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It Is Difficult To Find A Pilgrim Who Does Not Talk Of The Peace And Tranquillity Of Cross Hill, Site Of The Supposed Apparitions That Turned A Remote And Impoverished Village Into One Of The Most Famous Corners Of Bosnia.
MORE than a million people visit Medjugorje every year, thousands of them Irish, and most come to climb the hill where 6 locals claim to have first seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary in June 1981.
It is difficult to find a traveller who doesn't speak of the peace and tranquillity of Cross Hill, location of the supposed apparitions that turned a remote and pauperised town into one of the most renowned corners of Bosnia.
Few visitors make the short trip from Medjugorje to Surmanci. It's only one or two miles from Cross Hill, but far removed from the boarding houses, restaurants and memento shops of its revered neighbor.
There is deep quiet in this place, but only those that don't know its history could speak of peace and tranquillity.
In August 1941, local members of the nazi Croat Ustashe organisation murdered some SIX HUNDRED Serb men, ladies and youngsters in deep natural pits on this barren plateau. Ethnic cleansing may have entered the lexicon during the 1990s Balkan wars, although it was grimly familiar to a previous generation of families from this area.
In the 1940s, the craggy hills of Herzegovina saw vicious fighting between the Ustashe who ruled Croatia as a Nazi puppet state Serb patriot Chetniks and the red Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, who would ultimately overcome and rule Yugoslavia until his death in 1980.
Each side committed gruesome atrocities, including Tito's Partisans, who slaughtered THIRTY Franciscan friars at Siroki Brijeg near Medjugorje, as punishment for supporting the Ustashe.
The Croat Catholic Church backed the Ustashe and its drive for an ethnically pure larger Croatia, and a few monks and Franciscan priests were accused of heinous war crimes.
After the war, Tito sought to neutralize the resentment between parts of the Yugoslav population by suppressing religion and patriotism. He depicted the inter-ethnic fighting as a easy struggle between nazi Ustashe and Chetniks and anti-fascist Partisans ; the second had won, fascism had been routed and thus the roots of conflict had been removed.
In places such as Medjugorje, though, the wounds never truly healed. Croats felt humiliated at being made to build a monument to the Ustashe's Serb victims at Surmanci, while official Yugoslav history depicted the Franciscans executed by Partisans at Siroki Brijeg as nazi villains.
The apparitions commenced at a tricky time for Yugoslavia : the stabilising force that was Tito had died the previous year and the Catholic Solidarity movement was roiling red Poland, provoked by a new east Western European pope, John Paul II.
The Yugoslav authorities straight away denounced reports of the visions which took place just before the fortieth anniversary of the Surmanci massacre as a "clerical-nationalist" conspiracy served up by Croat extremists.
Local Franciscans quickly took charge of the Medjugorje phenomenon, declaring the children's visions to be genuine and installing themselves as intercessors between the young "seers" and a Croat public that was clamouring for spiritual experience after many years of official state atheism.
Thousands of people were soon gathering in Medjugorje for daily "messages" from Our Woman ; the authorities arrested a local friar and others whom they suspected of participation in the alleged hoax. Over time , however , the cash- strapped Yugoslav authorities realised the commercial potential of Medjugorje.
By the mid-1980s, Belgrade had no problem with the daily visions or visitors but the Catholic Church did.
The Bishop of Mostar, the senior church official in the area, has for decades been at loggerheads with the Franciscans over their refusal to relinquish control over certain parishes in Herzegovina, where they've been present for hundreds of years and luxuriate in the deep fidelity of area folk.
This dispute was raging when the visions began ; some people believe the Franciscans used them or helped invent them to protect and augment their position in Medjugorje.
Unlike those at Fatima and Lourdes, the Vatican hasn't recognised the providence of the Medjugorje visions. In 2009 it defrocked a former Franciscan "spiritual director" to the visionaries amid claims that he exaggerated the apparitions and had a child with a nun.
A number of other "disobedient" Franciscans have been expelled from the parish.
Like his predecessor Pavao Zanic, the Bishop of Mostar Ratko Peric is intensely critical of the "visions" and the way that the Franciscans and other groups have behaved in Medjugorje. Their striking comments on the phenomenon which suggest it is just a lucrative hoax are posted in English on the diocese web site (cbismo.com).
Nevertheless the Franciscans of Herzegovina will not give up Medjugorje without a fight. They are tough and devoted, as everyone from the Ottomans to Bishop Peric has found. In the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Peric was abducted and beaten by Croat militiamen in a local Franciscan chapel, till UN troops and the mayor of Mostar secured his release.
The war unleashed another wave of ethnic cleaning in Herzegovina, much of it by members of the region's Croat majority, who flattened mosques and Orthodox churches as they drove Muslims and Serbs from their houses.
The memorial at Surmanci was blown up by Croats, lots of whom delighted in their Ustashe heritage.
A drip of travellers kept coming to Medjugorje throughout the war. Few maybe realised that atrocities were taking place close by, or that their Queen of Peace had been dubbed the "Ustasha Virgin" by Serbs and Muslims who saw her as symbolic of Croatian ultra-nationalism.
Medjugorje last week marked THIRTY years since the apparitions commenced and the crowds are as big than previously.
The Vatican is now examining the apparitions and the tens of thousands of supposedly divine messages that have made Medjugorje's name.
For the church, the Franciscans, the people of Medjugorje and the visionaries as well as millions of believers a great deal rests on its decision,writes tagza.com.
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