The shrine of Our Lady of Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. PHOTO COURTESY: Ante Perkovic
“I’d like to take you back to the beginning, to tell you what it was like in 1981.”
These were the words of Medjugorje visionary Ivan Dragicevic, speaking recently at St. Petronille Church in Glen Ellyn about apparitions of the Virgin Mary, which he claims began that year.
“I was very reserved, withdrawn into myself, very shy. I didn’t communicate very much with the world,” he told the audience packed into the church.
As the oldest child in his family, Dragicevic had many responsibilities.
“Life was very difficult,” he recalled. “We always worked very hard in the fields.”
Dragicevic looked forward to those feast days of saints that were celebrated as holidays, meaning there was no work in the fields on those days. One such day was Wednesday, June 24, 1981 – the feast of St. John the Baptist.
Dragicevic, 16 at the time, slept in a little bit that day, but his parents made sure he was up in time to go to 11 o’clock Mass.
“I was there in body, but I don’t know that I was there in heart and soul,” he admitted.
After church, he and some friends played soccer.
“When we all got tired, around 5 o’clock, we slowly started heading back to our homes. And as we were walking toward our homes, we encountered three young girls. Those girls were Ivanka [Ivankovic], Milka [Pavlovic], and Mirjana [Dragicevic]… They said they were going to look for the family sheep and that they were going for a walk.”
That evening, Ivan went to a friend’s house to watch a basketball game.
“There may have been only five or six families in our village that had color television and so always as kids we would gather at one of those families’ homes to watch basketball and soccer… I watched the first half of that basketball game with my friends, and at halftime, I said to one of my friends, ‘Come back with me to my house, so we can get something to eat, and then we’ll come back to watch the second half of the game.’ But we never got there to see the second half… As we were walking on the path towards his home, we heard a voice. Someone was calling us. Someone saying, ‘Ivan! Ivan! Come see Our Lady.’ I didn’t see anyone in front of me or behind me, and the path we were walking on was very narrow, overgrown with shrubbery and bushes.
“The further along we went, the louder and closer that voice became. And in one moment, I turned to look behind me, and I saw one of those three young girls that we had seen earlier, Milka. She was running towards the two of us, barefoot. She was trembling with fear, excited. She was saying, ‘Come. Come to Our Lady on the hill.’ Like I said, I was a child of 16 at the time. I turned to my friend, and I said, ‘What is she talking about? What does she mean, Our Lady? Forget about her. She’s nuts.’”
But Vicka Ivankovic, who had come looking for her friends Ivanka and Mirjana, helped prevail on Dragicevic and his friend, Ivan Ivankovic, to join her and Milka in seeing what was on the hill. What Dragicevic saw when they reached the hilltop disturbed him.
“I saw the most beautiful image of Our Lady in normal size,” he said. “As soon as I saw that, I immediately ran home.”
Scared, and uncertain of what he had seen, he said nothing to his family. He was afraid the Virgin Mary would come to his room.
“I never had a particular devotion to Our Lady,” he noted.
That was about to change, as we will learn in Part Three of this story, when we examine the messages Dragicevic says Mary has given him to share with the world.
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