Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

The Medjugorje Apparitions

Marian apparitions are a subject I have not learned much about, but last week a Catholic friend of mine showed me a newsletter from Medjugorje.

Medjugorje is a small village in Bosnia-Hercegovina which since 1981 has been host to a series of alleged visitations - and messages - from the Virgin Mary to a small group of 'visionaries' who were children when the apparitions began, and are now adults in their 30s. Its status according to the Catholic Church is unconfirmed, and in some cases there is outright hostility to the idea that these messages may be genuine. Nevertheless, it has become something of an unofficial pilgrimage site.

Other than that a link to this place has appeared in my backyard, the messages themselves interest me for several reasons: they're freely available online, they're recent, they're regular and ongoing, they are of a type loosely consistent with other aspects of 'mental mediumship' (such as trance channelling and automatic writing), and the content has a character I have come to associate with the spiritual messages I personally consider 'interesting': a quiet simplicity and gentleness, and for such a war-torn piece of the world, a constant emphasis on prayer and peace.

One of the criticisms of the Medjugorje communications is that there is nothing overtly provably supernatural about them. But is that how we would judge the authenticity of a communication from any ordinary living person? The other major criticism seems to be that this instance of Mary seems to quietly ignore much of the Catholic bureaucracy, chooses her own visionaries and happily fellowships with them regardless of Church procedures and rulings. Which is probably more of a problem for Catholics than it is for Protestants (in fact for Protestants it's actually the opposite).

Reading these messages I notice 'Mary of Medjugorje' talks quite a lot about the Rosary, and has turns of phrase ('Dear children... I want to present you to God without sin...') very reminiscent of St John and St Paul.

According to Wikipedia, there are two schools of thought on the origin of the Rosary. The modern view is that it evolved gradually over centuries; however older tradition has it that the Rosary was given to St Dominic (founder of the Dominican order) directly by Mary in the 13th century. Something about the Mudjugorje messages (and the way this Mary refers to the prayer of the Rosary as hers) makes me wonder if that could in fact be at least partially true. Any time there is an ongoing, regular, intelligible spiritual communication it seems to centre around a call to meditation, often involving a simple system, and the Rosary (a bit like the Workbook of A Course In Miracles) has a sense of being just that kind of device: a mnemonic or spiritual tool, easily learned, easily memorised, portable, demanding little from its users except attention. Just looking at it quickly with an outsider's eye, there seems to be a sort of elegance that pops out and makes me think 'this could be a designed thing, and a teaching aid at that'. A sort of extreme compactness, a feeling I associate with survival kits, first aid manuals, and textbook quick-reference cards. Procedures slimmed down to essentials.

(I get a similar kind of feeling, on first glance, from Reiki, and indeed its inventor claimed to have 'received' it. But I've not investigated Reiki and still am not sure how to go about integrating my generally safe initial feelings about it with my religious scruples that say 'anything spiritual and not specifically Christian could be dangerous'.)