By Mauro, Loredana and Luisa

(Taken from the book, Our Lady Is Alive in Međugorje – Conversations with Father Tomislav Vlašić; Publisher Luci dell’Esodo)

A new spiritual dimension

What did the “Medjugorje” event mean for your life?

My meeting with the events of grace in Medjugorje was a decisive moment in my life, it was a new and definitive step in my relationship with God. A new dimension opened up within me, because in my opinion the apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje represent a new turning point in the Church. These apparitions exceed all spiritual movements and methods, they guide man towards a personal relationship with the living God, they lead him to walk with and meet God face to face. Meeting God face to face overcomes all the methodologies or formulae that close us up and, if we are abandoned completely to him, the meeting with God reawakens us and transforms us.

When I speak about the apparitions, I am not merely referring to the experience had by the six visionaries, I go beyond this: I look towards the fullness of the action of the Holy Spirit in various people, in simple souls who expressed the presence of the Holy Spirit and Our Lady on their faces. I also think of those who have had profound and different experiences of the Mother of God in their lives, associated with Medjugorje. My gaze at the phenomenon of the apparitions is quite wide-ranging, although in Medjugorje what happens through the six visionaries remains central, like a special grace that gathers people together and leads them to God through Our Lady.

Thinking about what happened at the beginning of the apparitions, I can say that Our Lady was alive, present in the true sense of the word. Yet the depth and extent of all of this can only be understood by assessing the course of events, in their diffuse evolution. With the coming of Mary, a whole new dimension opened up in my soul, which was much more extensive than the experiences that I had had up to then. Obviously, through work, meetings and testimonies that I listened to, my outlook was becoming broader and broader.

Now, when I think about what the coming of Our Lady to Medjugorje meant in my life, I can say that it led me to experience a total change. This does not mean that I have reached a complete transformation, but I want to say that my outlook on life has changed, my vision of spirituality has been transformed. I could sum things up by saying that everything has become new, because God creates everything new. This is the perspective that opened up before me and that I recognised.

It is a well-known fact that the Church has not yet officially expressed itself on the apparitions in Medjugorje because they are still ongoing. Nevertheless, it seems to me that even if the ecclesiastic authorities were to recognise the authenticity of the apparitions some time in the future, such recognition would not have any bearing on those who await it passively. In fact, I notice that certain people are anxiously awaiting the recognition of the ecclesiastic authorities, putting off their conversion until then, but we cannot passively await a document, thinking that it will determine our conversion. Therefore, blessed are those who experience this grace today in simplicity! In fact, I believe that if ecclesiastical recognition were to come about, those who did not believe and pray until that time, will continue not to do so then. Those who have already entered prayer and conversion on the other hand, are on the right road.

God wants us to live abandoning ourselves faithfully to his will. The Lord himself will confirm the grace of the apparitions in the people who convert. Thanks to them, the ecclesiastical authorities will be able to see the fruits and recognise the apparitions. This is the conviction that has guided me over the years. For this reason I have tried to walk in faith, in continuous conversion, pointing out this pathway to God’s people.

Service in the Parish of Medjugorje

Do you remember when you visited Medjugorje for the first time and how you started serving in that special parish?

I arrived in Medjugorje for the first time on the 29^th of June 1981, having been invited by certain parishioners from Čapljina, where I was a parish priest. They were originally from that area, they had spoken to me about the apparitions and they had wanted me to go with them. I was in civilian dress, without my religious habit, and I observed the apparition that took place on Podbrdo from a distance. I couldn’t see anything in particular, apart from the multitude of people who had gathered there. I met up with some of the visionaries, Vicka, Jakov and Mirjana. I stayed with Vicka for a longer time. The most striking thing was the profound conviction of all three of them, it didn’t even allow a shadow of a doubt to transpire regarding the apparitions of Our Lady: their behaviour seemed strange to me. I had the feeling that some priest had to be present, who could accompany the faithful and help them in their pathway towards God, regardless of what was happening.

Further to this, I returned to Medjugorje on several occasions, to help in confessions, but I only began my service in the parish after Father Jozo was imprisoned¹.

Our Lady is alive, God is alive

Those who were not in Bijakovići during that period on apparition hill and in Medjugorje, cannot understand this point; those who were there on the other hand, understand. The battle that we had to sustain with the communist regime was not for Our Lady or against Our Lady; the regime obstructed us because it wanted to prevent people from meeting Our Lady alive, through the apparitions. The parishioners recall well when, in December 1981, the representatives of the power in Sarajevo called them to the school. I was there also. Those politicians said that the authorities didn’t have anything against God or against Our Lady and that neither did they oppose the fact that the faithful should go to church; but they opposed that “fanaticism”, affirming that the apparitions and events in Medjugorje had nothing to do with faith. As an answer to that attempt at persuasion, I asked to speak and said: “Everything is alive and everything is miraculous in the Gospel. In actual fact, the gospel is made up of events such as these, in which people recognise our Lady as alive. For these people, all of this is sacred, and those who oppose this, offend their souls”. In short, this expresses all the tension that was around at that time in Medjugorje between atheist political power and the faith of the people. The people recognised the presence of grace, they recognised Our Lady as alive and they answered the impulses of grace; they were not afraid of going against power, or of going to prison, because they wanted to remain faithful to the living God and to the living Our Lady.

The Eucharist experienced

The Holy Mass had been celebrated in the morning up to that time in the parish church. A few days after the beginning of the apparitions, Father Jozo started to celebrate the Eucharist during the evening hours. People began to meet spontaneously for confession and mass, to experience the Eucharist and the other sacraments in a livelier and more profound manner. The celebration of this experienced Eucharist became the main problem for those in power on a political level. All the representatives of the regime attempted to do was to abolish the evening mass, to prohibit it, to get people and priests away from that mass. Therefore, during the course of a sitting in which the political authorities insisted on the fact that the church should remain closed during the evening and the evening mass should be cancelled, they said: “Celebrate the Eucharist in the morning, as has been done up to now”. Brother Zrinko, who is now dead, answered joking: “Gentlemen, Jesus did not establish the last breakfast, but the last supper!”

The whole of 1981 was marked by the struggle in favour of the experienced Eucharist; I am thinking not only of the struggle against the atheist regime, but rather the struggle that the parishioners of Medjugorje had to endure, along with all the pilgrims, to receive the sacraments and to participate in a living manner in the holy mass. The people animated the Eucharist and in exchange, they were nourished by it. The Eucharist experienced in this manner was a danger for atheism, but it was also a form of nourishment for all the faithful.

The living Church

It is impossible to tell the story of all the experiences encountered with the people during those initial months of the apparitions. People came to God’s temple, the church, as to an inexhaustible spring. I recall that in the autumn of 1981, after the harvest, people even remained in the church for three hours at a time. After the recital of two decades of the rosary, after the celebration of the mass, people remained in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament; on their knees. Not even in the convents was there a similar silence during prayer. Several thousand people were crammed into the church, kneeling, following the adoration in such a recollected way that you could even hear a pin drop. The people were unstoppable, nobody could impede their journey towards God.

Another example comes to mind. It was the month of November, it was very cold and a dense frost covered the meadows. I had to go to Čitluk. At the crossroads of the road that links Medjugorje to Miletina there was a guard who was stiff with the cold and not wearing many clothes. I was looking for the right words to greet him, to encourage him. Opening the window of the car, I greeted him saying: “Praise Jesus and Mary!”, “Forever may they be praised” the man replied, and before I managed to say a word to him, he started to speak to me and said: “Father, be courageous, go onwards! We will succeed in protecting our faith, do not fear!”.

There were many examples of this kind because that population was alive in God and with God. That parochial community was truly a living Church. What a marvellous event! Our Lady alive, the Eucharist experienced, God alive amidst his risen people! This was the sign that the Queen of Peace left us, and it is the sign that will remain until the end of time, when God will be alive among his people.

Here I would like to add an element that may be of interest to some readers: the relationship that was established with the political representatives of that time. Initially the heads of the regime thought that the crowd that was gathering in Medjugorje might give life to a sort of coup d’état, and so they were extremely rigorous and they feared a national uprising against the communist ideology. In the beginning their rigour was understandable to a certain extent. Then, when they realised that there was no danger of those proportions, “they turned over a new leaf”. Around the time of the first anniversary, their behaviour began to change, because they became convinced of the fact that the people who were beginning to gather in Medjugorje had no political connotations.

However, one year later, during the winter of 1983 to be precise, some new action got underway, which was directed by the authorities of the time, and the aim of which was to provide an incentive for introducing “religious tourism” and the rapid construction of homes for this aim: this operation significantly disfigured the countryside, as we can see today. From that moment, the regime completely shifted its tactics: it started to take advantage of the apparitions of Our Lady and the gatherings of people for its own interests and to enrich itself materially. People who had nothing to do with the faith then began to come to Medjugorje. In a word: Satan started to erect his tent alongside God’s church, with the aim of putting the faithful, who truly recognised the grace of the apparitions and who wanted to go towards God, continuously at risk.

Despite all the assaults and temptations, people sought to preserve their living faith in God. This behaviour made the people rest on solid foundations from the beginning of the apparitions.

I would also like to underline the fact that the dynamics of the spiritual struggle experienced in Medjugorje will always be the same and will last until such time as the triumph of the Immaculate Virgin. Satan will do everything to avoid having Our Lady come alive among her children, to reduce this whole phenomenon to an ideology, a historical memory, a statue or a tradition. Those who are tricked by him, will become indifferent towards God and towards Mary over time because they will enter darkness. Then in Medjugorje too the people may grow cold, the church will become cold if the faithful are incapable of struggling against the temptations of evil and conquering them. And so I would like to urge everyone: we need to wake up in faith and face this battle, which will constantly become more and more bitter, until such time as the definitive triumph of the Immaculate Heart!

As you have underlined, those first years were marked by a particularly strong spiritual dynamic. As a priest how did you enter this completely new reality?

The dynamic was strong and rich. I encountered mystery. We priests were taken by surprise, because none of us were aware of this dimension: all we knew was the theory of the apparitions. When man encounters the mystery of eternal life, he encounters something that he cannot grasp with reason. This is the true meeting with the Mystery that surpasses all human concepts.

On the other hand, despite the mystery, everything was simple. It was simple because God touched people through the Virgin Mary and people responded to that impulse. It was also easy because we did not need to run after people to make them come: the whole population of the parish and other localities literally poured into the church.

I will never forget the striking experience of the evening Mass. At 6 p.m. the church was already completely full. I already mentioned that people were in the church in absolute silence: I was able to guide the prayer hearing and breathing in silence, because in a wholly natural way, people were participating in and welcoming the Word of God. From this point of view, service in the parochial community of Medjugorje was very simple.

The difficulties that we experienced due to the political pressures of the time are also known, due to the imprisonment of brother Jozo and other brothers, and due to continuous interrogations and persecutions. But all of this did not leave any negative sting in our souls². During those moments we really felt as though what Saint Paul announced to the Romans was coming true, and that is, that suffering is nothing in comparison to the glory that awaits us. In the end, all those adversities were nothing in comparison to the strength of the graces that God was pouring out into my soul and into the souls of us priests. We felt nothing but joy and gratitude to God for the service that we were able to provide and we were certain that he was the guiding force behind everything.