On June 24, 1981: it all started in a summer afternoon

It was the afternoon of Wednesday, June 24, 1981, the feast of St. John the Baptist. In Podbrdo - the "hill of apparitions," on the outskirts of the small town of Medjugorje, in Herzegovina - a group of young people was grazing or simply walking when Ivanka Ivanković, 15, thought he saw a luminous figure on the hill hillside. At first he thought it was his own eyes. She called her friend Mirjana Dragičević, 16, who also saw her. They both called others.

At the end of that afternoon, six young people - all between ten and sixteen years old, all Catholics but without any special preparation for what was happening - had seen what they described as a young and beautiful woman, dressed in grey with a blue blanket, holding a child in her arms but who, when they approached, no longer carried it. The figure made a gesture for them to approach, but fear prevented them from moving. They went back to town without knowing what to say.

The next day they came back. The figure was back there. And the next day too. And the next. And so to today, more than four decades later.

The six seers: who are they?

What draws the attention of these six witnesses, forty years after the events, is precisely what has not happened. None of them have denied what they saw. No one has revealed the secrets they claim to have received. None has been significantly enriched by being a seer - although there are businesses around Medjugorje that have prospered behind them -. They've built normal lives: family, children, work. And every day, according to their own testimonies, they continue to see the same figure they saw that June 1981.

The messages: what he says he said

From the beginning, the seers transmitted words that attributed to the figure. The messages are grouped around five central themes that the Church has recognized as spiritually fruitful, regardless of the judgment on the supernatural origin of the apparitions.

The monthly messages - transmitted by Marija on the 25th of each month - are followed by millions of people around the world through the official page of the Centre of Medjugorje (centromedjugorje.org). They are not spectacular or prophetic messages in the dramatic sense: they are, for the most part, calls to prayer, to personal conversion, to reconciliation. Those who criticize them find them too banal to be supernatural. Those who defend them find their credibility in that same simplicity.

The secrets: ten messages that no one has revealed

From the early years, the seers began to speak of "secrets": messages that the figure transmitted to them with the instruction not to reveal them until the right time. Every seer has received ten secrets. Mirjana was the first to complete them, in 1982. The other four who still have daily apparitions have not yet received all their secrets, or so they say.

The secrets have not been revealed in forty years. The seers describe some of them as "world-related" and "events that will happen," but give no more details. Mirjana has explained that, before the first secret is fulfilled, she will communicate it to a priest of her choice, who in turn will announce the event three days in advance so that the world can prepare.

The content of secrets has been greatly speculated. The seers themselves have said that the first three are "warnings" and that the third will be a "visible and permanent sign" on the hill of Podbrdo. Nothing more. The ability to keep that secret for four decades, without contradictions among the six seers, is one of the most disconcerting elements for the skeptics.

The War in Bosnia (1992- 1995): the miracle of peace within horror

In April 1992, the war reached Bosnia- Herzegovina. The cities were burning. Ethnic cleansing turned hundreds of thousands of people into refugees. Sarajevo lived under siege. In that context of horror, Medjugorje became something that no one had ever anticipated: an oasis of peace within the storm.

The town of Medjugorje was not bombed. Serbian militias operating in the region surrounded the area on several occasions but never attacked the sanctuary. The pilgrims who continued to arrive - some journalists and documentalists from all over the world mixed with the faithful - found in Medjugorje a place where the Croats, the Bosnian-Muslims and the Serbs who lived there continued to live together in such a way that it was impossible anywhere else in Bosnia.

"I came here as a journalist to cover the war. I stayed as a pilgrim because I saw something I couldn't explain: people on both sides praying together." - Jonathan Falwell, American journalist, 1993

The apparitions continued throughout the war. The messages of those years insistently called for peace. In August 1993, at one of the darkest moments of the conflict, Marija's message said: "Dear children, today I ask you to pray for peace. Not the peace that men give, but the peace that only God can give." As mortars fell a few kilometres away, the pilgrims prayed the rosary on the hill of apparition.

Fifty million pilgrims: the greatest flow of the 20th century

The numbers of Medjugorje are difficult to process. Since 1981, it is estimated that between forty and fifty million pilgrims have visited the place. There is no other Marian phenomenon in history - neither Lourdes, nor Fatima, nor Guadalupe - that has generated a comparable influx in a similar period of time since its inception.

In a normal year, before the 2020 pandemic, between two and three million people visited Medjugorje. The town has just over four thousand permanent inhabitants. The hotel and accommodation infrastructure that has grown around the sanctuary is colossal and, for many, problematic: Medjugorje has restaurants, religious souvenir shops and hotels that in no way remember the village of Herzegovina that was in 1981. This has been criticized by those who believe that trade has distorted the place. The defenders of the sanctuary respond that Lourdes or Fatima have exactly the same problem and that is not why their spiritual value is denied.

The position of the Church: the long process of discernment

No Marian phenomenon in history has been the object of such a long and complex ecclesial process. The apparitions of Lourdes were recognized four years after they occurred. The ones from Fatima, 13 years old. The Medjugorje people, forty-three years later, have received a trial that is not final but is not a conviction.

In May 2024, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published the so-called "Ruini Decree" - called because the investigation was conducted for years by Cardinal Ruini. The document explicitly recognizes the "positive spiritual fruits" of Medjugorje: the documented conversions, the return to faith of remote people, the flourishing of priestly vocations among pilgrims who visited the place, the practice of the sacraments that is recorded massively in the sanctuary.

The decree authorizes the public veneration of Our Lady of Medjugorje and allows the bishops to organize official pilgrimages to the place. But it does not declare supernatural the origin of the apparitions - especially those that continue today - and it distinguishes between the initial apparitions of 1981, which the decree values favourably, and the continued phenomenon, which remains pending final judgment.

"The spiritual fruits associated with this place of grace are abundant and recognizable. Many people have returned to God, confessed after years, found the meaning of life." - Dicastery Decree for the Doctrine of the Faith, May 2024

Extraordinary conversion testimonials

NATO General

In 1995, in the middle of the war in Bosnia, an American general who was part of the NATO contingent deployed in the region visited Medjugorje for no religious purpose. He was a pragmatic military, educated at the West Point Academy, who had no religious practice since adolescence. He came out of professional curiosity, to see what was the place that appeared in all intelligence reports as a stabilization factor in the area.

What happened in his visit he later reported in several recorded testimonies: during the evening mass in the church of Santiago, in the midst of the warm darkness of the interior full of the faithful of dozens of nationalities, he began to cry without being able to contain himself. I didn't know why. I had not experienced anything "supernatural," no vision, no voice. Only that feeling that something was moving inside it that had been still decades. He returned to his country, confessed for the first time in 20 years, and since then he has maintained a regular religious practice. He preferred not to make his name public.

The French atheist philosopher

Gabriel Barielle was a French Marxist philosopher, a university professor, who visited Medjugorje in 1988 to write a critical article. His starting hypothesis was that the phenomenon of Medjugorje was an ideological construction of Croatian nationalism, taking advantage of the religious fanaticism of the peasant masses. He spent eight days in the village, interviewed the seers, attended the evening masses, spoke to pilgrims from twelve countries.

The article he published was not the one he planned to write. He said that, on the sixth day of his stay, during a rosary session on the hill of Podbrdo, he had experienced something that his philosophical categories did not allow him to classify: a sudden and absolutely illogical certainty that "someone" knew and loved him. He spent the last two days of the journey crying intermittently and praying for the first time in his adult life. Its later conversion was gradual but complete.

The Japanese nun

In 1993, a Japanese Buddhist nun working as a translator of religious materials for a Tokyo editorial arrived in Medjugorje within a group of Asian journalists. He wasn't Christian. He had read about the apparitions and found them culturally interesting. During his visit, one of the seers allowed him to be present at the time of the apparition. She later described what happened: "I felt they were touching me on the shoulder, although there was no one behind me. I turned. I didn't see anything. But at that moment I knew with a certainty that I still can't explain that everything I believed about death and beyond was true, and that death had no last word."

The nun did not leave Buddhism immediately - the process was long and costly for her in family and professional terms - but was baptized three years later in Tokyo. He worked the rest of his life translating Christian literature into Japanese.

The hill of the cross (Križevac) and Mount Podbrdo

Medjugorje is not just the village and the church. It is also two hills that pilgrims walk up on foot, often barefoot and at night, as penance or as gratitude. The hill of apparition, Podbrdo, is 520 meters high. The hill of the cross, Križevac, also has 520 meters and on its top lies a cement cross of eight meters that the people built in 1934 - forty-seven years before the apparitions - to commemorate the nineteenth centenary of Christ's death. That the cross was already there when the apparitions began is one of those details that the faithful point out as a providential preparation.

Up those hills at night, with the rosary in hand, following the line of pilgrims who are illuminating themselves with small lanterns, is an experience that many describe as the most intense of their spiritual life. Not because nothing extraordinary happens - usually nothing extraordinary happens - but because something in the dark, silence, physical effort and company of strangers who pray in different languages creates an atmosphere that is difficult to forget.

The five stones of Medjugorje

In the messages transmitted over the years, the figure of Medjugorje has proposed a spiritual program that the faithful have organized under the name "the five stones": five concrete practices that the seers present as the heart of what the sanctuary proposes.

• 24 June 1981First apparition on Mount Podbrdo. Six young people see the light figure.
• Yunio-Julio 1981Yugoslav police are trying to prevent apparitions. The seers are questioned. The pilgrims are still coming.
• 1982Mirjana gets the tenth secret. His daily apparitions end.
• 1984On March 1, the monthly messages of the 25th (transmitted by Marija) begin.
• 1985Ivanka's apparitions are over. There are four seers left with daily apparitions.
• 1987Bishop Pavao Žanić emits a negative judgment. The Holy See withdrew the case from its jurisdiction.
• 1991The war comes to Yugoslavia. The apparitions continue.
• 1993In the middle of the Bosnian war, pilgrims continue to reach Medjugorje from the whole world.
• 1998Jakov's apparitions are over. There are three seers with daily apparitions (Vicka, Ivan, Marija).
• 2010The Holy See established an international commission (Ruini Commission) to consider the case.
• May 2024The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith publishes the decree that recognizes the spiritual fruits and authorizes public veneration.

Why Medjugorje matters, beyond the supernatural question

Whatever the judgment each person takes on the origin of what happens in Medjugorje, the phenomenon raises questions that are not easily answered. How can we explain that six young people from a village without regular electricity, without access to television or sophisticated media, in a communist Yugoslavia where religion was looked at with suspicion, have been able to hold a consistent testimony for more than four decades, without contradictions between them and without ever retraction? How to explain the millions of documented conversions, the return to religious practice of people who had completely abandoned it?

The skeptics have their answers: collective psychology, suggestion, economic interests, need for transcendence in difficult times. These are answers that must be taken seriously. But they do not fully explain why the phenomenon has produced, in a consistent and measurable way, exactly what the Church considers to be the production of the authentic places of grace: priestly vocations, conversions, sacramental practice, personal reconciliation, return to prayer.

"By their fruits you shall know them." - Mt 7: 16. The evangelical criterion for discerning what comes from heaven is the one that most cites, with different reasons, both the defenders and the critics of Medjugorje.

The Virgin who the seers describe does not appear as spectacular. He's not asking for monuments or wealth. He asks for prayer, conversion, rosary, fasting, confession. He asks for things that the Church has been asking for for two thousand years. And that, those who believe, say, is precisely what makes it credible.