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.
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 145km 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 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 ($4) jars of dirt collected from the hillside. Racks of multicoloured and glow- in-the-dark prayer beads line the shelves.
A few kilometres 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 ($149m) 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 ($21.5b) last year and could hit £32b ($57b) 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 US$1m ($1.7m), 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 Víctor Manuel Fernandez declared that, after its thorough 15-year investigation, he was to deliver a verdict of nihil obstat on Medjugorje, 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.”
Written by: Dominic Hauschild
© The Times of London