This book is the third of the four volumes of sermons and discourses given by Fr. Slavko Barbaric and Fr. Tomislav Vlasic during 1984 - 1987 in Medjugorje, and contains discourses given from July to December 1985.
Not all chapters of this book are yet included
Welcome everybody. You are with us because you believe in the testimony of our visionaries. We are now in the fifty first month, since they started being witnesses to seeing Our Lady.
I have just come from a long chat with the doctors. Even in Zagreb (they are all psychiatrists and psychologists) the last word was, ‘This phenomenon is highly complicated for us. It is very difficult to explain. A great many aspects have to be taken into account in order to see what it is all about.”
For the visionaries, however, it is very simple, from the start until now they say, ‘We see Our Lady. We see Her in three dimensions, the same way we see one another. We can talk to Her, we pray with Her, we can hear Her, we see Her clearly, we can touch Her.’
Our Lady is giving us messages, She is inviting us to prayer, peace, reconciliation, faith and fasting, and it cannot be any other way. Faith and spirituality are something quite other than medicine, psychology ....
Why does this happen ? It happens for one reason only. We are all invited to peace and reconciliation. And we are all in great need of this very peace individuals, families, the Church and the whole world. According to these messages one could say Our Lady is making us responsible for peace. And I do believe Our Lady knows what She is doing, what She is saying namely, that we must allow ourselves to be made responsible.
Please do not wash your hands of it by saying, ‘I am not a diplomat, I am not a politician, peace does not depend on me.’ Peace depends on us all. This , it seems to me, is the most important thing to look with a new heart, with a new eye at one’s own responsibility in this world and at all that is going on around us. How can we give our personal response to all this which we are invited to ? Our Lady says, “Pray and Fast”.
This we must do in order to obtain peace in our hearts and to enable us to bring peace to others. This is perhaps the hardest way to obtain peace, but is it not perhaps the only one ?
Conversion is asked of us all a change in one’s own everyday life. And this is the most difficult thing of all. Sometimes it is easier to give money to the poor than to forgive someone for a word or to forget an insult. But it is only on these grounds that one can build up peace: by being reconciled and by forgiving. And every man who is reconciled, every family who lives in peace is always a new sign that peace is possible and, with each reconciled person, the entire world is brought closer to peace.
(Fr. Slavko Barbaric 7th September 1985)