It is not the right time yet. But
if tomorrow the church approved Medjugorje, what would change? Would we start
to pray the rosary? Would we start to read the Bible? We already do those
things, so what would change?”
This June marked
the 43rd anniversary of the first apparitions. During nine days of prayer —
called a novena — I and several thousand other people join Ivan and his fellow
seer Marija in a clearing on Apparition Hill. They both look remarkably
ordinary, dressed in T-shirts. Marija’s is powder blue, Ivan’s is black with
white Adidas stripes on the sleeve.
On the final
evening at 11.30pm, by candlelight, they drop to their knees — a sign that a
vision is taking place. They clasp their hands in front of their chests and
lift their gaze to the sky, while their lips move in conversation with an
invisible interlocutor. Afterwards Marija grasps a microphone and relays the
message. Mary “smiled and was joyful”, she says. “She thanked us for our
prayers and sacrifices and told us to continue. She came dressed in a gold
dress, standing on a cloud and wearing a crown of stars.” Mary then prayed over
the crowd “in her mother language, Aramaic” before leaving for Heaven.
Denis Nolan, who
runs the Medjugorje news website Mary TV, live streamed every night of the
novena. He claims that on the final night about a million people tuned in
online, with at least one person in every country of the world. “That is a low
estimate too,” he says, “as I was informed that one device in Europe was airing
our live stream to 28,000 people.”
Ivan has given interviews like this one only a handful of times and,
although it is impossible to know the truth of his visions, I am taken by his
earnest demeanour. That isn’t to say he hasn’t benefited considerably from the
apparitions. In 1995 a Hollywood film was released about Medjugorje, starring
the West Wing actor Martin Sheen as Jozo Zovko. The year
before, Ivan married Laureen Murphy, a former winner of the Miss Massachusetts
beauty pageant, with whom he has four children. The couple spend six months of
every year in Boston, in a property reportedly worth $1 million, and reside the
other six months in the Medjugorje home in which we now sit.
He and the other
visionaries don’t have separate full-time jobs, so he rents out his house to
pilgrims to make money. It is spacious, air conditioned and the tile floor is
cool underfoot. Through the window is a large garden and a neatly paved pathway
leading to Ivan’s private chapel, from which he broadcasts his evening visions
to dozens of followers — a private prayer group held over Zoom.
Ivan tells me he
has always struggled with the attention. “Those first days were difficult. We
were just children and I was a very introverted child,” he says. Though not
particularly religious before the events on the hillside, that year he entered
a seminary in Dubrovnik and sought to become a priest. But his teachers and
peers refused to believe in his visions.
“I suffered very
much, truly, very much,” he says. “I often asked myself, ‘Why me? Will I ever
be able to do what Our Lady wants me to do?’ I once asked Our Lady and she just
smiled and said, ‘My dear child, I don’t always look for the best.’ I never
asked that question again.”
After two years he
left the seminary, deciding against priesthood. A rumour began that Mary gave
him a vision of his own future. He supposedly said that she “revealed my future
to me until my death”.
Today he downplays
those claims. “Many books write this, but they never asked me what is the
truth. Our Lady never showed me the future,” he says. “But she told me certain
things. Indications and directions of how I should walk. What kind of a life
would it be if you knew everything in advance? Awful. It wouldn’t be a life.”
In addition to her
public messages, the visionaries say Mary has revealed to them a number of
“secrets” concerning the future of the world. These are said to involve signs,
warnings and “chastisements” and have been interpreted by some as heralding an
apocalypse. One secret, the third, is said to involve a visible,
indestructible, permanent sign that is “not of this world”, which will be left
on Apparition Hill.
In previous
interviews the visionaries have said there are ten secrets, and once they
receive all of them the daily visions will cease and Mary will appear to them
only once a year. Ivan, who says he has received nine secrets so far, corrects
the record. “There are not ten secrets,” he tells me. “We all have ten. Some of
them we share in common and others we don’t. There are not sixty secrets. That
would be a lot, but there are more than ten.”
He declines to
elaborate on the content of his secrets, but waxes lyrical about the loveliness
of the messenger. “It is impossible to describe in words the very beauty of
her,” Ivan says, sitting in his front room with a tray of stale croissants on a
table. “She wears a grey dress, a white veil and has blue eyes. She has pink
lips and pink cheeks, with black hair. She stands on a cloud and wears a crown
of stars.”
Despite its reservations and equivocations, the Vatican finally decided
to stamp a seal of approval — of sorts — on Ivan and the five other visionaries
in September. At a press conference in Rome, the bald-headed Cardinal VÃctor
Manuel Fernandez declared that, after its thorough 15-year investigation, he
was to deliver a verdict of nihil obstat onMedjugorje, a Latin
phrase that means “nothing stands in the way”, currently the highest level of
formal attainable approval.
Fernandez, originally from Argentina, is the head of the Congregation
for the Dicastery of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of religious
discipline in the church. “While this does not imply a declaration of the
supernatural character of the phenomenon in question,” he said, “and recalling
that the faithful are not obliged to believe in it, the nihil obstat indicates
that the faithful can receive a positive encouragement for their Christian life
through this spiritual proposal and it authorises public acts of devotion.”
When the ruling was
delivered, Ivan was in Austria. Seated in the foremost pew in St Stephen’s
Cathedral in Vienna, he was participating in an annual prayer for peace, which
lasted nearly six hours. At precisely 6.40pm, he said, Mary appeared to him
among the congregation and spoke of her joy at the announcement. People close
to him that day say he felt grateful that Mary’s messages could now be spread
more widely.
When Ivan showed me
out of his home this summer, he told me about heaven. Mary, he said, once gave
him a vision of paradise. “Our Lady wanted to show me hell and purgatory but I
was afraid. I wanted to see what was beautiful. The next day she came and took
me by the hand and I looked at paradise from above. It is an endless space
without limits where people walk, sing and pray. There’s no old and no young
and it is full of angels and flowers and light.” He added with a laugh: “I
recommend it a lot.”
Now that he has won
the long-awaited endorsement from the Vatican, will Ivan invite Pope Francis to
visit Medjugorje and see it with his own eyes?
“We are all
pilgrims. Like every pilgrim who comes, if the Holy Father feels it in his
heart and he is called, then he will come.”
