Mysticism & Miracles

At the Franciscan monastery of Siroki Brijeg, in the barren countryside of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a ghostly pale woman on a pilgrimage from Boston told her story.

Her name is Fran Russell and she first came here last year, when her doctors said her back condition was worse and she would soon be confined to bed. In what she expected to be her last act of mobility, the 44-year-old health care worker traveled to the village of Medjugorje, a pilgrim site near the monastery.

“I came to hear Father Jozo speak,” said Russell of the priest standing beside her. He wears the brown robes of a Franciscan. His eyes sparkle like black opals.

Jozo Zovko is a legendary figure in this part of the world. Many believe he is able to heal the sick by touching them as he prays for them. A side trip to his remote monastery is required for anyone who wants the full Medjugorje tour.

For 15 years, the village has been a hothouse of mysticism and miracles, all the more compelling for being in this country torn to ruins by ethnic and religious war.

The village is set high above the Dalmatian coast, 80 miles southeast of Sarajevo in one of the poorest parts of the country. It is a farming community of 1,500 people that blossoms with fruit trees in April. In recent years the villagers have witnessed extraordinary events, and Zovko has been at the center of them.

In 1981, he was among the first to believe six teenagers when they described a vision of the Virgin Mary. They said they saw her in the flinty hills above Medjugorje. The next day after school they saw her again. By then, most of the neighbors knew about it. People ripped through the brambles for a closer look, but only the six saw her.

The apparitions continued. For several years the teenagers met with the Virgin in the local Catholic church, St. James. They would pray together and she would give them a message for the parish.

Four of the visionaries continue to see her daily; one other has less frequent visions. The teenagers are now in their 20s or 30s. Several are married with children.

Once each month one of the four conveys a message meant for the whole world. At the heart of the messages is a plea for peace and the return to a simpler, more prayerful life.

As her story unfolded, Russell recalled how Zovko prayed over her at the monastery, and again a few days later when she met him at an outdoor shrine in the village. Similar shrines now dot Medjugorje’s hillsides and back roads. All of them are as simple as the one she described, with its painted blue cross staked into rocks, surrounded by plastic flowers.

This time as Zovko prayed, Russell’s body began to jolt. “I felt I was being electrocuted,” she said. “I could see my bones shifting around under my skin. Afterward, when I came down the hill, I didn’t need my crutches anymore.”

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Fifteen years ago, Zovko worked at the parish of St. James in what was then Yugoslavia, a Communist country. He protected the children from the government authorities who disapproved of religious fervor; he spent time in prison for his acts of defiance. Those dramatic early days are the subject of the 1995 movie “Gospa,” the Croatian word for Blessed Mother. Martin Sheen plays the mild-mannered priest.

Busloads of pilgrims arrive at Siroki Brijeg almost every day. The half-hour trip from Medjugorje leads along roads chiseled from limestone hills, into broad valleys of scrubby grasses and outcroppings of rock.

Brilliant blue skies, flamboyant clouds as dense as shaving cream, pristine air and the rugged landscape remind Americans of New Mexico.

Soon after the first reports of the apparitions and the miraculous healings came stories from returning pilgrims of mystical writings in the sky and other unusual sights, all of which drew people to Medjugorje like a spiritual magnet.

Despite Third World living conditions, a remote location and the dangers of the war, some 20 million people have made the journey.

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In part, the huge numbers reflect a renewed enthusiasm for an ancient religious tradition. Classic pilgrim sites, among them Jerusalem in Israel and Mecca in Saudi Arabia, are drawing ever higher numbers.

The most famous shrines to Mary, at Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal and Tepeyec in Mexico, attract some 20,000 visitors each day.

People go on pilgrimage looking for a religious encounter they cannot find in a church, a temple or a mosque. Russell is one of more than 300 people who attribute physical healing to their time in Medjugorje.

There is also the romance of travel to a distant place, all the more inviting if it is difficult to reach.

“It truly is an oasis of peace for me,” said Mary Gail Reding, a health care worker from Park Ridge, Ill., during her recent trip to Medjugorje. “No phone, no faxes, no e-mail. You have time to think.”

Most alluring, perhaps, is the hope that a pilgrimage will move a person beyond an ordinary experience into the realm of the transcendent.

“I think something really big is going to happen,” said Steve from Reno a few days after he arrived in the village. “I think the Blessed Mother is going to appear to me.”

He would not give his full name, for fear his family would find out where he was. They do not approve of his fervor, he said.

Charles Champ, 97, made the trip for another reason.

“It looked like a good place to go to confession,” he said. He had traveled without family or friends from home in Fort Wayne, Ind., to clear up certain matters with God.

Like most pilgrims, he stayed at the home of a villager. A number of locals have built onto their houses and opened them to travelers. One evening after a farm-style dinner of potatoes, sliced pork and home-made wine, Champ described his delicate relationship with organized religion.

“I didn’t go to church for years,” he said. He stopped sometime in the 1940s. His last confession ended with him storming toward the door with the priest chasing after him.

In the ‘70s, a car accident sent him through a windshield, but even that didn’t lead him to make his peace.

Then, he watched a television program about Medjugorje. He saw people making their confessions to priests who sat beside them on the park benches outside St. James church.

“I figured, ‘I’m 97 years old. I’d better get there before I die.’ ”

His trip to confession was not easy. On the bus ride from Split, the coastal town four hours from Medjugorje, icy rain blew past his ears every time the door opened. He arrived with a cold that turned serious.

The first few days, he tried to ignore it. One morning the lean and elegant Champ dressed in his tweed sports coat and flannel trousers for the day’s outing. The leaders of his tour group bundled him up in a bright orange blanket and sat him down in a lawn chair outside the house of the visionary Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo. The street was crowded with German and American tour groups. Soldo emerged from her door and the crowd scrambled onto her neighbors’ fences and trampled their gardens to take pictures. Chilly weather kept everyone rustling like leaves. From his lawn chair, Champ barely saw the top of Soldo’s blond head. “I didn’t hear much,” he said.

Almost every day in Medjugorje, the visionaries invite groups of pilgrims to stand outside their houses and listen to their informal talks. Most of them live close to one another in an area of large new houses known as the Beverly Hills of Medjugorje. Most of their income is from donations and stipends from lectures. They now travel the world to speak about the events at home. Several have spouses who work.

Vicka Ivankovic is a particular favorite. From the balcony of her powder blue house, she dispenses motherly advice while she waves to passing neighbors, nods to the birds in her plum tree, and smiles at pilgrims with such unguarded affection that they could only conclude it must be nice to have visits from the Blessed Mother.

As his eight days in Medjugorje wore on, Champ spent most of his time in bed, taking medicine he got from a doctor. Others could hike the rocky Apparition Hill, where the children had their first vision. The hill now gets as crowded as a New York City street. People in their 70s or 80s make the climb dressed in high-heeled shoes and carrying a purse--symbols of their generation. Champ heard about it all at dinner.

He passed, as well, on the rugged hike to the top of Cross Mountain, another outdoor apparition site. Friday afternoons, villagers climb the hill and follow the Stations of the Cross, the prayer that recalls the passion and death of Jesus.

Champ stayed indoors, storing up strength. An invitation to be with the visionary Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti during one of her apparitions got him to his feet.

The convent chapel where the event was held was so crowded that steam clouded the windows. Pavlovic-Lunetti brought along her baby boy, whose crying held up the main event--a reminder of the uneasy fit between human and divine purposes. She led the prayers in her native Croatian; everyone answered in his or her own language. French, German, English, Italian all spoken at once, yet every person knew what the others were saying.

Suddenly, Pavlovic-Lunetti looked up. There was no sound in the room for long moments after that. When she looked down again, she said, “Our Lady blessed all of us.” People looked around, discreetly. Some faces were beaming, some shining from tears. Some looked confused, not certain what to make of it.

The next morning, Champ confided, “Our Lady told me she loves me. She didn’t send somebody else to tell me. She told me herself.” He explained this to Father Slavko Barbaric, the parish priest from St. James who came to his bedside to hear his confession.

Champ’s health continued to fail and he took most of his meals in his room. Several times on the flight back to Chicago the flight attendant gave him emergency oxygen. He went straight from the airport to a nearby hospital. Several weeks later he had angioplasty surgery and is still in recovery.

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Saturday afternoons the soldiers come to Medjugorje. United Nations peacekeeping forces on their day off wander the center of town, which is filled with souvenir shops, hotels and cafes. S-4 troops have been stationed nearby since the end of the war in 1995. They are scheduled to remain in the area until June 1998. Dressed in jungle fatigues, they mix with pilgrims and tourists at Colombo’s, the local hot spot that serves gourmet pizza and espresso.

Throughout the bombings and invasions, Medjugorje was preserved. This surprises some who had visited in the tense months before the fighting broke out.

“I was here in 1990 and there were helicopters circling over our heads when we were climbing Apparition Hill,” Reding said. “The Communists seemed to want us to know they were in charge.”

Zovko heard their opinions directly from them.

“Early in the war I was asked to meet one of the Serbian leaders,” he said. “He showed me faxes from Belgrade and Moscow asking, ‘How could you allow something like Medjugorje?’ They intended to destroy it.”

Bombs were dropped but they landed in an empty field. “Not even one small house was destroyed.”

For days, American Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady was stranded in the area when his plane was shot down. He talked about it during a television interview. “I considered myself religious before, but not, you know, to where I believed in any of that,” he said of the events at Medjugorje.

That has changed. “I don’t know what I saw, but I saw something,” he said.

Most of the young taxi drivers who shuttle pilgrims around town served in the war. Ante Vasilj-Sususic, born in Medjugorje, was in the army for five years. “In her messages, the Madonna says, ‘Do these things and there will be peace,’ ” he said. “But I say there will be war again in 10 years.”

He is convinced the swelling economy that followed the pilgrims to Medjugorje has ruined his village. “The only thing people think about is money,” he said. “If you have a house with 15 rooms, I want one with 20.”

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Perhaps the most cynical explanation of Medjugorje suggests that the Croatians, virtually all of them baptized Catholics, have used it for political and national ends.

Chris Merrill heard that version of the mystery during his frequent trips to the Balkans before and during the war. A professor of contemporary literature at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, he was in Bosnia to research his book, “The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee” (Milkweed Editions, 1995). “Whether the apparitions actually happened or not, they have become part of the building of a national identity,” Merrill said.

Croatia declared its independence June 25, 1992, the 11th anniversary of the apparitions. This winter, President Franjo Tudjman made an official visit to the remote shrine.

“In Croatia, religion means nation and nation means religion,” said Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian writer who lives in Zagreb and Vienna. Her book of essays, “Cafe Europa” (Norton, 1996), is a culture watcher’s look at life after communism. “In our last census, over 90% of Croatians said they are Catholic,” she said. “Not necessarily because they are believers but as a way of saying, ‘We are not Serbs.’ So, Medjugorje has a symbolic meaning. It is part of Croatia’s identity as a Catholic country.”

Her friends and family have not made the pilgrimage.

“No one says it’s nonsense or feels embarrassed by it,” she explained. “They seem utterly indifferent. Maybe it’s just too close to home.”

The Vatican has not approved or disapproved the apparitions at Medjugorje, but Zovko has hopes. Recently, he gave the pope a report of the events of the past 15 years and was encouraged by the results.

“The pope shook my hand, very firmly, and said ‘Guard Medjugorje, protect Medjugorje.’ ”

Millions of devout Catholics, including clergy, have made the pilgrimage. Many have been inspired to organize annual Medjugorje conferences, like the one held in Irvine each fall. There are 17 such gatherings listed for this year on the Medjugorje World Wide Web site’s conference schedule page.

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In a vast green tent on the lawn outside St. James church, Barbaric offers a sort of orientation meeting. Fifteen years ago he spoke only Croatian and German. Now he flips from English to Italian to French like a U.N. translator. Quick and wiry with steel wool for hair and a fiery sense of humor, he greets new arrivals with a story.

“Some people come to Medjugorje and ask, ‘Why does the Blessed Mother talk so much? Talk, talk, talk. She’s always saying the same things. She wants us to love. And to fast two times every week, and pray three hours every day, and go to confession every month. Who has time?’ ”

Over the years he formed his answer:

“Medjugorje is the school of Our Lady. Here, she is our teacher. She is slow and patient with her students. And if the teacher repeats things again and again, maybe it is more of a comment on the students than on her.”