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Grouping BridgePilgrims Are Swarming To Medjugorje To Mark 30 Years Since A Grouping Of Local Kids Claimed To Have First Seen A Vision Of The Virgin Mary, An Event That Has Drawn Tens Of Millions Of Folks To This Remote Village In Southern Bosnia.
Travellers 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 tens of millions of folks to this remote town in southern Bosnia.
Visitors from across 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 aid Medjugorje's bid for Vatican recognition as a site of special significance.
A Vatican commission led 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 each day and gives them messages to pass on to the world .
Disputes over the authenticity of the visions has been responsible for sometimes sour disputes between local clergymen and pushed 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 hamlet, that has grown at an extraordinary rate in recent years and is replete with hotels, cafes and keepsake shops, was yesterday thronged with pilgrims who braved 35-degree heat to scale the steep and rugged hill and offer prayers to Our Woman.
"It was a long journey 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 haven't 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 Corp Galway was on a "holy holiday" with relatives. "I have been to Medjugorje 20 times in 10 years. The first time, I came to Our Woman with a huge cross on my shoulder and it was lifted. So I have been asserting many thanks for that. There are such a lot of folks here there seem to be many more than than normal. But it is peaceful 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 few hundred meters above the Bijakovo hamlet of Podbrdo in Medjugorje. A steep footpath leads from the homes to the place of the apparitions. Now a touch widened by the uncountable millions of travellers who've so far made a trip to the place of the first apparitions, the path has become perceivable from as far distant as St. James.
Many pilgrims, many of whom were raised on flat asphalt, often in not suitable clothing or even shoeless, and on their knees, climbed over the sharp stones to the place of Our Lady's first apparitions. Half way up the path is found a massive plain wooden cross. Here's where on the 3rd day of the apparitions, June 26, 1981, Our Woman seemed to the visionary Marija Pavlovic who, after having had a vision with the others at the usual 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 unhappy face.
Behind her was an enormous 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 man, and the arena 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 a hundred 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 much of a lump 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 truly unusual could have attracted such a great variety of folks to that place. At any point 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 a lot of other miracles and confusing phenomena occur 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 first motive there was a completely different picture, specifically the Virgin Mary. Of course, it is surely feasible to fake a photograph, but this happend to people who didn't know each other.They are from totaly different countries but the motive on the picture was always the same.
After a while the motiv changed. 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 didn't show the first motiv after the development. Instead of the original motiv something entirely different
Was shown : in this example the image of Mary with the child Jesus.
The Great Garratt Gathering (15th August 2009): Part 4 - Hassell Harbour Bridge