Medjugorje and the Desire for a Wilder Catholicism

I have long desired a wilder Catholicism—bygone, primitive, a bit off-kilter. What I have wanted, prayed for, and preached in hope of is that sort of Christianity we read about mostly now in books. Thirty years ago, for instance, William Dalrymple in From the Holy Mountain wrote about stylites, how in St. Simeon’s day Syria was littered with them. Supposedly when one of them got struck by lightning, people assumed the dead stylite was a heretic; such then was the only obvious conclusion to be drawn.[1] I have read that book more times than I can remember; I have read also many times John Moschos’s Spiritual Meadow, the ancient text that inspired Dalrymple to write his book. They are replete with such stories. They chronicle the strangeness I mean.

From our perspective that old kind of Christianity is weird, stupid—no doubt about it. Yet I have always also secretly found it alluring, an attractive strangeness marking the difference between that Christianity and my Christianity. Reading stupidity and natural phenomena as divine judgment: there is something bizarre yet alive about that. That Christianity was ever as accidentally dangerous as it was miraculous, I have never fully been able to comprehend. A jarring difference, an unsettling juxtaposition, that is what I am trying to describe, to reconcile: the embarrassed feeling, the thought that secretly I want that sort of wilder Christianity, the idea that electrocuted stylites somehow signal a faith more vibrant than my own.

What I am confessing is my desire for a Christianity more miraculous and less managed. I guess I am searching for what in his remarkable book, They Flew, Carlos Eire called a “postsecular” faith, a faith that, although rational, is not merely rational.[2] I am seeking to escape Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame.”[3] I want William James’s fascination with mysticism, his tolerance for the “reality of the unseen,” but without, as he did, justifying that tolerance by means of “empiricist criteria.”[4] I want an unmanaged faith, ecclesiastical institutions that are less rational, not franchised and Taylorized like fast food restaurants or multi-national corporations done over by PR consultants.[5] I want more objectionable preachers, more faith healers, more old women in candlelit corners countervailing common sense priests whispering secret wisdom to other old women; I want fewer lawyers and risk managers, fewer conferences and paid professional speakers. I want more mendicants who die naked on the naked earth, more bishops who once loved and lusted after women and who still talk about how their hearts were ripped out of their bodies as they drew closer to God in misery and purity.[6] I no longer want a Church wearied by decency and liability, mortgaged, insured; I want a Christianity wilder and more dangerous. I want a Christianity that feels more like war than peace, more alive, more argumentative, less online. As you next sit through your carefully brief, air-conditioned Sunday Mass celebrated by a highly educated and properly vetted religious professional, perhaps you will know what I mean—the feeling that this is not it, that our clean Christianity is not quite what Christianity was meant to be.

Which is why Medjugorje haunts me. It is why, since going there on pilgrimage a few months back, I have not gone one day without thinking about it, crying about it, praying about it. Going to that place so comfortable, so hollow in soul, so desirous of a Christianity realer than what I have known, it has done something to me. Medjugorje did not satisfy my longing for a wilder Catholicism. Rather, Medjugorje complicated it, called much of that longing into question. I still do not know exactly what to make of the place, and I am beginning to suspect that may be part of the game. Whatever is going on with me or within me, whatever Medjugorje has done to me, I am only still learning. But again, I suspect that may be the point.

I was fortunate to go to Medjugorje and to take my entire family. I am a married priest, a convert from Anglicanism. It was important to me that the whole family go on this pilgrimage; if something strange was to happen, I did not want it to happen just to me. It was important to me to experience whatever there was to experience with them; and so, off we went, the seven of us—Mom, Fr. Dad, and five kids aged fourteen to two. It was a noisy pilgrimage.

Now, the first thing to say about Medjugorje is that much of its spiritual power is simply the power of Catholic collective action. As the Dicastery’s recent Note puts it: “Medjugorje is perceived as a space of great peace, recollection, and a piety that is sincere, deep, and easily shared.” That is true. Surrounded by thousands of fellow Catholics, other fellow believers, immersing oneself in the liturgical rhythms of the village, one perceives this quickly. Going to Confession, praying the Rosary, going to Mass, to adoration: these things come easily in Medjugorje. My ten-year-old daughter, for example, was the one a few days into the pilgrimage who the moment we stepped into St. James’s Church said, “I want to go to Confession”—causing all of us to go Confession. That is not normal for her, but that is what I mean saying the faith is practiced easily there. Maybe that is because there is not much else in the village to do; maybe it is because most Catholics who go to Medjugorje go game-ready.

Or, maybe there is something tangibly Pentecostal, something spiritually sociogenic, that happens when that many Catholics celebrate their faith together. Slowly climbing up and down Apparition Hill, for instance, up and down Cross Mountain too, in prayer we heard Croatian, English, Italian, French, Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and Ukrainian—a different sort of United Nations praying the Rosary or the Stations of the Cross, praying for peace, out of love for the Blessed Mother and the Lord.

Devotion that intense and that diverse is bound to take its toll. “So many others have discovered the beauty of being Christians through Medjugorje,” the Note says. Again, that is simply true. And it is a beauty that has lasted—for my family at least, this far at least. We have prayed more ever since. Practicing the faith is easier for us now. We remember what it felt like; we still feel what we felt there. I pray more with my children now than before going to Medjugorje; I do not know what else I can tell you. I do not know if that counts as wild Christianity or not. Maybe these days it does.

But what about the wilder side of Medjugorje? What about the secrets, the signs, and the rosaries turned to gold? What about the apparitions, the visionaries, and the messages about which the Dicastery is adjectivally cautious, calling them “alleged”? The Church is right to be so cautious, even to the point of coldly resisting any hint of a positive judgment regarding the visionaries. As things stand in Medjugorje today, taking any other position would plainly be inappropriate. Nor would it do any relevant spiritual good.

Apparitions are not essential; they are not at all evidence for the faith, nor can they be. If they are ever judged by the Church to be “private revelations” worthy of prudential acceptance, even that would add nothing to the Catholic faith. At best, all that private revelations do is help people live according to divine revelation “more fully” and in a “certain period of history.”[7] This point of order, in fact, is made repeatedly at Medjugorje not only by the priests at St. James but by the visionaries themselves; and, if you do happen to believe the visionaries, it is a message repeated by Our Lady herself.

About the daily apparitions, however, I witnessed two of them—both in the chapel belonging Ivan Dragičević. I did not plan to go; I was invited. That first evening, I went alone because, for some reason, only priests had been invited. I arrived early, sat up front. I wanted to see whatever there was to see. I did not want to overthink it, just experience it. I did little else but pray, look, and listen. With its pastels and landscapes, the chapel looks a bit like a strip mall Italian restaurant. Ivan opened the door to welcome us in, but I did not know he was the visionary. Honestly, he could have easily passed for another pilgrim, a shop owner, somebody’s dad, or even a Croatian cab driver. I do not know what I thought a visionary should look like. I did not know who he was until he knelt before the altar, raised his hands in prayer, looked up at the ceiling, and mumbled inaudible.

Mere feet away, out of the corner of my eye, I watched him intently as tears rolled down my face. I chose not to think about it, only feel it, and I cannot say much else than that I have never experienced anything like it before. I have no idea what to make of it. The second evening—again, I was just invited—my family came along. This time, my children with me, I began to worry. What if this is a fraud? Am I harming them by bringing them here? The routine of the apparition was the same as the night before, though I was less emotional the second time around. I found myself watching my children more than anything else.

But it was the ordinariness of it all that has stayed with me, complicated things for me. My emotions were mine, nothing supernatural there. Both messages were basic, the simplest Catholicism. Go to Confession, the Mass is central, pray, read the Bible, pray for peace, pray for families: that was it. That mothers must often repeat themselves is offered as an explanation for why the messages are often the same. The night my kids were there, the visionary took questions. My daughter asked Ivan what Our Lady looked like. He said she wore a bluish-gray dress and that she was very pretty. I had read that in the book I was reading.[8] My fidgety two-year-old bouncing around the chapel suddenly came to stop; she sat down on a kneeler and said repeatedly, “This is a good place. This is a good place. This is a good place.” But none of it seemed weird at all. Maybe it was. Maybe it just did not seem weird to me anymore. Although, I have thought of those moments every day ever since.

What then to make of wild Medjugorje? It is a weird place full of weird people. But, of course, that is what holiness is and does. Spiritually it feels a bit like an active crime scene. That the alleged apparitions are ongoing does give the place an edge you do not feel at other Marian sites. Are the apparitions real? I do not know. Carlos Eire, following Durkheim, called such things “social facts.”[9] Maybe that is a good way to put it.

All I can say is that now I would not ever be so foolish or wicked or sophisticated as to laugh at them. If the Lord came back tomorrow and I had to choose between Ivan, the utterly ordinary visionary or, say, some associate professor of religious studies quick with his opinions on X, I know where I would stand—no doubt about it. However, to say any more than that is foolish, probably sinful.

However, the real challenge of Medjugorje is that it is utterly and ordinarily Catholic—the diversity, the kitsch, the devotion. The miraculous, the ordinary, and the banal are woven together tightly there. And that has made me see how the miraculous, the ordinary, and the banal are woven together everywhere. It makes me wonder if it is not wild Christianity I desire after all, but ordinary Christianity. Maybe I needed to go to the fringes to learn the lesson. I do not know, but I have come home wanting to be a better priest, a better husband and father. I think about that every day. I confront my ordinariness differently. And maybe that is wild and miraculous enough.

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