THE ARGUMENT THAT THE VISIONS OF MEDJUGORJE PRODUCE GOOD AND HOLY FRUITS AND SO ARE PROBABLY FROM GOD
Catholic teaching is that God is clear with us and will not let us be confused
so confusion only happens because people fool others. He wants his Church to be
one and firm in faith.
He supposedly gave us bishops to protect the faith. St Paul wrote that God
appoints leaders in the world implying that this is true of religious leaders
than anybody else. See Romans 13. Catholic teaching is that we do not need
further revelations from God since the apostles died and the purpose of
apparitions that have taken place since is to tell us to look at the truth
brought by Jesus and the apostles. So they reinforce that there is no new
revelation. For these reasons any apparition condemned by a bishop that is a
cause of disobedience IS A BAD FRUIT! Any good fruits are irrelevant for
everything bad does some good. The big fruit is bad so the other fruits mean
nothing. Good fruits do not compensate for bad ones!
One bad fruit is the lies told about the popes believing in the visions.
Read this letter.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
I-00120 CITTÀ DEL Vaticano
22 Juli 1998
Herrn …………
00069 Trevignano Romano (RM)
Dear Mr. …
First of all, I have to apologize for answering your kind letter from 27th May only today. The burden (i.e. work load) of the last few weeks has been so heavy that I had to postpone my private correspondence again and again so that only now, as my vacation is about to begin, I can at last try to answer the more important letters.
I thank you very much for sending me the memorandum by
Claus Peter Clausen, whom in fact I know as the author of the Schwarze Briefe
(Black Letters). I can only say that the statements attributed to the Holy
Father and me are freely invented.
With my best wishes for your manifold activities.
Josef Ratzinger
Mary's Birthday
The Gospa or apparition claims that she was born on August 5, 16 BC.
Some defenders of this message say that she did say that it was August 5 but did not give a year. They are lying. Why? It is because the New Testament dates Jesus' birth about 7 BC. The thought that Mary was 9 or 10 when she gave birth is not something the Church wants people to think. It means she could have been pregnant at 8. Plus her poor undernourished background would mean she was in the physical condition of a much younger girl. She may as well have been pregnant at 5.
Devotees of the vision did however celebrate her being 2,000 years old in 1984.
Nothing changes the fact that the Spiritual Director of the visionaries Tomislav Vlasic wrote this in May 1984: Today I visited Bishop Pavao Zanic. I brought him the last part of the ‘journal’ from Jelena and Marijana Vasilj. I also brought him the message from the Gospa that was given to Jelena for him, for the Holy Father, and for the Christian public, according to which the 2000th birthday of the Mother of God is August 5, 1984.”
This assertion that Mary was in her 2000th year was reiterated June 14, July 27, 29, 30.
Fruits don't count at all if Mary was that young and that abused by God. Worse, the apparition is not far wrong when it says she was underage. It is a little known fact that when Jesus banned females from divorcing their husbands this would have virtually only applied to female children railroaded into marriage when their bodies were not ready. It was abuse considering how high maternal mortality was and underage mothers was making it worse.
Credulity leads to credulity
Chris Maunder in Our Lady of the Nations writes,
"Medjugorje presents a problem for research, as no thorough academic and
objective treatment has been published in English." He complains that Sandra
Zimdars-Swartz depended on devotional pro-Medjugorje material for her chapter on
the subject in Encountering Mary.
The apparition is pure hype and thus dangerous.
Self-absorbed visionaries
Marco Corvaglia tells us that by 2018 the alleged visionaries of Medjugorje have had about 1,100 chats with the Virgin Mary. Marija, Vicka and Ivan say they have visions every day. Mirjana has hers once a month. Ivanka and Jacov say they see her on a yearly basis. The public messages are very few. It is just a couple of dozen a year at most. The bulk are private talks between the vision and her visionary. None of them come together to have an apparition. The Bible rule that you need two testimonies before God is dismissed. Even Jesus said he agreed with the rule and reinforced it.
As you would expect, Ivan clearly says the vision just comes for him virtually all the time: “Our Lady talks to me of some personal matters and gives me advice on what to do - the messages are for me and my family. See Livio Fanzaga, Gianni Sgreva, I messaggi della Regina della Pace, Shalom, Camerata Picena 2010, p. 115.
Vicka seems to have deeper chats and keeps friends and family and herself out of it. She says that she does not speak with “Our Lady of everyday things, like people's problems or my personal issues, I prefer to avoid these discourses. See Vicka Ivankovic-Mijatovic, Maria mi parla. La mia storia, Piemme, Milan 2014, p. 55. She says, “I never ask her questions for myself. It would be too easy for me to have Our Lady saying: ‘Do this, do that’.” See Vicka Ivankovic-Mijatovic, A Medjugorje con Maria. I segreti che la Madonna mi ha affidato, Piemme, Milan 2015, p. 152.
It is suspicious that Mary does it so differently with Ivan than with Vicka. It has been suggested that she is doing what the visionaries expect of her so that is the solution. The Church frowns upon visions like Ivan’s that seem more worried about hanging out than spiritual stuff.
The privacy is too much. The Church refers to Lourdes etc as Private Revelation but that only means it is something the Church as a whole does not have to believe in. The message of a private revelation is for the people. Medjugorje goes too far with the private and thus is in breach of Catholic criteria for judging an apparition.
Vicka has claimed Mary never mentioned contraception being a sin. Why is Mary talking to her and not telling her abortion and same sex marriage are wrong? What are they talking about anyway if not religious and ethical matters?
Medjugorje is a bad fruit with the visionaries. The visionaries are what you look at first in terms of fruits. No other fruits can matter as much.
Disobedience
Medjugorje has examples of the Virgin encouraging pilgrims and the visionaries
to disobey the bishop. The bishops see the visions as not being from the real
Virgin Mary.
The diocese that looks after Medjugorje posted the following commands to the
parish, the visionaries and the Franciscans in 2006. They were restrictions made
by the bishop. He had every right to make them - even if he was wrong - as a
bishop. The only response he got was disobedience. The Church does not accept
apparitions as being truly from God if they are a source of disobedience.
The following is forbidden
- NO more retreats, spiritual exercises, conferences, foreign priests… without
permission of the bishop
- NO own or foreign priests may propagate NON-recognized ‘messages’ or
‘apparitions’
- EVERY priest must show his ‘celebret’ before H.Mass
- NO more Blessed Sacrament or adoration in ‘Oasis of Peace’; even NO permission
to reside in whole diocese [not sure what that last part means]
- NO services in the private church in Bijakovice; it is now closed.
- NO mentioning of ‘seers’, apparitions, messages’ in parish bulletin;
- NO mentioning of the word ‘sanctuary’ in Medjugorje
- NO mentioning or comment of ‘messages’ or ‘apparitions’ on the 25th of the
month via Marija Pavlovic
- NO private ‘apparitions’ of Mirjana Dragicevic in ‘Cenacolo’ of Sr. Elvira
- NO permission for ‘Kraljica Mira’(founder : Tomislav Vlasic) in Medjugorje or
in whole diocese
- NO ‘seers’ or others in the church to pray prayers from the ‘apparitions’
- NO intentions during the rosary concerning ‘apparitions’ or ‘messages’
- NO ‘seers’ in or around the church on anniversaries of ‘apparitions’ or
‘messages
Jesus stated that you can tell when phenomena is not from God even if it seems
to be, when the fruits are bad (Matthew 7:15-23). The bad fruits of Medjugorje
are very numerous. All good that comes from an error is really bad for it causes
commitment to what is untrue. It could have terrible consequences that outweigh
any good done when the victims discover they have been taken for a ride. The
Church has wilfully failed to notice that when she merely permits belief in
apparitions and makes people free to disbelieve them that people should not
believe in God and Jesus and in the Catholic Church because of an apparition. It
should be because of the Bible and divine tradition – if the Church is right to
make tradition another source of infallible revelation that one is bound to
believe. Apparitions make people stronger in faith because they are miracles and
that is heretical. The fruits are really anti-Catholic. The apparition can only
happen for people who are already well grounded in their faith and have seen and
tasted the evidence and based their thinking and lives on divine revelation. The
apparition does not come as a ground for faith but as a pointer to the grounds
of faith. This criterion eliminates the authenticity of the appearances to
Bernadette at Lourdes, the children at Fatima, the appearance to Juan Diego in
Guadalupe, the vision of La Salette to two ignorant children and most of the
miracles of the Catholic Church that it has declared to be of God. The Med
Virgin approves of these appearances and so she refutes her own apparitions and
she appeared to six children who did not have the kind of education it takes to
have a true Christian faith. Their faith would really have been feeling with a
little belief in some things maintained by habit and the desire to be like
everybody else. The feeling element would have been predominant.
It is myopic to argue that Medjugorje brings people back to confession and Mass
and prayer and fasting and that that means it has good fruits for the vast
majority of Catholics doing these things do not understand Church doctrine and
are consciously or unconsciously holding to unCatholic doctrines. So their
devotion to error is increased not deadened. If Catholicism is the true faith
then it follows that to err as a Catholic and be devoted to that error is
extremely dangerous for you have so much of the truth and you will be attached
more to the error it has been mixed up in and because of the truth so that you
will find it too hard to give up the error and nearly always won’t try. Error
that contains a huge portion of the truth is the number one enemy of the Church
for it is a Trojan Horse and very subtle and captivating. The apparitions
accepted by the Church and Medjugorje never made a major point about being
instructed properly in the faith which shows that their fruits were as false as
themselves.
THE LIES
Fr Lauretin was the main catalyst of the Medjugorje popularity. Like others he feared that if a group reports experiences then their tales will be less credible if they are related and have an okay relationship. So what did Laurentin do? He lied in 1984 that the Medjugorje visionaries were related. We are not told that the Ivankoics are cousins and that Marija and Jakov Dragicevic are cousins. His lies succeeded in fuelling the Medjugorje industry.
FINALLY
The endless lies about these "apparitions" is
not a good sign on any level. The fruits clearly in this case
show the vision is from man or Satan if you believe in him.
