I travelled to the shrine to Our

Medjugorje: A shrine to the living God

I travelled to the shrine to Our Lady in Medjugorje last summer. Medjugorje is in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia where there are ethnic tensions like here in Northern Ireland and where there was extremely violent civil war in the early 1990s. So I was a little concerned what the attraction to the shrine was for me given that I have been deep in communication with God for more than a couple of decades.

For example, was it signifying that the fact that Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley’s names come out at 666 – something which I discovered myself in 1986 during an experience inspired by the Holy Spirit (see Love is the Answer: The SDLP, Christianity, and the Northern Ireland Conflict) – renders the North a very volatile part of the world in spiritual terms and that volatility would eventually lead to a Bosnia on these shores?

I was nervous about that during the whole visit to the Bosnian village, and that nervousness has not gone away yet.

There was just something so intriguing in the way that the young visionaries had been told to pray the Rosary – which is a way that I have now adopted too – with the seven Our Fathers, the seven Hail Marys and the seven Glory Bes. Our Lady had apparently told the visionaries to use the Biblical number for perfection, seven, three times, in praying the Rosary. It was a new Rosary, but it was also a 7-7-7 code, which tied in very neatly with my own experience of discovering a 6-6-6 code five years after the first encounter of the six visionaries with Our Lady.

The fact that there were six visionaries also intrigued me. It meant that there was a gap in the logic of God who would, I assumed, in such a perfect shrine village have made the number seven. While there, I was often lost to the world in the notion that I was the seventh visionary, the unknown one who the world would one day realise as the most important one of the seven, having been given a mission of highlighting the lack of Christ at the extremes of the North’s society.

Yet I was no more important than the visionaries, whose task is to give the messages from Our Lady, messages which invariably point to the fact that we are living in the End Times, and that God is judging the world at this very moment.

I couldn’t help feeling that only a select few will take the messages seriously, and that many will only go away with an understanding of the fact that something special is happening at the minute: a shrine is alive and messages were being concurrently received as people visited the place.

But God will have tipped his cap to the faithful in supplying the information being given out at the shrine and no-one can come back to him with the rebuke that he didn’t warn us that big ructions were taking place in the world and in God’s kingdom. No-one can say that he didn’t warn us.

He has truly warned us alright in the most beautiful shrine village that the world will probably ever know. I was in awe of the remarkable simplicity of the place. Apart from the commercialisation of the main street where everything, but mainly things of a religious nature, can be bought, it was a very well thought out location for the most remarkable happening in the Catholic world.

It was classical God. On one side is Apparition Hill, where the first vision was experienced by the six – mainly teenage – children in June 1981. I was shocked by the steepness and the rocky nature of the climb, but did it comfortably. On the other side is Cross Mountain where other visions took place, and as it was an altogether more challenging climb, I decided to leave it until next time when I was a little lighter.

In the middle is St James’ Chapel with a line of confession boxes and open air confession, and behind it was the weeping statue of the Risen Jesus, which weeps what are said to be “human tears” from the just reachable right knee.

The whole set-up is a massive hypnotic, a conceptual hypnotic created by God. Everything about the place sets you at ease that you are in a good place and that you are among good people. People are constantly climbing Apparition Hill and Cross Mountain, and going to mass.

Mass is in German at nine o’clock in the morning, English at ten, and Italian at eleven. There was some friction between the Irish and the Italians because, so strong was their desire to get a seat for mass, some Italians would push their way into the chapel as we were leaving.

It was the most remarkable of experiences. It set my mind deep in thought about the possible meaning for the North of Ireland of such an incredibly beautiful scene in 2006. It is certainly a warning, but of what? What would God’s judgement be for a North of Ireland that has leaders such as Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams? Can the now young men and women visionaries of Medjugorje, a village set against the backdrop of civil war in their own country, be indicating that judgement is about the unleashing of violence where certain leaders have refused to bow to God through accepting Christ as the saviour of the world? Over to you, Gerry and Ian.

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*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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