Travellers Are Heading To Medjugorje To Mark Thirty Years Since A Group Of Local Teenagers Claimed To Have First Seen A Vision Of The Virgin Mary, An Event That Has Drawn Many Millions Of Folks To This Remote Town In Southern Bosnia.

Pilgrims ARE heading to Medjugorje to mark 30 years since a bunch of local kids claimed to have first seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, an event that has drawn tens of millions of people to this remote town in southern Bosnia.

Visitors from around the world will rise at dawn and climb the rocky Krizevac or Cross Hill to where Our Woman is said to have appeared, to start a day of memorial events that many hope will help Medjugorje’s bid for Vatican recognition as a location of special importance.

A Vatican commission controlled by influential Italian cardinal Camillo Ruini last year opened an investigation into the authenticity of the apparitions. Some of the self-declared idealists say that Mary still visits them each day and gives them messages to pass on to the world .

Disputes over the validity of the visions has led to occasionally sour disputes between local priests and prompted warnings from the Vatican, but advocates were heartened when Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, a close ally of Pope Benedict, made a private trip to Medjugorje in late 2009.

The town, that has grown at an incredible rate in recent years and is replete with hotels, restaurants and keepsake shops, was yesterday thronged with pilgrims who braved 35-degree heat to scale the steep and rough hill and offer requests to Our Woman.

“It was a long journey to get here but with prayer anything is possible,” said Tadas Bertulis ( 30 ), who endured a three-day bus ride from Lithuania to reach this once-obscure corner of Bosnia.

“Mary was with us on the road and She’s with us here. I haven’t any words to explain the feeling of being here,” he said, adding that a group of fellow Lithuanians were now walking from their Baltic homeland to Medjugorje and hoped to arrive in September.

Eileen O’Connor from Company Galway was on a “holy holiday” with kin. “I have been to Medjugorje 20 times in 10 years. The 1st time, I came to Our Woman with a big cross on my shoulder which was lifted. So I have been pronouncing thank you for that. There are so many people here there appear to be many more than than normal. However it is relaxed and there is always so much joy here”, writes tagza.com.

The place of Our Lady’s first apparitions on the hill of Crnica is mostly called Apparition Hill. It is situated a couple of hundred meters above the Bijakovo hamlet of Podbrdo in Medjugorje. A steep footpath leads from the homes to the very place of the apparitions. Now slightly dilated by the many millions of travellers who have so far made a trip to the place of the first apparitions, the path has become visible from as far away as St. James.

Numerous pilgrims, plenty of whom were born and raised on flat asphalt, regularly in less than suitable clothing or barefoot, and on their knees, climbed over the pointed stones to the place of Our Lady’s first apparitions. Half way up the path is located a large plain wooden cross. Here’s where on the third day of the apparitions, June twenty-six, 1981, Our Woman appeared to the idealist Marija Pavlovic who, after having had a vision with the others at the common place that evening, ran down the hill a little ahead of the other visionaries. At this place Marija once again saw Our Woman, now with a sad face.

Behind her was a huge cross and motioning with her hands she revealed, “Peace, peace, peace and only peace! Peace must reign between God and man and also between men!” Today this is a place where travellers stop, remaining in prayer and reflection on the message given by Our Woman, directed to occupy, and the sector of today, which is so much in such great need of peace.

The site of apparitions is a huge bare space on the rocky ground more than a hundred meters in diameter, absolutely trodden down by the feet of millions of travellers, without a single stem or blade of grass between the rocks, without hardly a lump of ground or even small rocks. At the site that the idealists closely marked as the place where Our Woman had appeared to them, a high cross is erected, planted into a heap of rocks. Only something truly unusual might have attracted such a great profusion of people to that place. At any time of night or day, any day of the year, individuals and groups can be discovered in prayer, in song, in deep meditation, and silence.

Beside these apparitions a lot of other miracles and confusing phenomena occur in Medjugorje. One example : It happend a couple of times that someone in Medjugorje or in other places in the world has made a picture and rather than the first motive there was an entirely different picture, ie the Virgin Mary. Of course, it is certainly feasible to fake a picture, but this happend to folk who failed to know each other.They are from totaly different nations but the motive on the picture was always the same.

After a while the motiv modified. It was always Virgin Mary, but infrequently it was just her and often you could see her holding Jesus. A picture which was made in Medjugorje did not show the first motiv after the development. Rather than the first motiv something wholly different
Was shown : in this case the image of Mary with the child Jesus.

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