EXORCISING MEDJUGORJE

A whole pilgrimage industry has arisen over claims that a small number have been seeing the mother of Jesus at Medjugorje since 1981.  When they go around the world she even follows them on the plane!  The visions lack credibility.  The ones investigated to determine this, the bishops Zanic and his successor Peric were very firm on that.

Christian Order Magazine, February 2012 EXTRACTS

The majority of the pious public has naively fallen victim of the great propaganda. These people themselves have become the greatest propaganda for the events. They do not even stop to think that the truth has been hidden by deliberate falsehoods.

Msgr. Pavao Zanic

The numerous absurd messages, lies, falsehoods and disobedience associated from the beginning with the events and apparitions" of Medjugorje, all refute every claim of authenticity.

In our day, Medjugorje is the perverse template, spawning countless imitations...

The Devil is clever and crafty but also stupid insofar as he always gives himself away with such transparently wicked tactics! The endless mendacity is another giveaway signal of the handiwork of "the father of lies" [Jn 8:44].

In his painstakingly referenced 2007 work "Ces 10 jours qui ont fait Medjugorje", documenting the first ten days from 24 June to 3 July 1981, French historian Joachim Bouflet reveals how the originally recorded accounts by the "seers" have been modified. During those first days, the late disgraced Fr Jozo Zovko rigorously interviewed the "seers" and was not convinced they saw their so-called "Gospa" [Lady]. He said: "There is NO message, there is NO sign; you must have seen SATAN." Yet he soon became a confidant of the visionaries and central director/manipulator of the whole affair, insisting that the "seers" should have their "apparitions" inside the church and insinuating that he himself should tell people what the "Gospa" had said. Before long, Zovko had been stripped of every faculty and expelled three times from Medjugorje by Bishop Peric and the Vatican.

[This revisionist ruse is common to bogus visionaries. Father Francois-Marie Dermine O.P. has documented the "disappearance, cancellation, censuring and modification of messages" by Vassula Ryden, for instance. He has posted online photocopies of the original messages with the corrections done by the "seer." The intrepid Maria Laura Pio at www.infovassula.ch states that "These documents are part of the famous photocopies circulated by [ex-Medjugorje advocate] Father Pavich in the 1990s, where it is possible to see the deleted passages and the modification of words and sentences in view of the publication of the messages. You will also find a fax written by Vassula in which she confirms having two sets of notebooks and tries to justify the censuring done to the messages."]

Fr Tomislav Vlasic succeeded Zovko as the one who "through Divine Providence guides the seers of Medjugorje," as he wrote in a letter to John Paul II of 13 April 1984. Thereafter the "messages" became more biblical and Franciscan. And totally supportive of one Tomislav Vlasic! Hardly surprising when Friar Tomislav would talk to the "seers," the "seers" would talk to Friar Tomislav, the discussions then being attributed to the Blessed Virgin. Typical of these regular commendations was that recorded in Vicka's diary manuscript of 28 February 1982: "The Gospa came at 6, 3 minutes, she looked kindly at us. Then the Gospa spoke about Tomislav, first she looked at him, and then said: 'you can thank Tomislav very much because he is guiding you so well'."

In July 1988 Marija, another "seer," candidly admitted this mendacious manipulation by Vlasic. After Vlasic stated that the "Gospa" had told Marija "she" approved of a mixed religious community he had founded in 1987, Marija wrote: "Everything that can be understood as a confirmation or approval of this Work of Fr. Tomislav ... on the part of the Madonna through me, absolutely does not correspond to the truth and furthermore the idea that I had a spontaneous desire to write down this testimony is also not true."

"We know that no lies can correspond to the truth," wrote the Chancellor of the Mostar-Duvno diocese, summarising Vlasic's history. "Yet one can see from this how the notorious lies of Medjugorje have also been attributed to the Madonna, which Bishop Zanic painstakingly struggled against in order to defend the honour and dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary!"

Indeed everything points to the creepy Vlasic as the diabolic source of the entire deception:

Fr. Vlasic went to Rome for an international congress of leaders of the Charismatic Movement. During the congress he had asked some of those present to pray with him for the healing of the Church in Yugoslavia. A religious, Sister Briege McKenna, who was united with those in prayer, had a vision: she saw Fr. Vlasic seated and surrounded by a great crowd of people facing him, and from the place where he was seated, there flowed rivers of water. Another religious there, Fr. Emile Tardiff, OP, said in prophecy, "Do not be afraid, I will send you my Mother." After a couple of weeks, the Madonna began to appear in Medjugorje. [Official Bulletin, 2/2008, p. 80, quoting from Rooney - R. Faricy, Mary the queen of peace, Milano, 1984, p. 34.]

Inevitably, in January 2008, the CDF decreed that Fr. Vlasic had "fallen into a censure of interdict latae sententiae," accused of "the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspected mysticism, disobedience towards legitimately issued orders and charges contra sextum [i.e., violation of the Sixth Commandment]." Subsequently, in 2009, 28 years after the first "apparition," this veritable Father of Medjugorje and manifest instrument of the "father of lies" was finally defrocked by Pope Benedict. (Reduced to the lay state, Vlasic was thus theoretically free to marry the former nun with whom he had fathered a child prior to the "apparitions.")

Aiders and abetters

Pervasive and persistent, Medj mendacity is not all about a small clique of arrogant, rebellious, unscrupulous, disobedient Franciscans. They have been aided and abetted at every turn by the likes of Rene Laurentin, who had defended Vlasic as a "great charismatic leader." Bouflet proves the modification of the "messages" by comparing many successive versions of books written by Medjugorje advocates like Laurentin. Others who have studied the deception in depth over several decades concur. "He altered the truth a least 100 times in order to defend the pseudo-apparitions," said Belgian writer Mark Waterinckx. "A friend of mine told me he could fill an entire encyclopaedia with the lies of Rene Laurentin." He points to an official but "little known" document dated 24 October 1997, in which the Bishop of Mostar himself lists "5 cases of disinformation by our 'great Mariologist' [Laurentin], who has destroyed his credibility by defending indefensible 'apparitions'." Underlining this unearthly propensity for falsehood, Waterinckx adds: "Yet in a 26 May 2004 article in the Italian journal Avvenire, Laurentin dares to write that he had never said that the Virgin appeared in Medjugorje!"

Clearly, once Laurentin embraced the "apparitions" he found himself forced into covering up the endless absurdities in the "messages." One of the most ridiculous involved altering the date of Our Lady's birthday (8 September). On 22 August 1984, Fr Vlasic wrote to Bishop Žanić informing him that the Madonna's 2000th birthday was to be held that same year on 5 August! Neither the Bishop nor the Holy See nor anyone with half a brain took this seriously. But sure enough, on 4 and 5 August 1984, a large group of people gathered in Medjugorje to "celebrate" the Madonna's "birthday." The Chancellor of the Mostar diocese later observed that "The 'Mladifest' (Youth festival) that is usually held at the beginning of August, is probably attached to this Medjugorje invention of Rev. Fr Tomislav Vlasic."

As well as the inanities, Laurentin and his fellow deceivers have also had to gloss over the endless flip-flopping of the "seers" - Vicka Ivankovic in particular! Living proof of the dictum: "To err is human, to persevere is diabolical" (Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum), her blatant fabrications and fantasies are routinely followed by distortions of her earlier declarations. Even contributors to a Medjugorje blog were disconcerted by one online interview in which Vicka said the "Gospa" had told her that unborn babies who are killed by abortion become angels in heaven. The old staples "mistranslation" and "misunderstanding" were duly trotted out to defuse things. But when the blog administrator agreed with Vicka things became heated, the heretical idea being contested and labelled ludicrous. The thread finished with a blogger lamenting that "issues like this give ammunition to anti-Medjugorjeans to attack followers." You might say!

The endemic deceit reverberates outwards and downwards to the grassroots. It has got to the stage where the outpourings of the talkative "Gospa" are even being sanitised on parish posters that carry them! In one such case discussed on another Medj blog, a parish was accused of editing the (presumably idiotic) published "message" after people complained that "the original message and the published one were so 'starkly' different."