Of Men and Mary Page 19

  There were moments when I wondered why God allowed things to happen as they did. I had to take a semester off from school, and during those months, I would sleep sixteen to eighteen hours a day because of the trauma to my brain and the constant pain. At least every other day for many months, I had to rouse myself to visit a doctor when my body couldn’t imagine moving an inch. I knew that God never does anything by accident, that everything has a purpose, but still I had to make an act of faith many, many times: “Lord, I trust in you. I know you’re going to work through this, even though I don’t understand how.”

  Over the course of time, I came to understand clearly that the accident was one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me. To give one example, my dad was very strict when I was growing up, and I’d always felt that things had to go his way or the highway. Though I always knew he loved me, he was unable to express it verbally and struggled to show his affection for me. He could not say, “I love you.”

  When I was forced to spend a semester at home, essentially bedbound, except for doctor visits, I would see my dad every evening at dinner. With my mouth torn apart and swollen, I could only eat pureed food for several weeks, most of which would fall from my mouth and drop onto my bib and tray. Every evening, my mom would spoon-feed me, like she did when I was an infant, wiping off my chin and scooping up what she could. And every evening from across the table, my dad would sit, looking at me with tears welling in his eyes, sometimes wiping them from his cheeks. I began to realize that God allowed everything for the healing of our relationship because I was able to see how much my dad loved me. I know without a doubt that he suffered more than I did through the accident and all that transpired afterward. I didn’t understand the ordeal while I was going through it, but the aftermath was better than anything I could have imagined. Honestly, I would have endured it all just for that, just for the mending of our relationship.

  I knew that God would always bring good out of suffering, but I, too, wondered for a long time what purpose there was for God allowing this terrible accident—until I really looked at Jeremy and saw his great faith, strength, fortitude, and tremendous compassion for others. Suddenly, my son was all grown up. He had to suffer mentally, spiritually, and physically with excruciating pain for months on end, and never once did he complain. The only time I saw his pain was when he looked in the mirror for the first time after the accident. Tears started to run down his face. But he never said a word, never uttered a single “I’m suffering” or “It hurts.”

  What was God’s gift to me? I gained an appreciation for Our Lady’s offering of her Son. My children mean everything to me, and no parent ever wants to lose a child. When I was sitting on that highway divider in Austria, holding Jeremy in my arms in the cold blackness of night, I was given the grace to see that good can come from anything. In what I can only describe as a state of serene agony, I felt an inner communion with Our Lady like never before or since.

  I believe that Mother Mary was truly there with me then, and she has been actively with me in every critical moment of my life. She is the hidden hand that brought me and my family to her Son and his Church, the tender arms that have carried me through my darkest moments. She is the loving mother I felt unashamed to approach when sorrow and guilt kept me from turning to her Son. She is the catalyst for my family’s conversion, the guiding light of their salvation, and the inspiration for my son Jeremy’s conversion and his priesthood.

  After my pilgrimage to Medjugorje, I felt it was Our Lady’s desire that my family go there with me one day, so I prayed for this intention for many years. Again, God answered my prayer, not in the way I imagined or in the time frame I had hoped, but better than I could have dreamed. Eight years after I traveled to Medjugorje, I took Jennifer and the kids there, and we were blessed beyond measure. My children then led five more pilgrimages to Medjugorje, bringing their neighbors, friends, and families. Altogether, our family has organized over twelve pilgrimages to Medjugorje, taking groups of forty or fifty people at a time, and we’ve witnessed multiple conversions. As a result, my ten brothers and sisters are all back in the faith, as are their children. My wife and all of my four children are striving to be saints. I don’t know where my family and I would be today without Our Lady. What began on December 22, the day my father had us baptized Catholic—a day we have celebrated with a Mass and dinner every year since—was set aflame by Medjugorje.

  It astounds me how one can teach the truth, take people to church, have them read spiritual books, and little changes; but take them to Medjugorje, and they’re often converted within a week. When I give people literature about Medjugorje and the messages, or I encourage them to go on a pilgrimage, their lives transform.

  I am extremely happy to see now that the Church has approved official pilgrimages and supports Medjugorje gatherings and conferences. Though the commission established by Pope Benedict XVI to investigate Medjugorje were in near-unanimous agreement that the first seven days of the apparitions were real, some people still distance themselves from Medjugorje and will not travel there because they want to be faithful to the Church, which has not yet formally approved the apparitions. However, this is not a Catholic way, nor a Christian way of thinking. If this were a proper response, then there would have been no one to witness the miracle of the sun at Fatima, no one to go into the healing waters at Lourdes. The Church, as a good Mother, has given us the charge: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good” (1 Thes 5:19-21).

  I hear others say, “I can go visit the Blessed Sacrament here. The Mass contains the greatest prayer to God. I don’t need to go to Medjugorje.” And that is true. But for some reason, God seems to think that we need Our Blessed Mother right now because he’s sending her, and I don’t have a better idea than he does. I’ve often thought, “How did I learn about the value of the Mass? Where did I find out about Adoration? Where did I learn about my faith? Where did I learn how to pray? It was Our Lady who taught me in her school of Medjugorje.

  The last to bend was my father. One thing he had no desire to do was to go to Medjugorje, even though his ten children and fifty-six grandkids were alive in the faith because of it: “I can pray to Our Lady right here. In fact, I pray to her all the time. I don’t need to see miracles. I already have faith.” Stubbornly resistant, he wouldn’t go. Ten years after the rest of his family had first traveled there, including his wife, my dad said spontaneously, “I think I’m going to go to Medjugorje.”

  “I thought you didn’t have to . . .”

  “I don’t have to. But I want to. I just want to go by myself.” He wouldn’t even take my mother.

  When my father was in Medjugorje, he had no desire to see any miracles. He believed they were a distraction, even a detraction, from true faith; he didn’t need reasons to believe or “selfish amusements.” It so happened that during his pilgrimage, on the day the visionary Mirjana received her monthly apparition of the Blessed Mother, my dad was present only a few feet away from her. He watched intently as Mirjana’s head suddenly tilted upward, her eyes focused a few feet above and in front of her, and her face softened with an expressive look of tenderness, awe, and love. He was so close as to see the tears running down her cheeks. Like son, like father, he was inundated by such powerful feelings that he had to get away. While Mary continued to appear to Mirjana on earth, he began walking through the grape fields. Only moments later, a man in front of him looked down at his rosary and gasped, “My rosary turned gold!”

  Then another man pulled his rosary out of his pocket and exclaimed, “Mine did, too!”

  Irritated by the “sideshow,” my father quickened his pace to pass them, when another man put his hand on my dad’s shoulder and pointed to the sky: “Look! Look up!” At the very moment when my father was running away from miracles, he was confronted with one of the most spectacular of them all—the miracle of the sun.

  He found himself staring directly and comfortably a
t the blazing source of the earth’s light and heat, which was spinning rapidly and emitting every dazzling color of the rainbow. Overcome with wonder, he felt a tsunami of emotion erupt in his heart, which brought him to his knees. Time disappeared. A transcendent love washed over him and through him, and he cried and cried and cried.

  Since then, my father has had the special grace of being able to see the miracle of the sun wherever he is, whenever he chooses to. My dad used to be the most stoic, stubborn person. He struggled to show what was in his heart: his love for his family and wife. We kids knew that he loved us, but he would never hug us, touch us, or say “I love you.” And now my silly dad can’t hide his tender feelings and weeps all the time. When the subject of Mary or faith comes up, he can’t help but cry. He’s even worse than I . . . thanks to our Mother in heaven.

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  APPENDIX

  A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE

  MEDJUGORJE APPARITIONS

  On June 24, 1981, in a remote village in the former communist Yugoslavia, two teenage girls, Mirjana and Ivanka, went for a walk. As they exchanged the latest news in their lives, Ivanka suddenly noticed a light high up on Mount Podbrdo, the large hill behind the village. Looking up, she saw a woman, radiating with light, hovering above the ground on a cloud and holding a baby in her arms. Ivanka said to Mirjana, “I think that Our Lady is on the hill.” Mirjana, not bothering to glance up, responded glibly, “Yes, Our Lady has nothing better to do than to come to the two of us.”

  Brushing off Ivanka’s strange behavior, she left and walked back toward the village, but she soon felt a great urge to return. When she did, she found Ivanka in the same spot, still staring at the hill, mesmerized. “Look at it now, please,” said Ivanka. Mirjana looked up and saw a beautiful woman with blue eyes and long, dark hair, dressed in a gray dress and a white veil, with a baby in her arms and a crown of twelve stars around her head. Mirjana says of that instant, “All the possible emotions that exist I felt in my heart at the same time. To put it simply, I was not aware if I was alive or dead.”

  Just then, a friend of theirs named Vicka was passing by, looking for the two of them, and when she, too, saw the woman on the hill, she jumped out of her slippers and ran headlong back to the village. A few moments later, a teenage boy named Ivan walked by on his way home carrying apples in his arms, and upon seeing the woman, threw down the apples and ran away. Then Mirjana said to Ivanka, “Who knows what’s going on? It’s better for us to go home as well.”

  The next day, all four children felt drawn back to the same spot (which is now called Apparition Hill). Vicka ran to get her friend, Marija, and ten-year-old Jakov, and all six children saw the beautiful woman. Then again, the following day after that, July 26, they saw her—this time with nearly the entire village present. On that day, more than five thousand people saw the visionaries bathed in an immense light and believed.

  As soon as the woman appeared, Vicka, at her grandmother’s urging, sprinkled holy water on her in the sign of the cross and said, “If you are Satan, go away from us.” The woman just smiled with an expression of immense love, and then she spoke:

  Do not be afraid, dear angels.

  I am the Mother of God.

  I am the Queen of Peace.

  I am the mother of all people.1

  Thus began Mary’s daily apparitions to the six children, the longest-occurring series of apparitions in Church history. They continue to this day. Why has she been appearing so long? She answers this question in her message of January 25, 2009:

  . . . I am with you for this long because you are on the wrong path. Only with my help, little children, you will open your eyes. There are many of those who, by living my messages, comprehend that they are on the way of holiness towards eternity. . . .2

  On the second day of the Medjugorje apparitions, Marija saw Mary crying and carrying a wooden cross. “Peace, peace, peace!” were the words she spoke. “Be reconciled! Only peace!”3 Twenty-eight years later, in her message of April 25, 2009, she calls out to us again:

  Dear children! Today I call you all to pray for peace and to witness it in your families so that peace may become the highest treasure on this peaceless earth. I am your Queen of Peace and your mother. I desire to lead you on the way of peace, which comes only from God. Therefore, pray, pray, pray. Thank you for having responded to my call.4

  Mary is appearing to a world intent on destroying itself in order to urge her children to return to the ways of God. To show to the world that her presence and words are true and real, Our Lady has promised that when she stops appearing, a visible and lasting sign, undeniably of God, will be left on the spot of her first apparition.

  Mary has chosen to appear in Medjugorje and to give the world messages in order to continue the work she set out to do when she appeared to three young children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Part of her message from August 25, 1991, states:

  Dear Children! Today also I invite you to prayer, now as never before when my plan has begun to be realized. Satan is strong and wants to sweep away my plans of peace and joy and make you think that my Son is not strong in his decisions. Therefore, I call all of you, dear children, to pray and fast still more firmly. I invite you to self-renunciation for nine days so that, with your help, everything that I desire to realize through the secrets I began in Fatima, may be fulfilled. I call you, dear children, to now grasp the importance of my coming and the seriousness of the situation. I want to save all souls and present them to God. Therefore, let us pray that everything I have begun be fully realized. Thank you for having responded to my call. 5

  In the Church-approved apparitions at Fatima, Mary gave the three young seers three secrets; in an earlier approved apparition in La Salette, France, in 1846, she gave two young seers two secrets. These have all since been revealed. The Blessed Mother is now in the process of giving ten secrets to each of the six visionaries in Medjugorje, some of whom have received all ten. The secrets will be revealed in the not-too-distant future, as the visionary Mirjana has been asked by Mary to help publicize them through a priest at the appointed time. Mary and the visionaries tell us, however, not to focus on the secrets; only to focus on our own personal conversion, here and now.

  In December 1982, a nine-year-old girl in Medjugorje, Jelena Vasilj, began to hear Our Lady speak to her interiorly, and the same gift was given to Marijana Vasilj (no relation) in March of 1983. Our Lady told them she wanted them to form a prayer group for the youth at St. James Church and spoke of her desire that all of her children be part of a prayer group. In a message to Jelena on February 25, 1985, she instructed:

  Dear children, this is my advice. I would like to conquer some fault each day.

  If your fault is to get angry at everything, try each day to get angry less.

  If your fault is not to be able to study, try to study.

  If your fault is not to be able to obey, or if you cannot stand those who do not please you, try on a given da
y to speak with them.

  If your fault is not to be able to stand an arrogant person, you should try to approach that person.

  If you desire that person to be humble, be humble yourselves. Show that humility is worth more than pride.

  Each day, try to go beyond, and to reject every vice from your heart.

  Find out which are the vices that you most need to reject.

  Try truly to desire to spend your life in real love. Strive as much as possible. 6

  Mary is strongly urging everyone to “pray, pray, pray,” and she has given five specific means to holiness that she wishes of us, in order to truly live her messages: frequent attendance of the Holy Mass, monthly Confession, Bible reading, daily prayer (especially the rosary), and fasting on bread and water on Wednesdays and Fridays—all done with the heart. “I am not God,” she said in her message in December 1983, “I need your prayers and sacrifices to help me.”7 And “you have forgotten that with prayer and fasting you can ward off wars, suspend natural laws.”8