Pilgrimages to Site of Alleged Madonna Visions Drop Off : Yugoslavia: Millions of tourists have flocked there over the last 10 years. But things have been going badly for Mary of Medjugorje lately.

Ten summers ago, six Croatian youths in the Yugoslavian countryside said they had visions of the Virgin Mary and received messages from her. As the Madonna’s purported messages continued, often daily, millions of Catholic tourists flocked to the village of Medjugorje, making it a rival of the famous Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites of Lourdes and Fatima.

But things have been going badly lately for Mary of Medjugorje (pronounced Meh-ju-gor-yay). This most-publicized of Marian apparitions in recent years failed last winter to get the endorsement of the Catholic hierarchy. Then, the country’s political strife and economic troubles have reduced the flow of U.S. and European pilgrims to a trickle.

It is uncertain whether this bodes ill for a movement that has attracted an international following waiting for the latest message from Mary.

The six purported visionaries, now in their 20s, continue to convey messages emphasizing piety, peace and reconciliation through Franciscan priests assigned to the Medjugorje parish. At least 40 Medjugorje information centers--not counting many religious, quasi-travel outfits--have sprung up in the United States to tell believers of this alleged divine channel to the mother of Jesus.

Pilgrimages to Yugoslavia, which have drawn between 10 and 15 million people according to some estimates, feed the fervor for Medjugorje’s cause. “Without that stoking for an extended period, the fire could burn very low,” said John DeMers of New Orleans, co-author of a guidebook for Medjugorje pilgrims.

“My most successful friends in the Medjugorje business around the United States have stopped going,” DeMers said. Plane service is limited, and even ferry service across the Adriatic Sea from Italy is not doing the business it once did, DeMers said.

Peter K. Miller, who heads Queen of Peace Ministries in Huntington Beach, says he still takes about 50 people each month to the site. But that is half the number he was taking, Miller said.

Miller says his groups travel by plane to Belgrade, then to the small airport at Mostar, about 30 miles away from Medjugorje, which is located in a quiet Croatian area of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Sponsors of a two-day Medjugorje Peace Conference, which begins next Saturday on the UC Irvine campus, expect to draw more than 4,000 people, mostly believers, exceeding the registration at last year’s meeting.

“This is a time when the devotion (to Mary) could become stronger,” said conference spokeswoman Joan Hosek. The conference will focus on “10 years of continuing miraculous appearances and messages of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Medjugorje.”

The Vatican is typically cautious about affirming reported apparitions of Mary and the church officially sanctions devotion to only a handful.

Last winter, Yugoslavia’s Catholic bishops, who were directed by Rome to evaluate the Medjugorje claims, said that based on evidence to date, “it cannot be confirmed that supernatural apparitions and revelations are occurring.” Supporters of the movement, however, have drawn encouragement by the fact that the Yugoslav bishops did not condemn the phenomena and have moved to assist in the pastoral care of the pilgrims.

The movement’s biggest obstacle is opposition from Bishop Pavao Zanic of Mostar-Duvno, the diocese that includes Medjugorje. Citing Zanic’s negative views, Archbishop John Whealon has banned promotions and ads for Medjugorje pilgrimages in his Hartford, Conn., Catholic archdiocese.

Correspondent Gabriel Meyer, who has done extensive reporting from Yugoslavia for the Studio City-based National Catholic Register and Twin Circle, said he thinks that critics of Medjugorje are going to “feel the jig is up.” Advocates will see the coincidence of Medjugorje’s 10th anniversary last month and the ethnic-political turmoil as part of a yet-unknown divine plan, he said.

“The people who really get affected are not the skeptics or the believers,” Meyer said, “but the large numbers of American Catholics who are attracted to Medjugorje but don’t know what to believe.”

In addition, the Madonna has lost some of her pan-Yugoslav appeal as increasingly she has become appropriated by Croatian nationalists as a divine symbol of their aspirations, Meyer said. “Since last year some Croats have seen the Madonna’s appearances as a sign that she came to Croatia to emphasize that republic’s special role in history,” he said.

A founder of the charismatic Catholic movement in Southern California in the 1970s before he turned news reporter, Meyer said he takes a neutral position on the authenticity of the Medjugorje phenomena. “This is private revelation. Who can know what is going on in the mind of a visionary?” Meyer said.

At the same time, he said, he finds the attention to the Medjugorje story a fascinating instance of the “tremendous explosion of Marian piety” as the century nears an end. The documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) did not say so directly, but it “basically had told Mary to stay in the closet and shut up,” he said.

Pope John Paul II illustrated his devotion to the church-approved apparition of Mary in 1917 to three youngsters in Fatima, Portugal, by making a pilgrimage there this year. And in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Catholic bishops pay homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the 16th-Century apparition reported by peasant Juan Diego near what would become Mexico City.

“Generations will likely go by before the church makes up its mind about Medjugorje,” writes James Whelan in the August issue of U.S. Catholic magazine. “Even when it does, there will be no flat statement that Our Lady did or did not appear there, just as no Catholic need believe that Mary ever actually set a sandaled foot in the cove at Fatima, the grotto at Lourdes, or on the ruins of that Aztec shrine in Mexico 450 years ago.”

At present, 144 reported apparitions are under investigation by national and local church officials, according to Meyer.

The Monterey Catholic Diocese, for example, has studied the supernatural claims of Carol Nole of Santa Maria, a former Medjugorje pilgrim who says she has received 27 messages from Mary, mostly about building a cross on a hill behind a supermarket. Ted Elisee, spokesman for the Monterey Diocese, said that a commission has completed its investigation, which will be given to whoever is named to succeed Bishop Thaddeus Shubsda, who died in April.

Reasons for the global spate of apparitions range from the pious view that Mary is issuing urgent calls to greater faith to the doubting perspective of Stanford-educated sociologist Michael P. Carroll, who wrote “The Cult of the Virgin Mary” in 1986. Carroll suggests that the original visionary in many famous cases is in mourning over a missing, much-loved female companion.

Medjugorje, before this year’s turmoil, has attracted extraordinary numbers. “The question that should be asked is whether it is spiritual hunger or spiritual curiosity that draws people,” said Father Thomas Thompson, director of the University of Dayton Marian Library.

The thousands of alleged apparitions and repetitive messages to the young purported seers in Medjugorje have raised some Catholic eyebrows. But theologian and Marian expert Rene Laurentin recently wrote that while there were only 18 messages at Lourdes and nine at Fatima, certain purported seers in the Middle Ages quietly received apparitions throughout their lives. The repetition serves the same purpose as a mother’s constant advice to her young children, he indicated.

Father Peter Stravinskas, editor of the Catholic Answer, a 150,000-circulation periodical, said he was “singularly unimpressed” with the alleged visionaries themselves and the surrounding activity during his visit to Medjugorje in 1987. “I found a great deal of preoccupation with the supernatural, with the demonic. I saw unauthorized exorcisms being performed,” Stravinskas said.

Positive things were going on--pilgrims attending Mass, praying the Rosary--all the basics of Catholic life, he said.

“People ask me why I care, if good things are resulting,” Stravinskas said. “That’s a real problem, if people are putting their faith in something that is unreal. It flies in the face of Christian tradition. Historical events make faith, not make-believe events,” he said.