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Medjugorje message comes to Chicago (Part One)
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Ivan Dragicevic (center) greets well wishers following a speech at St. Petronille Catholic Church in Glen Ellyn Saturday. PHOTO: Dennis D. Jacobs
Medjugorje.
Just mentioning the name of this village in Bosnia and Herzegovina to a group of Catholics can cause an argument. The debate concerns visions of the Virgin Mary that six Croatians say began atop a hill near Medjugorje on June 24, 1981.
The visionaries say Mary continues to appear to them, including Mirjana Soldo, who will speak next month in St. Charles, and Ivan Dragicevic, who brought his message to St. Petronille Church in Glen Ellyn Saturday.
“It will be almost 28 years now since Our Lady pointed her finger at me,” Dragicevic told an audience of more than 600 packed into the church sanctuary. “She chose me to be her instrument.”
Thousands of pilgrims visit Medjugorje each year, believing the apparition claims and sometimes seeking help from Mary for problems in their own lives. Many people have claimed terminal illnesses were miraculously cured after visiting Medjugorje. When Dragicevic asked how many people in the church had been to Medjugorje, a large number of hands went up.
Catholic church officials, however, remain reticent on any miracles associated with Medjugorje, including the apparitions of Mary. In introducing Dragicevic, Rev. Dan Bachner said Bishop Peter Sartain of the Diocese of Joliet wanted to remind the assembly that the church has not made a ruling on Medjugorje and won’t until the visions end. Bachner offered no opinion on the visions, either, though he has made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje.
“I never met Ivan before, but when I went to Medjugorje, I met his mother,” he recalled. “She came running after me in the rain with an umbrella.”
Dragicevic was just 16 when the visions began, and his parents were concerned for their son’s safety when he first told them what he had seen.
“My parents said, ‘Be careful what you say,’” Dragicevic told the audience. “They thought they were going to haul us off to jail right away.”
At the time, Medjugorje was part of Yugoslavia.
“It was still a time of Communism,” Dragicevic noted. “There was no freedom.”
Although Yugoslavia’s constitution officially declared a separation of church and state and guaranteed religious freedom, in practice the Communist government under Marshal Josip Tito feared church influence and sought to diminish the role of religion in society. Following Tito’s death in 1980, however, the power of the central government began to wane and decisions about religious matters were often left to local and regional leaders. Ethnic tensions began to rise, eventually resulting in civil war in the 1990s. Croatians were the predominant ethnic group in Medjugorje and most Croatians are Catholic. But Catholics were a minority (14%) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was dominated by Muslims (45%) and Orthodox Serbs (36%).
When the visionaries, all children, returned to the hill the day after the first apparition, Dragicevic said Mary placed her right hand on their heads and offered the following reassurance: “My dear children, I am with you… Do not be afraid of anything.”
The children were not locked up. They were taken to a doctor for psychiatric evaluation and given a clean bill of mental health. Three local priests, however, were imprisoned and the local bishop was called to the headquarters of the Yugoslav secret service for an explanation.
Given the tension between church and state, it’s perhaps not surprising then that area clergy often vacillated between believing in the apparitions and denouncing them. In 1991, the bishops of Yugoslavia issued a statement neither affirming nor denying the apparitions.
The six visionaries remain steadfast in their belief that they see and communicate with the Virgin Mary. Dragicevic claims to see her each day at the same time, in this case, 6:40 p.m. CDT. Saturday, he came to the center of the church and knelt before the altar at that time, in between the recitation of the fourth and fifth sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary. There was silence in the church for more than five minutes. During his later address to the crowd, Dragicevic described the moment.
“I’m standing here before you and I’m still with her,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “I’m still with Our Lady. It’s difficult to speak after every encounter with her… It’s difficult to find the right words to describe the beauty of Our Lady, to describe the love of Our Mother.”
As always, he said she appeared to be floating on a cloud, wearing a crown of stars. He said Mary has blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and black hair.
Dragicevic indicated Mary was pleased to see the faithful in attendance.
“There was great love and such great joy,” he said. “Truly as if she wanted to embrace all of you.”
This reporter did not see an apparition, but can’t say what Dragicevic did or did not see.
In the second part of this story, we’ll examine more closely the details of the Medjugorje apparitions. And for more information on the marketing of Medjugorje, visit my article at Suite 101.
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