By Mauro, Loredana and Luisa

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

The deeper meaning of the apparitions

Personally I think that the apparitions of Our Lady are a sort of visitation of God’s people, like when Mary visited Elizabeth and reached John in his mother’s womb. In the same way, through the six visionaries, the Mother of God shows herself to the whole population, she reaches and reawakens everyone personally. And grace touched and touches everyone, and invites everyone to give a personal answer.

In his wisdom, God arranged different tasks for different people. It seems too restrictive to me to circumscribe the action of the Holy Spirit in the apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje exclusively to the six visionaries. The Holy Spirit acts through the six visionaries as through many others. It is he who generates the Church, who gives life to the Mystical Body of Christ, who guides every man. Only God is he who gives grace, who spreads his new gifts to individual people.

The moment in which Vicka and Jakov were playing and Our Lady came to call them so that they might go to Heaven with her often comes to mind. They abandoned themselves to that grace and following this they told us the story of their experience of Heaven. Vicka and Jakov did not deserve this in any manner, they were not even prepared for anything of this kind: grace simply came upon them and God wanted them to come to know the realities of Heaven. They therefore became messengers, witnesses of the existence of Heaven. Sacred Scripture had already revealed the existence of Heaven to us, but their testimony helps us, because it confirms what we already know: the Holy Spirit continuously confirms the truths of faith. It is therefore important to underline the fact that the grace given to the six visionaries is a grace granted freely for the whole world. The gift of the apparitions is not given to them as a prize, but as a service, so that they might inform everyone of the presence of Our Lady.

We must however specify something else: as I have already pointed out, Our Lady did not only reveal herself to the six visionaries in Medjugorje, she revealed herself to many other people through different gifts such as interior locutions, visions, or particular spiritual experiences. In conscience these people are also called to bear witness to the grace received. First of all, the visionaries Jelena Vasilj and Marjana Vasilj come to mind, but also many other people who entrusted their inner experiences to me over the years and who spoke to me of the graces received right in Medjugorje.

Every grace is given freely by God, but when we speak of the dimension of the mysticism or the inner experiences of faith, we must remember that a pathway is always requested, a process of conversion; if people do not want to embark on this pathway of conversion, then the graces that they receive cannot develop and certain experiences or visions stop at a superficial level, they cannot become fertile.

For me it was always very nice to see the link between the six visionaries and Jelena and Marijana in Medjugorje, to see how a common life flowed among those different experiences. For example, when Our Lady wanted to form the prayer group through Jelena, she also invited the six visionaries to participate, so that they might take part in that pathway of prayer. And the visionary Marija Pavlović also participated in it. We could say that the gift of inner locutions given to Jelena, was complementary to the gift of the apparitions.

I’d like to quote one more example. Since the messages started to be given regularly from March 1984 (initially every Thursday and following this, every 25^th of the month), the majority of the faithful thought that the impulse came through Marija Pavlović, but this is not the case! It came through Jelena Vasilj. At the end of February 1984, it was she who informed me of Our Lady’s desire that the faithful who couldn’t come to the church every evening due to work, should meet at least once a week, on Thursdays, at Mass, and that after the Mass, they should remain in adoration, meditating on the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew¹ which speaks about abandonment to God, faith in his Providence. After all, Our Lady said these words to Jelena: “Continuously adore the Most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. I am present in a special way when the faithful adore. Special graces are received at those times.” A few days later, exactly on the 1^st of March, Our Lady gave the following message through Marija Pavlovic: “Dear children, I have chosen this parish in a special way and I wish to guide it. With love I protect it and I want everyone to be mine. Thank you for coming here this evening. I want you to be present here in ever-greater numbers with my Son and me. Every Thursday I will give a special message for you” (1/3/1984).

If we reflect on all of this, we see various significant elements: first of all, the link between the visionary Jelena and the six visionaries. Our Lady sent a message to me through Jelena, and a few days later, on the Thursday, Marija Pavlović started to receive the messages for the parish from Our Lady.

A second element lies in the fact that Our Lady said: “When you adore the Most Blessed Sacrament, I am present with you in a special way”, and this means that if the faithful were to convert, if they were to live the holy Mass worthily, if they were to adore the Most Blessed Sacrament, what Our Lady came and appeared for would be fulfilled. In saying this, our Mother wanted to make us understand that we can grasp the true meaning of the apparitions, of her maternal presence among us, only if we enter into a deeper relationship with God. Thanks to this relationship, at the beginning of the apparitions, we have a clear manifestation of the interaction between the grace of God acting through the six visionaries and the graces acting respectively through Jelena and the people. This is because God leads everyone and everything towards communion in the Holy Spirit, as is the case in Pentecost. Then I understood that encouraging and taking care of the interaction of graces, is one of the priest’s most fundamental and fragile tasks. It is also very precious, because it prevents the fragmentation of the gifts and rivalries between the members of God’s people. This is how the Church is built in the Holy Spirit.

I have already underlined the fact that the apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje find their best expression in the second glorious mystery of the Rosary: Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s body and soul perceived this visit, and the same thing occurred to little John, who recognised Mary and He who was in her womb with all of his being: through Mary, John felt the touch of God. In that meeting, the Holy Spirit filled Elizabeth, blessed the baby in her womb and she gave birth to the prophet who preceded the Messiah and manifested this to the world.

When we speak of the apparitions in Medjugorje, Our Lady’s most essential messages are repeated: peace, prayer, fasting, confession, conversion and faith. In my opinion the deeper meaning of the apparitions is what I define as the touch of the love of God through Mary, which reaches every man.

In this context, I’d like to call to mind a scene that expresses Our Lady’s touch. It happened on the 4^th of August 1984. As we know, Our Lady had notified Jelena Vasilj that the exact date of her birth is the 5^th of August². I had previously been asked by Our Lady through Jelena to invite the parishioners to a novena of fasting and prayer in preparation for this solemnity; the liturgy on that day celebrates the consecration of the Basilica of Saint Mary in Rome, later called Saint Mary Major, but also known by us as Our Lady of the Snow. Many people fasted and prayed for nine days. During the last three days of the novena, the majority of parishioners didn’t even work, apart from the most essential occupations. We could say that Medjugorje was like a convent where everyone was praying, fasting and keeping vigil. On the eve of that 5^th of August, as she was praying, Jelena experienced an important vision in which Satan approached her kneeling down in front of her and she started to cry. Then the devil said to her: “Tell her (addressed to Our Lady) not to bless the world!”. And he repeated this several times. Immediately afterwards Jelena experienced another vision: she saw Our Lady and upon her arrival, Satan disappeared. Our Lady then said to her: “He knows what he wants, he doesn’t want me to bless the world on this day”, and at that moment she solemnly blessed the whole of humanity.

I am telling this story in order to shed light on the reality of this touch of God through Our Lady. What happened that night and the next day was truly striking. Grace was present and tangible. The priests heard confessions all day long, meeting special cases: people who had not even thought about the apparitions in the least, or who were actually unaware of their existence, stopped strangely on their way to the seaside and headed towards Medjugorje. People approached the sacrament of reconciliation even after thirty years and more, with a special ease. The priests testified that grace was palpable in confessions. In all of this, the touch of God was manifested solidly through Mary: the Virgin visited her children, she brought God to them.

When man opens up to this divine touch, to those impulses that come through Mary, the miracle happens: life is transformed completely, it is reborn from above, as Jesus explained to Nicodemus³.

The novelty of Medjugorje

I think that Our Lady herself provided the answer to this question through Vicka, when she said that she appeared in this parish because “there are many good faithful people” and that here “there are deep roots of faith” (15.9.1981). If we observe this answer of hers, then we really must understand all the light of the faith.

I recall a conversation that I had in 1983 with the well-known Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who said to me: “No person and no place deserves Our Lady to appear, and no place in the world is pure and holy to the extent that the Virgin could appear there without there being tension and persecution”. Looking at today’s world, we see so many places in which the living presence of the Mother of consolation and hope would be essential, but this does not come about.

Therefore, when Our Lady appears, or when God gives some grace, the grace is totally pure because it comes from him, nobody deserves it. Why does God pour out that grace in a certain place, why does he give it to a certain person? This remains a mystery, it is the mystery of the distribution of the grace and God’s free choice. Nevertheless, with reference to the fact that Our Lady is said to have appeared in Medjugorje because the roots of faith are deep within that people, I also link those apparitions in a special way to the whole of Europe, which is experiencing a deep crisis of Christian identity today.

From the beginning, I have believed that the apparitions of the Mother of God in Medjugorje were the work of the Holy Spirit. Today in particular, I make a clear distinction between the apparitions of Our Lady, understood to be an extraordinary grace associated with a particular place and a historical moment, and the presence of Our Lady, which is everywhere in space, in time and in eternity. The apparitions are a grace, they are a confirmation of the maternity and the care of Our Lady for the whole of humanity, of her mission as the Mother of God. And this is a grace given to all of us. Therefore I understand that the aim to be reached is not that of stopping at the apparitions as a supernatural phenomenon, but of learning to experience the presence of Mary, which attracts us continuously into the life of the Most Blessed Trinity. Our Lady has been appearing for so long because she wants to teach us to live in her presence and in the presence of God.

The theology of the Easter mystery is deeply accentuated in Medjugorje: the passage through the passion and death that leads us to the Resurrection. This is the fundamental message that the apparitions leave us and it cannot be otherwise, because Our Mother always guides us towards what her Son Jesus experienced, towards the only true pathway towards healing. The Virgin therefore guides us towards the essence, towards the mystery of Christianity: the Eucharist, the Easter mystery. In the end she manifests her Trinitarian dimension to us, because in reality, we cannot find Mary in her fullness, if not in the Most Blessed Trinity.

My opinion is that we are called to enter into a living and continuous relationship with God and with Our Lady. In fact, Our Lady does not appear in Medjugorje to remain with us for just a few minutes a day, but to enable us to understand that we were created to be in God, to relate to him continuously, to recognise his voice. Understanding all of this was a source of great spiritual wealth for me, in which I interpreted the action of the Holy Spirit through his spouse Mary.

When speaking about Medjugorje, a priest friend of mine once said to me: “My dear Father Tomislav, who will verify all of this?” And I answered him saying: “This is our problem, that we want to verify everything, while God is calling us to walk and to grow, to direct people towards the Holy Spirit through Mary, so that she might guide them towards Jesus and, together with him, towards the Father”. This is an invaluable truth: after everything that I experienced initially with the visionaries and then in accompanying many faithful and consecrated people, I understood that I cannot and I do not want to verify anyone. I must limit myself to walking, to experiencing God’s nearness and to showing people how to create a relationship with God, in such a way as to ensure that it might be the Lord to guide and direct everyone and everything.

The novelty that Medjugorje brings to the Church and to humanity is the meeting with the living God. Perhaps this does not say a lot to some people, but if we find ourselves before the living God and we allow him to involve us totally, changing everything within ourselves according to his plans, then this is an absolute novelty. I believe that these are God’s intentions regarding the apparitions in Medjugorje: to attract man to him through the Immaculate Heart, to attract the Church and, through it, the whole world. Everyone must meet the living God and, in faith, contemplate him face to face.

This meeting with God brings other novelties with it also: Christian life must become simple, it must free itself of the formulae and of that which weighs it down and that encloses the Spirit in empty rules. Simplicity guides us to a direct relationship with God, to which Jesus wanted to lead the people to whom he preached, as the Holy Spirit said through the prophet Isaiah and as he refers to us in the Gospel according to Matthew: “For this reason I am speaking in parables: because they look yet they do not see, they listen and they do not understand, and for them the prophecy that is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah is fulfilled for them: You shall listen yet you shall not understand, says the Lord, you shall look yet you shall not see. Because the heart of this people has become insensitive: they have become hard of hearing, they have closed their eyes: to not see with their eyes, to not hear with their ears, to not understand with their heart, to not turn towards me, to not allow themselves to be healed by me. You on the other hand are blessed, because your eyes see and your ears listen. I assure you that many prophets and many righteous men would have wanted to see what you see, but they did not see it; many would have wanted to hear what you hear, but they did not hear it”⁴. We are therefore called to this simplicity about which Pope Benedict XVI spoke when he was still a cardinal: “The renewal of the life of the Church is not a heap of exercises in piety and the creation of institutions, but an integral and unique belonging to the community of Christ. The novelty, the renewal means becoming simple, converting to that authentic and true simplicity that is the mystery of everything that exists. But this is nothing other than the echo of the simplicity of the One God”⁵.

What else could we say about this novelty? When Our Lady appears, she reveals herself as a simple and living presence among us; with her, the Church descends from the heavens and invites the Church of the earth to enter into true communion with the Holy Spirit. This is a truth that all the books of liturgy are full of, but that must be experienced in a real manner!

The outcome of this novelty is the same as that of the first Church, consisting of the assembly of the Apostles, of Mary, of the women and the disciples who were present when the Holy Spirit descended onto them and filled them with himself. Everything becomes new and everything is renewed continuously. It is not a novelty that is detached from the Gospel, but a new dynamic, a new vitality, like the spring is a novelty for the winter, the summer a novelty for the spring and so on. It is a vital and continuous process that brings many fruits. It is the sign of the dynamism of the life of faith, that is differentiated from the stagnation that, in certain forms of religiousness, often finds different and very dangerous shades.

Already during the fifth anniversary of the apparitions, I underlined the fact that many people are wrong to believe that the parish of Medjugorje is set to become another Lourdes or Fatima. I personally believe that we should not even talk too much about Medjugorje so as not to transform it into an ideology. Our Lady is not calling us onto apparition hill, onto Mount Križevac or to the parish church because Medjugorje is one of many shrines, but rather, because she wants to introduce humanity to a new era. A new era has commenced with the apparitions of Medjugorje. A new quality of spiritual life, a new quality of life in general, that embraces our whole being, because the Christian calling aims not only at making us resurrect in spirit, but also in body. We almost never think of the resurrection of the body, as such, our transformation cannot come about. The transformation of man is the true novelty.

From my own point of view and from my own experience, I can say that we are not even aware of the extent to which we are slaves of corruptibility and how poor we are, because we do not allow God to involve us and to speed up this process of transformation within ourselves and within humanity. In fact, the whole of humanity is called to enter into a new heaven and a new earth⁶. I understand that this means entering a new concept and new times, because the Holy Spirit, who is the author of life, always introduces us to a dimension of newness: every day, life in God is a novelty.

There have been many episodes in which I experienced the novelty that we are talking about, but I would like to talk about something that happened on Good Friday of 1983. I was going towards Križevac with a nun and a fellow brother of mine, I was praying the rosary and we wanted to go up the mountain to adore the Lord Crucified. At the beginning of the road, at the foot of Križevac, the police stopped us: they told us that we could not go up. I asked “Why?”. A commanding officer approached us, he said to me in an irritated tone: “You cannot go, it’s forbidden!”. I answered him saying that it was parochial land and that it was a tradition for the faithful to go there to adore the Lord’s cross every year. He answered me aggressively: “You can complain all you like but you cannot go up there!”. I answered him saying: “I will not complain, but I will protest publicly!”.

Later on, all three of us took the long way around through Miletina and we continued to pray the rosary, returning to the parochial office. When we arrived at the parochial house, I went to sit in my bedroom and, without saying anything to anyone, I wrote an article of protest for a newspaper. I left the text on the table because I wanted to have it checked by other people before sending it to the paper. On Easter Monday the little visionary Jelena Vasilj who was only eleven years old at the time, came and without knowing anything about all of this, said these words to me: “Our Lady says to you: Do not complain, do not protest! Pray and rejoice, because when God puts his hand to something, nobody can stop him”. At that moment, all the human reasoning produced by my will ceased to exist, along with all my human struggles. I entered into joy and peace, and I gave up on all forms of protest. That teaching remained profoundly impressed on me. Since then, when I found myself in difficult situations that provoked me greatly, I always reminded myself of Our Lady’s words.

I have had to go through many of these interior passages, which I believe were a pure grace that God granted me so that I could continue on my pathway. Those who experience Mary’s nearness, experience her maternity and the fact that she is the bride of God and of the Church. It is impossible to describe the tenderness of her love: in her all barriers disappear, all wounds heal and all questions find their answer. The soul feels filled with the life of God for which it longs in its depths, despite the fact that it encounters obstacles, trials and difficulties.

This is the authentic novelty that gives us a profound sense of peace, even when from the outside it seems as though we are beaten. In every piece of Sacred Scripture we read that we must allow God to direct our lives: to experience this in reality is the beginning of a complete spiritual renewal.