This year is the 30th anniversary of the Medjugorje apparitions and Joe Walsh Tours has trips from Dublin and Cork as reported irishtimes.com.
Medjugorje is one of the towns of the Western Herzegovina municipality of Citluk in the previous Yugoslavia. The name Medjugorje is Slavic and means “area between two mountains”. This real life story occurs in the Bijakovici section of Medjugorje. On the afternoon of June 24, 1981, two girls, Ivanka Ivankovic, age fifteen, and Mirjana Dragicevic, age sixteen, were returning home from a walk. Looking toward the hill called Crnica, Ivanka saw a bright outline of a woman. She revealed to Mirjana, “It is the Gospa!” ( Our Woman ).
On June twenty-five, the two girls returned to the hill with 4 others. Their names are, Vicka Ivankovic, age sixteen, Ivan Dragivevic, age sixteen, Maria Pavlovic, age sixteen and Jakov Colo, age ten. A figure in white was calling them to come up the hill. The children were somehow transported in some confusing way to a lovely Lady who calls herself, the Queen of Peace. The Woman gives messages to the seers for the whole world. To date, the Queen of Peace has left thousands of messages. At first, the messages were almost daily. Now, for the last a few years, they come on the 25th of every month.
The idealists describe Our Lady as beautiful beyond words ; radiant with holiness. Her conversations with the children have taken the type of motherly sensitiveness and love, and she’s taken the role of both mother and catechist in advising and directing their lives. She greets them with, “Praised be Jesus, my dear children.” At the end of the apparition she says, “Go in peace, my dear children.” She seems to the 6 idealists as a three dimensional real image and always appears among brilliant flashes of light. Her appearances sometimes happen about 6:40 pm each day. In Medjugorje, masses of people come daily at this time to take part in the event with prayer, song, the rosary and the Mass, which is often celebrated by 30 or more monks. The whole evening service lasts about three hours. And this has been happening daily since 1981!
During the apparitions, the idealists don’t respond to light, they don’t hear any earthly sound, they don’t respond to being touched. They have been subject to many systematic tests even in the apparitions, and the discoveries are well documented. While with Our Woman, they feel they are outside time and space.
Our Woman began imparting systems to the idealists in Medjugorje extremely early on. She has informed the idealists that each one of them would receive ten strategies. Our Woman has imparted these strategies to the 6 idealists progressively over these past eighteen years. Three idealists have received all ten, and subsequently, they have stopped having the daily apparition with Our Lady. The other three each have nine.
The systems bear on the idealists themselves, to the Church, to the sign, to all humanity, and to everybody, and to the entire world and to Medjugorje. The ninth and tenth techniques are grave matters. They are a chastisement for the sins of the world. The punishment is inevitable as we cannot expect the conversion of the world. The chastisement can be lessened by prayers and penance. It cannot be suppressed. An evil which threatened the world, according to the 7th secret, had been eliminated through prayer and fasting according to Mirjana.
Local Church leaders sometimes feel they must keep Medjugorje under “wraps” till formal Church approval is given. However , Rome has established for itself a very different pastoral response; a reply of support instead of distance. The support, naturally, is low keyed and temporary, so as not to short cut the on-going process that will lead on to a last definitive judgement. The process, historically, has only granted full recognition to world-scale apparitions when they have come to their conclusion. FATIMA was officially recognized 13 years after, and GUADALUPE 2 hundred years after.
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