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Constant Head To Medjugorje On 30th Anniversary Of Apparition.
Pilgrims ARE heading to Medjugorje to mark thirty years since a bunch of local teens claimed to have first seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, an event that has drawn many millions of people to this remote town in southern Bosnia.
Visitors from all over the world will rise at dawn and climb the rocky Krizevac or Cross Hill to where Our Lady is claimed 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 significance.
A Vatican commission controlled by influential Italian cardinal Camillo Ruini last year opened an inquiry into the authenticity of the apparitions. Some of the self-declared visionaries say that Mary still visits them every day and gives them messages to pass on to the world .
Disputes over the providence of the visions has led to occasionally sour disputes between local clergymen and inspired cautions 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 village, that has grown at an extraordinary rate in recent times and is replete with hostels, restaurants and memento shops, was yesterday thronged with pilgrims who braved 35-degree heat to scale the steep and craggy hill and offer requests to Our Woman.
“It was a long trip to get here but with prayer anything is possible,” claimed 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 is with us here. I don’t have any words to describe the feeling of being here,” he revealed, adding that a bunch of fellow Lithuanians were now walking from their Baltic homeland to Medjugorje and hoped to arrive in Sep.
Eileen O’Connor from Company Galway was on a “holy holiday” with relatives. “I have been to Medjugorje 20 times in ten years. The 1st time, I came to Our Lady with a massive cross on my shoulder and that was lifted. So I’ve been pronouncing thanks for that. There are such a lot of folk here there seem to be a lot more than than usual. It is tranquil and there’s always so much joy here”, writes tagza.com.
The place of Our Lady’s first apparitions on the hill of Crnica is generally called Apparition Hill. It is situated several hundred meters above the Bijakovo hamlet of Podbrdo in Medjugorje. A steep footpath leads from the houses to the very place of the apparitions. Now a touch dilated by the many millions of travellers who’ve so far visited the place of the first apparitions, the trail has become perceivable from as far away as St. James.
Many pilgrims, many of whom were born and raised on flat asphalt, frequently in less than suitable clothing or barefoot, and on their knees, climbed over the sharpened stones to the place of Our Lady’s first apparitions. Half way up the trail is found a large plain wooden cross. Here is where on the 3rd day of the apparitions, June 26, 1981, Our Lady seemed to the visionary Marija Pavlovic who, after having had a vision with the others at the common place that evening, ran down the hill a little before the other idealists. At this place Marija once more saw Our Woman, now with a miserable 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 Lady, directed to man, and the world of today, which is so much in such great need of peace.
The location of apparitions is a giant bare space on the rocky ground more than 100 meters in diameter, completely trodden down by the feet of millions of travellers, without a single stem or blade of grass between the rocks, without not a pile of ground or perhaps little rocks. At the site that the visionaries closely marked as the very place where Our Woman had appeared to them, a high cross is erected, planted into a pile of rocks. Only something actually remarkable might have attracted such a great profusion of folks to that place. At any time of day or night, any day of the year, individuals and groups can be found in prayer, in song, in deep meditation, and silence.
Beside these apparitions plenty of other miracles and mysterious phenomena happen in Medjugorje. One example : It happend a few times that someone in Medjugorje or in other places in the world has made a picture and rather than the original motive there was a totally different picture, namely the Virgin Mary. Of course, it is certainly possible to fake an image, 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 sometimes it was just her and often you could see her holding Jesus. A picture which was made in Medjugorje did not show the original motiv after the development. Instead of the first motiv something completely different
Was shown : in this situation the image of Mary with the kid Jesus.
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