John Gerardi, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus

The Thursday before Thanksgiving, I learned from a friend that Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti was coming to the Joyce Center to have a Marian apparition.  She is one of the “seers” of the alleged Marian apparitions taking place continuously since 1981 in Medjugorje (a small town in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina).  The public was invited to pray with her and watch the apparition happen.

I went to the event as a reporter, and as a longtime skeptic of these apparitions.  I think there are good reasons for skepticism.

First, every local bishop from the Diocese of Mostar (where Medjugorje is located) has refused to support the apparitions’ authenticity since they began.  In spite of a few offhand, unofficial, favorable comments by Bl. John Paul II about Medjugorje, the Holy See has never given any official recognition to the apparitions.

Secondly, the “seers” all have financial stakes in the apparitions, which I find suspicious.  All of them have made a good deal of money off of international speaking circuits, and they all have ownership stakes in hotels, hostels, and retreat centers for pilgrims.  This is in contrast to St. Bernadette (Lourdes) and Sister Lucia (Fatima), who both took vows of poverty after their apparitions.

Third, the apparitions were a battlefront for issues of ecclesiastical politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina.   In 1975, the Pope issued a decree for how parishes in the region would be divided up between the bickering Franciscan and secular clergy.  It angered some of the Franciscans, who thought they received too little.  “Mary’s” messages, beginning in 1981, were used as justification for certain Franciscans, who acted as the seers’ spiritual directors and ran the new pilgrimage sites, to disobey the local diocesan bishop in sometimes outlandish ways (e.g., hostile takeovers of parishes within the diocese).   As a result, the Holy See kicked many of them out of the clerical state.

Fourth, and most importantly, there’s no way that Mary could have said or done some of the things the seers claim.  Apparently, “Mary” has encouraged disobedience to the local diocesan bishop some 13 times.  There are times when “Mary” has contradicted herself, and when the seers clearly lied to ecclesiastical authorities about the content of her messages.  “Mary” has made statements that do not comport with Catholic doctrine, and other statements that are frankly silly.  “Mary” even defended as innocent one of the disgraced Franciscan priests whom the Holy Father had already removed from the clerical state because he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a nun.  She said that this priest should continue to offer Mass, even though the Pope had stripped him of that right.

In spite of these grave problems with the apparitions, I realize that a lot of good has come out of Medjugorje, and that most people devoted to it are very good Catholics.  It has helped many of them grow in holiness and virtue, and resulted in a number of conversions.  How does one explain all of this if the visions are inauthentic?  Simple: people at Medjugorje go to Mass a lot, pray the rosary a lot, adore the Blessed Sacrament a lot, and go to Confession a lot.  Good things naturally result from when these sources of grace are tapped.

Anyway, to the event itself.  I walked into the Joyce Center at about 5:55 p.m.  The JACC was somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 full, so I figure 3-4,000 people were there.  Much of the crowd seemed to be senior citizens, with a large number of married people and children—not many students.  Near the middle of the basketball court a dais was set up with a large statue of Mary, and a kneeler in front of it.

An event organizer greeted the crowd and gave the schedule of events.  He noted that there was another event in the JACC around 8 p.m., and that the organizers had promised to get the crowd out by 7:45.

This small scheduling point floored me.  Exactly how, I asked, is this seer able to schedule when the Mother of God will appear around the availability of the Joyce Center?   I always thought, with Marian apparitions, that the apparition-er dictated the whens and wheres of her arrival to the apparition-ee.  It seemed awfully convenient that Mary could appear seemingly at the seer’s whim.

There was little that was particularly noteworthy about the event itself.  We prayed a rosary, with Pavlovic-Lunetti (a modestly dressed, middle-aged woman with bleached blonde hair and a heavy European accent) leading two decades of the rosary in Italian and her native Croatian.  The crowd knelt down in anticipation of her receiving the apparition; in Croatian, she led the crowd in prayer until she suddenly fell silent.   The apparition had begun.

The crowd was silent.  After five minutes, she made the sign of the cross and stood up to address the people.  Apparition over.  The whole thing felt almost like a liturgy, very well-scripted, as if she had done all this a thousand times before.

Oddly, she didn’t talk about what happened in the apparition.  She didn’t relay “Mary’s”  message.   She thanked everyone for inviting her, said a few other nice things about Notre Dame, and…yep, that was about it.  It seemed anticlimactic.

The organizers then asked if people would be willing to “donate” money to cover Pavlovic-Lunetti’s flight.  A couple hundred checkbooks came out.  Ah ha.  So that’s what keeps this all going.

The Holy See is finally launching a real investigation into Medjugorje, and is scheduled to render a decision on the authenticity of the apparitions in the next year or so.  I pray that the followers of Medjugorje will accept the Church’s ruling, no matter what it may be.

John Gerardi is a third year law student at Notre Dame. He is also the luckiest man alive and is getting his fiancée an AWESOME Christmas present, because she deserves it. This article is an excerpt from Gerardi’s blog, Christifidelis Laicus, which can be accessed at http://xpflaicus.wordpress.com. Contact John at jgerardi@nd.edu.