Medjugorje Website Updates

“Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”
(John 20,21)

To all parishioners, pilgrims, friends, benefactors, and to all men of goodwill a

Blessed and Happy Easter!

Parish priest and the Franciscans

Photos

... A striking example of the healing power of the cross is Jaime Jaramillo, affectionately known as Papa Jaime in his home country of Colombia. Papa Jaime is one of the stories in a book I wrote called Full of Grace: Miraculous Stories of Healing and Conversion through Mary’s Intercession. For many years now, he has single-handedly rescued children who actually live in the underground sewer canals of Colombia. Again and again, he picks up his cross and enters the sewers. Here’s how he speaks of his experience.

"I was raised in a devout Lutheran home in New York and always believed in God, but from my teen years onward I rejected organized religion, believing it was created totally by man and not by God. After marrying Ed and reluctantly agreeing to raise our children Catholic, I told him, ' Don't EVER expect me to become Catholic. You have to be born that way - you'd have to be crazy to choose it voluntarily! ' I rejected the Church's teachings, thinking they were made up by men who had nothing better to do than make people feel guilty and miserable. I occasionally went to church with my family, but found it profoundly boring.

By Michael H. Brown

... I'll go by what the Church ends up formally concluding (it is currently in the hands of a Vatican commission) -- period -- but my personal belief is that this is a place halfway between here and the hereafter, a supernatural spot where the dimensional partition is thin. I had gone through my "conversion" (actually, my return) to the Church years before, as I said (independent of any apparition), but this brought me into a deeper and richer phase of Catholicism. It also spurred my writing in the Catholic realm. Not only did virtually everyone change for the better after visiting, but did so profoundly -- converting others, establishing Adoration in their parishes upon return to the U.S., starting uncountable Rosary groups, and in many cases becoming priests. The seers are human -- and not perfect (is anyone?) -- but the good fruits vastly outweighed any "bad."

by Prof. Marco Corvaglia

The community Caritas of Birmingham (Alabama) has gained much publicity and visibility in the U.S. by hosting many times (162 from 1988 to 2011), year after year, Marija Pavlović's, the Medjugorje visionary, daily apparitions.

So it is particularly interesting and significant to know the doctrines that are observed in the community and are spread by its founder and owner, Terry Colafrancesco.

He published in the mid-nineties, under his usual pseudonym of Friend of Medjugorje, the book How to Change Your Husband [Caritas, Sterrett (AL), 1996], printed by the community itself and now also downloadable from its official website.

Reading the book one is astonished by the male chauvinism, sometimes grotesque, that seems to characterize it: for example, he writes that the devil, in order to hide to people the potentially destructive nature of women, got persons to quit the right habit of giving female names to hurricanes that each year lash the shores of the Atlantic.

Actually, this isn’t simply absurd male chauvinism, but rather adhesion to well-known religious ideologies.

The young Franciscan Peter Kim Dae Woo visited Međugorje for the second time. He comes from the parish Incon in Korea, where he serves as the assistant parish priest. He was ordained in 2009, despite his great desire to become a singer. He studied at the University for electrical engineering, but he dreamt of music, and that had even reduced his student’s performance at the university. “I studied for four years, but I was not interested in that at all. I would spend most of my time playing and singing, the music was my whole life. I was student only up to the moment when I got to know music a bit better. At one point, I was no longer attending classes. Back in those days, I used to have a nick name “factory of curses”, because all of the words that were coming out from my mouth were bad, but I did not care for that at all. I only cared for music and lived in its world completely. I socialised with ‘so-called musicians’”

Mirjana parla ai pellegrini italiani nel salone giallo