Medjugorje Pilgrims Encouraged, Relieved By New Vatican Document| National Catholic Register

Beth Racine had just come out of church after confession in Medjugorje and was leaning against a wall when something caught her eye. 

A disc covered the sun. She saw swirling colors to the sides — red on one side and white on the other — that made her think of the image of Divine Mercy. 

The experience lasted about 20 minutes, she told the Register. 

“You don’t need to see those things to have the faith in God, but sometimes he gives us those things to show us that he loves us,” she said. 

“It was a feeling of closeness to God that I had never experienced before,” said Racine, 61, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 

Racine’s description of a possibly supernatural event in the fall of 2005 is one of many associated with Medjugorje, a village in Herzegovina where several natives have reported receiving messages from the Blessed Virgin Mary since 1981. 

Racine, who plans to visit Medjugorje again later this month, is also one of many believers in the reported apparitions at Medjugorje encouraged — and somewhat relieved — by a largely positive Vatican statement released Thursday in Rome. 

 “It’s nice to have an official green light from the Vatican,” she said. 

“Hopefully, this will remove the obstacles preventing people from visiting and will encourage pilgrimages there.” 

Nothing Objectionable 

The new document, from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, assigns Medjugorje a “Nihil Obstat” — meaning the Vatican finds nothing objectionable about Catholics accepting what it calls the “alleged apparitions” and the “Medjugorje phenomenon.” It’s the highest of the Vatican’s gradations for judging reported apparitions. The Vatican laid out new standards for evaluating such reported appearances in a document released in May. 

The new document released Thursday describes approvingly many of the messages purportedly from Mary and acknowledges what it calls the “fruits” of Medjugorje — including what it describes as “abundant conversions, a frequent return to the sacraments … many vocations … a deepening of the life of faith, a more intense practice of prayer, many reconciliations between spouses, and the renewal of marriage and family life” — and authorizes pilgrimages there. 

But it doesn’t declare that the reported messages from Mary are of supernatural origin and it warns about certain instances of what it calls “imprecise and ultimately theologically incorrect mystical language” in some of the messages that purported visionaries have reported. 

“It’s very positive, with a note of caution,” said Gloria Falcão Dodd, research professor at the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton in Ohio. 

According to Church standards laid out in May, only the pope can proclaim a purported apparition to be of supernatural origin. But the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith can encourage devotion while stopping short of such a pronouncement, as it did Thursday with Medjugorje. 

“Under the new norms, it does allow it to have the highest ranking that the dicastery can give,” Dodd told the Register. “So it’s not saying it’s supernatural, but it is saying that it’s actually helpful. Whether or not it’s supernatural, that’s up to the Pope to say.” 

The new document also reiterates longstanding Church teaching that Catholics “are not obliged to believe in” purported supernatural appearances at Medjugorje or anywhere else as a matter of faith. 

Father Daniel Maria Klimek, a Mariologist who has written a book about Medjugorje, said the Vatican’s statement “is a long time coming” and “expresses what millions of pilgrims and devotees have been experiencing for over four decades in Medjugorje: a place of palpable spiritual peace where the Mother of God is encountered, Eucharist adoration and love for the Mass renewed, prayer, and fasting awakened in a deep conversion to God.” 

He also described the new document as “nuanced” and showing what he called “prudent pastoral judgment” based on the revised norms for evaluating reported apparitions released by the Vatican in May. 

“Those revisions stressed that the Church will henceforth be less interested in declaring the supernatural validity of a phenomenon and more interested in measuring its spiritual and pastoral benefits,” Father Klimek told the Register by email. “Hence, in its statement on Medjugorje, no judgment is made on the supernatural character of the apparitions but emphasis is placed on the abundant spiritual fruits at Medjugorje, and how those spiritual fruits are a sign of the Holy Spirit and merit devotion at the village.” 

Some critics of Medjugorje have pointed to what they see as shortcomings of the people who have reported receiving messages from Mary or perceived deficiencies in some of the messages. The new Vatican document takes account of those criticisms and puts them in proper context, Father Klimek said. 

“There’s also an emphasis in the declaration to go to Medjugorje not to seek the visionaries, but to seek an encounter with Mary, Queen of Peace, the title with which the Blessed Virgin identified herself in Medjugorje,” he said. 

Peace 

Medjugorje was hotly debated in the Catholic Church during the 1980s and 1990s, and Catholics remain divided over it, with some questioning or rejecting the authenticity of the purported messages. 

But over time, as more pilgrims have visited and reported positive experiences, the conflict over it has seemed to lessen. 

Still, the announcement earlier this month that the Vatican would publish a new document on Medjugorje worried some devotees, many of whom describe life-altering experiences there. 

Mimi Kelly made her first visit to Medjugorje in 1987. 

“I really needed something that would help me find peace,” Kelly told the Register. 

She found it. 

“The peace is incredible,” she said. 

Kelly, 76, of Hanrahan, Louisiana, led 19 pilgrimages to Medjugorje over about two decades. She said the spiritual fruits there are obvious. 

“There is no end to confessions in Medjugorje,” Kelly said. “It just kind of lifts your spirit to see so many people looking to go and get right with the Lord.” 

Msgr. Christopher Nalty, who is now a pastor in New Orleans, had a specific prayer intention when he went to Medjugorje in 1988 at age 26:  Please let me pass the bar exam. He had just taken it and hadn’t gotten the result yet. 

As it happens, he did pass. But he got more than that. 

“At the time I was a news junkie. I was in Medjugorje for a week. And during that week it never occurred to me to look at the news of the world,” Nalty told the Register. “You were just in a cocoon of peace.” 

Unlike many priests who went there, he does not attribute his vocation to the priesthood to his trip to Medjugorje. But after his visit, he started saying the Rosary every day, for the first time. 

Though he hasn’t been back since, he notes that many people who go there are moved to turn to God. 

“When you’re looking at something like this, you’re looking at what the spiritual fruits are, and when you see the sacraments and the lines at the confessional when I was there, that’s spiritual fruit,” Nalty said. 

Many visitors to Medjugorje climb what’s known as Apparition Hill, where purported visionaries say Mary spoke to them, and which has a cross on top of it. It’s rocky. 

“It was a hard climb,” said Marcela Froelich, 59, of Round Rock, Texas, who visited with her husband about two years ago and who likes hiking. “It’s not too long, but it was a hard one. But as you get to the top, you want to stay there. You feel peaceful when you are there.” 

Referring to the mother of Jesus, Froelich said: “I know she’s listening to me and I know she knows what I’m going through right now. My experience is:  I’m so happy to be here and to connect with Mary.” 

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