Prayer Intention: For all migrants
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Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary has been appearing at Medjugojre, Bosnia Herzegovina since 1981 and has been giving messages to the world through the six visionaries from Medjugorje, Ivan Dragicevic, Marija Pavlovic, Mirjana Dragicevic, Ivanka Ivankovic, Vicka Ivankovic, and Jakov Colo. They received apparitions of the Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary since June 24, 1981 and Our Lady continues to give messages to them during her apparitions till today.
Our Lady’s mission is one of peace and love, and in her words “I have come to tell the world that God exists. He is the fullness of life, and to enjoy this fullness and peace, you must return to God”.
Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Medjugorje apparitions, is known “Our Lady Queen of Peace”.
Our Lady has promised that each of the six visionaries will receive a total of ten “secrets” from her, which are revelations of events to occur sometime in the future (the events in the secret, some relate to the world, while some to the visionaries themselves and others to Medjugorje itself). The secrets will be revealed within the lifetimes of each visionary, and these will be revealed to the world.
So far, only one of the secrets has been revealed, in the third secret Our Lady has promised to leave a supernatural, indestructible, beautiful and visible sign on Apparition Hill, where the six visionaries experienced their first apparition. Our Lady said: “This sign will be given for the atheists. You faithful already have signs and you have become the sign for the atheists. You faithful must not wait for the sign before you convert; convert soon. This time is a time of grace for you. You can never thank God enough for His grace. The time is for deepening your faith, and for your conversion. When the sign comes, it will be too late for many.”
The visionaries wrote that Our Lady appears to be 18 to 20 years old, slender and around 165 centimetres (5 ft 5 in) tall. Her face is long and oval. She has black hair. Her eyes are blue with delicate eyelashes and thin black eyebrows. She has a little nose and rosy cheeks. She has reddish thin lips and her smile is more like some indescribable gentleness. It’s visible as if somehow under her skin. Her simple dress is bluish-grey and falls freely all the way down to the little whitish cloud on which she is standing. Her veil is pure white and covers her head and shoulders. It also reaches down to the little cloud. She has a crown of twelve golden stars on her head. When asked, “Is Our Lady really beautiful, as you have said?” Their answer was, “Well, really we haven’t told you anything about that. Her beauty cannot be described. It is not our kind of beauty. It is something otherworldly, something heavenly, something that we’ll only see in Paradise and then only to a certain degree.
CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING THE APPARITIONS
More than 30 million Catholics have visited Medjugorje since six children began reporting regular visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981. ‘These presumed apparitions don’t have a lot of value. This I say as a personal opinion,’ Pope Francis told journalists on the plane as he returned to Rome from Fatima. The visions in Medjugorje have transformed the fortunes of the town. Some of the children, all now adults, claim the Madonna still appears to them.
The claims were so controversial that Pope Benedict set up a commission to examine them. The report has never been published but Pope Francis said that it made clear the Church’s ‘doubts’ about the continuing apparitions.
More than 30 million Catholics have visited Medjugorje since six children began reporting regular visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981. ‘These presumed apparitions don’t have a lot of value. This I say as a personal opinion,’ Pope Francis told journalists on the plane as he returned to Rome from Fatima.
The visions in Medjugorje have transformed the fortunes of the town. Some of the children, all now adults, claim the Madonna still appears to them. The claims were so controversial that Pope Benedict set up a commission to examine them. The report has never been published but Pope Francis said that it made clear the Church’s ‘doubts’ about the continuing apparitions. Pope Francis however has conceded that pilgrims to Medjugorje experience a spiritual renewal, ‘encounter God, change their lives’ and also said he believed the original apparitions in the early 1980s are more likely to be authentic than the continuing ones.
On May 13, 2017, a papal response came when Pope Francis declared that the original visions reported by the teenagers are worth studying in more depth, while the subsequent continued visions over the years are, in his view, of dubious value. He went on to say that there are people who go there, convert, find God and their lives change. He said that this is a spiritual and pastoral fact that cannot be denied. As a pastoral initiative, after considering the considerable number of people who go to Medjugorje and the abundant fruits of grace that have sprung from it, the ban on officially organized pilgrimages was lifted by the Pope in May 2019.
The Church continues to study these apparitions at Medjugorje and has not pronounced itself one way or the other yet.
