By Stefan Teplan
Statue of Virgin Mary in Medjugorje. Photograph by Stefan Teplan
Had anyone told me before the year of 1981 that I would one day believe in the apparitions of Virgin Mary, pray the rosary almost every day, and worship Holy Mary in all sorts of devotions, I would have secretly tapped my finger on my forehead and considered him to be the most pitiful creature on earth. From 1981 on, however, everything turned out differently than I had ever thought it would and – had it been my way at that time – would have wanted it. Suddenly I felt like Peter, to whom Jesus said, „Someone else will lead you where you do not want to go.“ True, I wanted to go to God, but I never really wanted to go to Mary – and yet God led me right there. But I am going to tell the story right from the start.
For me, 1981 did not initially have the significance of the year in which the now world-famous Medjugorje apparitions of Virgin Mary began – I only learned about this three years later. For me, it was a year in which a down-to-earth life – exactly the opposite of unworldly fantasy – began, both privately and professionally: I ended my bohemian bachelor’s life, got married, relatively young, and started a promising career as a young journalist of a big reputable daily newspaper. Admittedly, I was a bit cocky at that time about having a well-ordered view of the world as an intellectual, coolly logical person and about communicating this to others. This was reflected in my professional activity, which requires intellectual, objective and sceptical thinking, as well as in my greatest hobby: I played chess passionately, analyzed and annotated games regularly in „my“ newspaper and, as an active tournament player, loved the cool objective calculation within fixed rules and objectively verifiable conditions. There was only one thing that, to the astonishment of many of my friends and colleagues, did not seem to fit into the picture of that intellectual young mind: I believed in God.
To believe in God would certainly not have occurred to me in my dreams, had it not been for concrete experiences that had preceded it, on which I, in the face of all doubters, could not help but quote a famous book title (by André Frossard) and apply it to myself personally: „God exists: I have met him.“ From the age of 16 on, I had such stunning experiences as are otherwise only known in biographies of saints – although I have always been anything but a saint-, experiences which alone would fill a thick book and which I can only briefly outline here for better understanding without going into detail. Through an experience that can at best be described by the insufficient term „mystical“, I first recognized that God exists as real and that this life is not to (as we are wrongly educated in it) accumulate possessions and knowledge senselessly for an extremely short lifetime and then disappear forever into nothingness, but to voluntarily decide to abandon the self-chosen (self-inflicted) isolation from God and thus to live eternally with Him in truth and imperishable happiness.
When I realized this, I was standing alone in a cemetery and I of all people (reasonable and enlightened, how I thought I was back then) felt that an inner voice was speaking to me, and it said among other things: „I am here. I have always been here. I am always the same; I am the one who was and is and will be. Behold the graves and realize: Beyond this life, which lasts only a short moment, I am here eternally, and I wait for each of you to come to me.“ I was struck with inner shivers and it was not only the content of the words that were transmitted to me, but at the same time the feeling that all this was true, that God spoke here – whom I did not think to be possible, but only because I had not yet come to know Him – and that He did this with very strong inviting love and at the same time with huge power, with a power that does not have to impose itself, since it knows very well that no one can get past it and everyone must face it, at the latest, with death. I also heard that I should read the Word of God in the Bible, where I would learn everything I had to do.
It was only much later, when I dealt with it in reading, that I learned that I had experienced the same thing as Moses, when God revealed Himself to him in the burning bush and spoke to him „I am who I am“ and like Francis of Assisi, to whom Jesus revealed Himself by suddenly speaking to him from a crucifix. Moses had killed a man before his experience of God, Francis had lived like a debauchee before and that comforted me: I, too, had a rather unholy life behind me already at the age of 16; God apparently did not always choose the best. Or, as Jesus puts it: „I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick“.
That this experience was not just a once-only incident, no hallucination or fantasy, was subsequently confirmed by the experience of unbelievable and incomprehensible miracles and answers to prayer (of course I began to pray daily from then on, experienced God more and more in prayer and grew with him as with a friend), I often asked God for something, even in the simplest situations, and usually received the answer immediately – through signs, through other people, through biblical passages (which were, as soon as I opened the book, like oracles, exactly answering the question or the situation I confronted God with) or occasionally again through the inner voice, with which I was already quite familiar. So my faith did not come about through narrations of, but through experiences with God, which led to the fact that for me there was no way of doubting what I saw and experienced all the time, or of believing that it was impossible. Nor did it collide with my reason, which could only confirm what it had to see as real, whether it wanted to or not. If someone held out the well-known saying to me: „Believing means not knowing“, I could confess from the deepest experience: „I don’t just believe, I know“. Had a teacher, parent, priest or any other missionary, on the other hand, wanted to convey to me by words or writing alone, as is common practice in many places of traditional religious education, that one simply had to believe in God, even if one could not see or prove him, I would only have plainly asked „Why?“ and (once again) arrogantly tapped my forehead with my finger.
It was precisely this „Why?“ that I hurled, although in the meantime deeply believing, at pious Catholics when they spoke of Marian worship, which I rejected to the highest degree. My faith was down-to-earth and based on real experiences with God. But what happened there to Mary, however, I condemned as excrescences of bigotry, idolatry and mischanneled longing for a visible and tangible deity, comparable to the magical thinking of indigenous peoples. Grown-up people seriously carried Marian statues in processions while rattling off litanies, set up these idol carvings in their homes, repeated, in rosary devotions, 50 times monotonously stammered down „Hail Marys“ instead of turning directly to God (which I, after all, knew this works). At times I even considered leaving the Catholic Church because of the „heresies “ I felt. I was baptized Catholic, but in my heart, I was actually Protestant; I only prayed directly to God (not to saints) and recognized without exception the Word of God in the Bible as the only authority. And the Bible did not give me any justification for the worship that was attributed to the mother of Jesus Christ in Catholic popular piety and theology.
In July 1981 I read in a book about the apparitions of Mary in Fatima in 1917, which prophesied, among other things, the near end of the First World War, the coming of a second and possible third one, and in which – allegedly from heaven – refuge to Mary and the prayer of the rosary were recommended as a last resort for the salvation of the world. I read about miracles that supposedly had happened in Fatima, including the famous miracle of the sun that 70,000 people, believers, and unbelievers alike, are said to have seen and witnessed. As sceptical as I took up this information, as reflective they made me on the other side. Would it be possible, I asked myself for the first time, that there really was something about these things and the Marian devotion of Catholics? Since there are no scientific tools to prove this, I decided to do what I had done dozens of times before in tricky cases and always got an answer: I asked God.
I went – at that time I was a private guest in a student residence in the city of Bamberg – from the house to a nearby church and prayed like this: „Eternal God, so many times you have heard and taught me and answered my questions. I thank you for this and, trusting to be heard further on, I ask you to reveal the following to me: Is the worship of Mary a heresy, or are Catholics not as wrong in it as I have always assumed? Is it even allowed to pray to Mary or anyone else but you? Is it true or fraud that Mary supposedly appears in some places? Is it truth or fraud what I had read about Fatima? I know (and thank you already now) that you will answer me so that I will not err in anything and will be able to follow your will in the right way.“
The answer came promptly. Just about five minutes later, when I entered the dormitory again, a sheet of paper, which had not been there when I had left that house, suddenly lay in front of the elevator. I took it and read the lyrics of a song about Fatima. In that text, all the questions I had asked in the Church before were answered clearly: Yes, Mary is sent by God to earth to give messages to people and to lead them back to God. Yes, one may and even should pray to Mary, because she is the greatest intercessor in heaven and wants to stop impending catastrophes. Yes, especially the rosary should be prayed daily. Yes, what happened in Fatima came from God.
It was like my first experience of conversion exactly ten years before: Through Mary I also experienced miracles after miracles, not knowing that the greatest (with Medjugorje) were yet to come. I began to understand more and more the role of Mary in God’s plan of salvation and developed – similar to my initial experiences with God – an ever-closer relationship with her as with a friend, in her case as with a real earthly mother, whom I know she cares for her (spiritual) children with supernatural care. I understood that Christ when he said on the cross: „Behold your mother“, did not only address this personally to John but symbolically with the apostle handed this over to all mankind as a testament. I did not worship Mary as God, but as the supreme creature appointed and chosen by God, as the Mother of Christ. I became aware that true Marian worship is always Christocentric. In all her messages (with which I also began to deal with in my reading from now on) she always only points to her son, just as she already did in the Gospel: „Do everything He tells you“. Until 1981 I thought I knew God quite well, but it was only then that I realized how much of Him had remained hidden from me, despite all my amazing experiences. It was only through Mary that I became truly Catholic and understood, among other things, the mysteries of the Catholic sacraments. It became clear to me in a totally new light that God, since the New Testament was written, has not ceased to reveal Himself to men, but has spoken to them throughout the history of the Church up to the present day through the chosen, through signs, but above all through Mary in what the Church calls „private revelations“ – just as He had already spoken in biblical times through prophets, apostles and angels. God doesn’t change. He is who He is.
Given the abundance of entire libraries of Marian literature and theology that I subsequently studied for years, it seems, in retrospect, rather strange to me that at that time I knew only about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary (at first I only dealt with the ecclesiastically recognized ones) – Guadeloupe in the 16th century, Lourdes in the 19th century, Fatima in the 20th century – as something completed and past, and not as something that could still happen today. If there had already been the Internet at that time, I would probably have come across Medjugorje in the first days of my Marian studies. When I read Franz Werfel’s great novel „The Song of Bernadette“ (about the apparitions of Lourdes), while reading it I suddenly felt a great longing to have lived at an earlier time, for example in 1858, in order to be allowed to stand at least once next to a visionary like Bernadette and to know that before me, even if invisible to my eyes, the Mother of Jesus Christ would stand. „My God, I would have given anything for it then,“ I prayed.
I should have known that I should be careful about what I discussed with God. I was so used to it and so indulged that almost everything was heard. A little later, in December 1984, in a television film, I heard reports about very current phenomenal events: In the remotest corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a small village called Medjugorje, Our Lady was said to appear daily to a group of six children and adolescents since the 24th of June 1981.
Cautiously, curiously, but by no means euphorically I took notice of this news. Ever since I had become a believer, I had come across several unworldly dreamers in religious circles, to whom I had always kept my distance. I was always striving to separate the wheat from the chaff and fact from fiction in spiritual matters if it was possible for me to distinguish this somehow. To do this, it was crystal clear to me: „I must go to Medjugorje!“ So I decided to travel there the following year not as a pilgrim, but professionally as a reporter; this would also help me to look at things with all the professional scepticism.
On October 26, 1985, I arrived in Medjugorje for the first time with my friend Fritz, who was to assist me and shoot photographs for me. What impressed me on the first day were the people – about 3000 pilgrims came from all parts of the world – who sat and kneeled for hours (the daily evening mass, which also includes three rosaries, a litany and healing prayers for the sick, lasts there for three hours!) devoutly and fully concentrated in their benches or on the floor. Since the church could not take all people, the mass was transmitted to the outside through loudspeakers. The square around the church had something festival-like about it: Old and young, children and adults, Africans, Europeans, Asians, Australians and Americans, business-like dressed manager types and long-haired old hippies in washed-out jeans prayed and sang together for hours, laughed at each other occasionally, some of them wept with emotion. I was fascinated by this diversity in one unifying spirit as if the whole world were gathered in one place. I had never seen anything like this before: Young women kneeled after communion in the grass or mud, not caring about their beautiful clothes and expensive fabrics, praying as long as they did fervently; several priests were sitting on ordinary wooden kitchen chairs in the middle of the meadow, each with a shield indicating in which language they could hear confession, and the queue of the waiting did not decrease during the whole three hours. On the parking lot in front of the church, I noticed several heavy motorcycles with rosaries wrapped around their handlebars. Their drivers stood, in a rocker-like outfit and with folded hands, at the church wall and listened to the words of the sermon. „It is not only that we don’t see such people in the mass“, I whispered to Fritz, „but people in our place already look at the watch when the priest preaches five minutes too long. But here they kneel for hours with growing enthusiasm and stand in line at confession as if free beer was being served.“ Whether the apparitions of Mary in Medjugorje were fraud or real, I could not deduce from those observations, but one thing was for sure: Something phenomenal took place here, a spiritual force existed that drew all these people under its spell – without anything spectacular happening.
I could make such observations every day. My Irish colleague Heather Parsons, who was there at the same time as a correspondent for a Dublin newspaper, wrote to her editor: „Every day at five o’clock on the dot, people leave any other activity behind and as if drawn by a magnet, stream to the church.“
The morning of the second day started with a disappointment. After the morning mass, I sat down on a bench in front of the church and quietly prayed a rosary when the then parish priest, Tomislav Pervan, passed by. Although he granted me an interview appointment for the next day, he rigorously refused my request to attend the apparitions: „That’s what hundreds of journalists want; we can’t organize it, nor do we want to make it a spectacle. There is always only a very small circle joining the apparitions. I’m really sorry – even if you come from a big German newspaper, but this is impossible.“ I sat down and continued to pray – admittedly also that some miracle would happen to be able to witness an apparition. A few minutes later the chaplain, Ivan Dugandzic, passed my bench. I explained to him what I was planning to do journalistically, and he promised to join the interview the next day. I didn’t say anything about the rejection Pervan had given me regarding the apparitions. All the more I was surprised when Dugandzic, already in farewell, said: „By the way, if this interests you for your article: If you want to be present at an apparition, knock at the parsonage shortly before five today and refer to me.“
Fritz and I turned up on time. The apparitions were, as we learned, not bound to a special place, but the presence of the visionaries and today’s apparition would take place in a room in the parsonage. We were shown inside; with us in the room were members of an Italian television team and a few nuns. The visionaries, Marija Pavlovic, Ivan Dragicevic and Vicka Ivankovic, came one after the other, placed themselves about two meters in front of a wall with a crucifix, on one side of us and began to pray the first mystery of the rosary. The prayer leaders alternated, everyone prayed a secret in his or her language, the visionaries in Croatian, the TV team in Italian, one in Latin, Fritz and I in German. During the second rosary, at the seventh mystery, I experienced live what I had seen ten months before in the television program that had drawn my attention to Medjugorje: The visionaries fell to their knees, synchronously as if on command, stopped the prayer and stared in the same direction with their heads slightly raised – they were in a trance. Numerous scientific tests have shown that during this state of trance, the eye movements of the visionaries are exactly the same, down to a hundredth of a second, and that one would have to assume that they would see the same thing in those moments since one could not operate fraud with such precision. Their bodies were, according to the scientific tests, completely insensitive to pain while in trance, and there were no reflexes in their eyes, even if they were exposed to the strongest flash. I could only notice what I perceived with my own senses and without measuring instruments: When the visionaries spoke to Our Lady, her lips and tongues moved as in a normal conversation, but we who were bystanders could not hear any sound. When I saw the visionary Ivan, I noticed very clearly – in order to take photographs I stood next to and in front of the visionaries, which was certainly somewhat inappropriate and undignified for the occasion – that his Adam’s apple was constantly moving up and down during this soundless conversation. The end of the apparition I experienced just as I had seen it on television: The heads of the visionaries were synchronously directed even more upwards, Vicka whispered devoutly in Croatian: „Ode“ (she goes).
In the afternoon of the same day, Fritz and I experienced the miracle of the sun with a group of Italian pilgrims, similar to what is described by the miracle of the sun in Fatima. Without the slightest difficulty or irritation of the eyes we could look into the sun for about a quarter of an hour, which – its edges looked like a glowing fire tyre, much brighter than usual – turned around its own centre, grew bigger and smaller; it occasionally appeared to me as if it was racing towards me, then it slipped further away again, from time to time the colours of the bundles of rays changed which it seemed to throw around itself. I noticed this along with occasional screams from the pilgrims around me and wondered if we were all seeing the same thing. In fact, as it turned out in our subsequent conversation, Fritz had experienced some things optically differently, yet the fact was amazing that in the middle of the day we could all look into the sun undamaged for so long and that all the people around us had perceived relatively similar phenomena, as I learned by asking questions.
I didn’t know what to make of it, just thought: If all this is supposed to be a hoax, then it might be possible to technically produce the various light phenomena of which many have reported, you could turn the supposed visionaries into swindlers and actors, but you can’t manipulate the sun.
I returned home without having any evidence of the authenticity or non-authenticity of the phenomena, but only had to admit that the observed phenomena of the sun would be difficult to explain in a natural way. I told my wife, a sceptic who viewed my religious development from a certain distance, but who always tolerated it, less about all that than about my fascination with the „holy village“, where the inhabitants flock enthusiastically to Mass day after day, preferring to renounce television and other pleasures in order to pray for hours every day, in order to fast and to carry into their lives the messages that the visionaries were supposed to receive from Our Lady. I invited her to the trip, she had to experience something like that. She was to experience more than she, who went there without any expectations, and I ever dared to dream.
The time interval between my first and my second trip to Medjugorje was relatively large – two years – when my wife Renate and I finally left for Medjugorje. Renate and I joined the evening mass of the first day on the „confession meadow“ outside because the church was (once again) overcrowded inside. Our place offered us a view of the two striking mountains of Medjugorje: on the left the Podbrdo, the hill of apparitions on which Mary is said to have appeared first in 1981, directly in front of us the higher Krizevac (Mountain of the Cross), on the peak of which there is a high concrete cross since the year 1933. I had read in foreign publications that tens of thousands of pilgrims reported supernatural signs that they had perceived on one of the hills, especially on the cross of Krizevac. Some of these phenomena were observed simultaneously by thousands of people. It was reported, for example, that the cross should often revolve around its axis, suddenly shine in supernatural splendour, that there was visible fire on the hill of apparitions, which vanished as one approached closer. Several times people feared that the whole hill would burn, once the fire brigade even went there to extinguish it until the whole fire spook suddenly disappeared. I hadn’t told my wife anything about all this, because I immediately feared an oversceptical negative reaction to such stories. But during the first evening mass, she suddenly drew my attention to the cross at Krizevac: „Did you see that? The cross suddenly lit up as bright as day (it was already quite dark at that time)!“ I didn’t notice anything about it. But after my wife saw this more than once, I focused my attention longer on the Krizevac. And now we both saw several times how the cross once began to shine for seconds as if in the most glaring light, another time as if it were burning, we saw how dazzlingly bright flashes of light from it shone upwards, which we suddenly perceived on the hill of apparitions to our left. The people around us probably didn’t notice anything about it, because they continued to concentrate peacefully on the liturgy of the mass and maybe only wondered why my wife and I kept whispering and looking up at the mountain. On that evening I could not help but tell my wife about what I had read about the signs of light in Medjugorje and probably left her a little confused that very night.
The next day and the day after the next similar and far more phenomena occurred, whereby it was striking that we perceived some of them simultaneously together, others were perceived only by my wife. I remember how Renate excitedly said: „But it is impossible that you do not see that, you must see that, an almost kitschy glaring corona of stars shines above the cross now! You’re not blind, are you?“ And I looked and looked and still couldn’t see anything. The same thing also happened during later trips to Medjugorje when we were there with other people: Some things could only be seen by a few and not by others. I later wondered that this might be greater proof of the authenticity of a supernatural phenomenon than if all had seen the same thing. For in the latter case one could rather assume a mass hallucination or a staged swindle.
On the third evening of our stay, my wife and me did not attend the evening mass but walked at dusk to the foot of the apparition hill Podbrdo. The place where Mary is said to have appeared first was marked by a cross placed there and clearly visible from the spot where we stood. The transmission of the mass was so loud that, even about a kilometre away as the crow flies, we could understand in fragments which part of the liturgy was being prayed. The consecration of bread and wine had just begun when I noticed a strange glow on the hill above me. In front of the white cross at the apparition site something like an oversized candle flame about one meter high flickered. Renate and me saw together (we constantly confirmed in dialogue who was seeing what) how these suddenly turned into several flames of varying size, flames that sometimes looked like pillars of fire and, strange as it may sound, began to dance or jump in front of the cross. I rubbed my eyes several times and thought for a moment: Am I still on this earth? I felt as if I was on another planet or in a science fiction film and yet I knew for sure: I am standing here with both feet firmly on the ground and know that I am fully in my senses. Now what we had seen the days before on the Krizevac hill was recurred at the cross on the apparition hill: It suddenly became unearthly bright, then the light changed, for one to two seconds everything seemed to be immersed in a ghostly green, then normal light prevailed again, only the pillars of fire were still moving back and forth. All of a sudden, a human figure emerged from this series of lights, the contours of which became more and more clear. „What do you see now?“ my wife was whispering to me. „I dare not say it, but I see a woman dressed in white with a child in her arms.“ „That’s exactly what I see. And what is she doing?“ „She’s waving. She waves to us, as if to invite us to come to her.“ „Yes, exactly.“ We marvelled at the white woman, spellbound and stunned. For a moment I thought about responding to the woman’s inviting gesture of going up the mountain to her, then – I confess this to my shame – completely profane thoughts prevailed: I considered that it was almost completely dark and that the descent later might get dangerous. After we stood around hesitantly for a while, the pillars of fire began to grow again and started to move in our direction. At that moment Renate and I, to be frank, got a little scared, turned around and sought the security of the village.
Even today I am ashamed of it and can only console myself with the thought that the visionaries also ran away frightfully from the white woman when she appeared to them for the first time. I could tell you about a number of other visible phenomena that we have perceived, but I would like to draw to a close with this. I realized that these signs are not as important as most people want them to be. People seek the spectacular, but the greatest miracles take place within people when they recognize the existence of God and change their lives completely to truth and holiness. This is the only intention that binds Mary to her apparitions in Medjugorje, of whose authenticity I am now completely convinced. Some may need visible signs, maybe also my wife needed them back then so that she could believe. But blessed are, as Christ says, those who do not see and yet believe.
Especially in my inner life, a lot has changed after those experiences, I joined the Fraternity or the Third Order (of which also a married person can be a member) of the Carmelite Order which is strictly Marian oriented, and I try to live this spirituality. I started a correspondence course in theology and education as a deacon in addition to my work but abandoned this path halfway through because of the double professional pressure. As a journalist, in addition to my secular work (I had switched from the daily newspaper to a major media magazine as an editor), I produced a series of programs on Medjugorje and numerous Marian topics for a private radio station. Especially in my spirituality and in my subsequent relationship with my fellow human beings, I try to live more and more holy and to live in the way Mary wants to shape us through the messages of Medjugorje. With all my human weaknesses, I must confess frankly: She won’t be very happy with me. When I think of all the experiences I have had, I should live like a saint by now. But I am still very far from that. But once again I console myself with the visionaries of Medjugorje, to whom the Virgin Mary (responding to their question „Why us?“) said exactly what I had thought at my first conversion experience at the age of 16: „God doesn’t always choose the best!“
© Stefan Teplan, 2004
First published in the German book „Wallfahrt für Millionen“ by Bernd Harder, Pattloch Verlag