Sex, lies and apparitions
Millions travel to Medjugorje each year but, says Simon Caldwell, the world-famous pilgrimage site may soon be exposed as a fraud
The Medjugorje story begins early in 1976 when a Franciscan monk in the former Yugoslavia, Father Tomislav Vlasic, starts an affair with a nun who becomes pregnant. Frightened he will be exposed as the child’s father, Father Vlasic persuades her to move away to Germany. She hopes he will honour his promise to leave the ministry and marry her. She writes a sequence of increasingly anxious letters when this does not happen, telling her former lover she is so miserable that she is praying she will die in childbirth. But he piously orders her to ‘be like Mary’ and accept her destiny in a foreign land — and never to tell a soul who the father really is.
Unfortunately for him, some of his letters fall into the hands of the woman’s landlord who, scandalised, copies them and sends them to a friend in the Vatican.
Six years later Father Vlasic is ‘spiritual leader’ of six children who say the Virgin Mary appears to them daily in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the local bishop is having none of it. The priest writes to Pope John Paul II to say that Satan is working through the bishop and to request direct intervention against him. But, worse luck, the Vatican official with copies of his love letters takes an interest in the case and sends them to the bishop in question.
Disgraced, the priest then heads for Italy where, with a new mistress, he sets up a mixed-sex religious community devoted to the apparitions and continues to party like a bad dog for the next 17 years until the Vatican official who ruined everything for him becomes Pope Benedict XVI.
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Drago
October 3rd, 2008 12:12pmYou have no clue about Medjugorje. If you are a Catholic at all and if you have visited medjugorje and confessed there - you would not be saying such a bad things about it. You are discrace !!
MB
October 3rd, 2008 1:02pmThis article is entirely biased, and written by a reporter with an obvious and persistent vendetta. The priest he links to Medjugorje left there 24 years ago, and was only there for two years (and not at the beginning of the apparitions). Even those associated with Medjugorje had long distanced themselves from him, for the main part. Meanwhile, the Vatican clearly allows private pilgrimages.
MB
October 3rd, 2008 1:02pmThis article is entirely biased, and written by a reporter with an obvious and persistent vendetta. The priest he links to Medjugorje left there 24 years ago, and was only there for two years (and not at the beginning of the apparitions). Even those associated with Medjugorje had long distanced themselves from him, for the main part. Meanwhile, the Vatican clearly allows private pilgrimages.
Sean
October 3rd, 2008 3:45pmThis is tabloidism at its worst, a ridiculous article full of lies. I would urge readers to do their own investigations into Medjugorje and to not ignore the most important spiritual event in the past 2,000 years.
RC
October 3rd, 2008 4:19pmAnd to think that this is only about half of the folly of Medjugorje.
Caldwell doesn't even mention the charges of immorality against Fr. Zovko, another so-called "saint"; the seers who go on speaking tours and have their "apparitions" conveniently wherever they want; the apparition's endorsement of condemned pseudo-mystical writings by Maria Valtorta.
Rod
October 3rd, 2008 5:31pmWell done Simon! A neat, factual summary of events. Medjugorje is the pseudo-spiritual equivalent of man-made global warming pseudo-science. A massive con. Last May, a renowned Italian exorcist, Bishop Andrea Gemma, slammed Medj as "a mixture of interests, personal and diabolical", fuelled by "the lure of easy money". (Gemma also predicted the Vlasic condemnation, stating that "soon the Vatican will intervene with something explosive to unmask once and for all who is behind this deceit.")
George Weber
October 3rd, 2008 6:23pmThe pope's beliefs are much more refined than those of the Medjugorje rabble because of the philosophical grinding that has gone on in Rome for the past 2000 years. In fact, both parties operate with unprovable claims.
Peter Inkley, Johannsburg South Africa
October 4th, 2008 8:29amArchbishop Rowan Williams obviously does not live in cloistered isolation from the real world. He should be a welcome addition to the Board of some of the companies "too big to fail" (Our idolatrous attitudes to markets-Spectator 27th September 2008). It's pity his stewardship of the Anglican Communion has not endeared him to it's diehard traditionalists .
Kevin
October 4th, 2008 12:09pmAn excellent report - factual and well written. It's high time the Vatican reined in this huge fraud. Sadly, those with vested interests will continue to promote it, and the fanatics who defend it will never listen to reason, but this needed to be written. The Vatican needs to do more. A forthright condemnation of the whole phenomenon is needed.
waterinckx mark
October 4th, 2008 2:10pmI have been 24x in Med. and have 200 arguments against the authenticity of Med.What S.Caldwell describes is only a small part of the TRUTH! Med. is based upon propaganda, manipulation and lies. Read carefully Vlasic's condemnation by the Vatican :schism, heresy, manipulation of consciences, dubious doctrine, suspected mysticism, disobedience..
What else can Rome tell us more about that modern Rasputin, the first spiritual leader of the 'seers'...
Jim
October 6th, 2008 9:12pmI can only speak from my own personal experience of Medjugorje and for me and many others it is a place of pray, peace and spiritual growth. People openly practice their faith individually and in groups. to me it is a little piece of Heaven here on earth.
Josh LeBosh
October 16th, 2008 6:40pmI visited Medjugorje in 1993 on business unrelated to the apparition industry. I was sickened to see tacky key chain and fridge magnet souvenirs bearing the image of the Mother of God being sold right next to similar items with swastikas and other nazi iconography. Obscene really - no less so when one wonders how much of the money fleeced from pilgrims must have helped to finance Franjo Tudjman's atrocities in the region.
FL
October 22nd, 2008 3:25amYour article well supports what Pavao Zanic (RIP), the first Bishop of Mostar to condemn Medjugorje, had maintained from the beginning and which he published in his 1990 Statement about the 'visions', the 'visionaries' and their manipulators: that Vlasic is the creator of Medjugorje, and that the 'visions' are a staged pantomime. Well done Simon.