So in essence the message is you can organize a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, just don't have anything to do with the "apparitions" or "visionaries". So might as well go on pilgrimage to Little Rock Arkansas.
This sounds like a test of one of the fruits of Medj, Obedience to the Church. No doubt some of the faithful will not take heed of the instruction and will attend the apparitions regardless. If this happens and somebody is healed, it could throw light on the authenticity of the alleged messages. Just my tuppence worth!
The Catholic Herals article merely reports news that I posted here on the forum over a week ago at http://motheofgod.com/threads/pope-...ugorje-pilgrimages-allowed.11492/#post-194050 It is not really significant at all and was caused by the Archbishop trying to correct a statement he had made earlier which was reported in an overly dramatic way that the Vatican had authorised diocesan pilgrimages to Medjugorje. It had done no such thing and the Archbishop has merely tried to correct those initial reports. The end result of all this 'to and froing' is that nothing has changed at all in the Church approach to Medjugorje. Everyone is welcome (and even encouraged) to make a pilgrimage to Medjugorje for any reason whatever. However, official Church diocesan pilgrimages are still not allowed. Archbishop Hoser remains totally positive about Medjugorje but it remains to be seen whether the official Church attitude will change in the near future.
It also shows how bad the influence is from the Freemasons. It pains me to say, Rome is thick with them. The original challenges/battles/persecutions you might recall were from Communists. They are still quietly trying to influence how many visit what St Pope JPII once referred to as (one of) the most spiritual place on earth. The fruits are clear: conversions, largest Confessional in the world with their language posted as signs next to chairs, Adoration, daily Mass attended by countless faithful. I have yet to go. But it would seem those who discourage have also not been there. Rent this. The 2nd one which is 52 minutes long, begins discussing Medjugorje half way through. It makes sense! (Thanks for renting 'From Fatima To Medjugorje [English Version]' by None for $4.99. This video will be available for streaming for 72 hours at https://www.medjugorje-to-fatima.co...b098ac50150e7e&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-iwccusfc#.) This is an excerpt from an article on a priest born and living in Medjugorje Croatia. He is a retreat leader for pilgrimages to Medjugorje. The bleeding markings on the wrists and feet of Croatian priest Zlatko Sudac have made him an ecclesiastical superstar. He usually doesn't display them -- but have faith. "Which one is he?" asked the 70-year-old lady from Yonkers. Near blind, seeing "only gray shadows," she had come to the St. Athanasius Church on Bay Parkway in Bensonhurst on this rainy, windswept evening, hoping to be healed. "The one in the purple vestments," said the lady's companion, who was leaning on a cane. "The one who looks like God." Truly, there was no mistaking the singular presence of Father Zlatko Sudac. He sat in a velvet-covered chair to the right of the altar. Moments before, the 31-year-old Croatian priest, russet shoulder-length hair pulled away from his pasty complexion, had spoken of the unsurpassed joy of devotion, but now his thick brows arched above mournful brown eyes; everything about his frail frame suggested an otherworldliness of suffering. "Can you see it?" the half-blind woman asked her companion. "Yes. On his head . . . I see . . . a notch," replied the second old lady, squinting hard. This much was visible: an indentation perhaps an inch long, like a coin slot, in the middle of Sudac's (pronounced SOO-dots) wide, flat forehead. It could be the horizontal plane of a cross, which, it is said, Sudac first "received" in May of 1999. This was followed the next year by bleeding markings on his wrists, feet, and side. These were the outward signs that the former philosophy student from the Adriatic island of Krk had received the mystical stigmata: wounds corresponding to those suffered by Christ on the cross. Amid the church's appalling sexual scandals, news of Sudac's stigmata has been cause for tentative celebration. The most celebrated stigmatic since the revered Padre Pio (the Italian priest who received the wounds of Christ in 1918 and will be officially canonized this June), Sudac, who came here from Croatia last fall, has become the hottest ecclesiastic ticket in town. At St. Athanasius, four hours before the beginning of the Mass, 2,000 people were standing on line in the rain, hoping to get inside lest they be shuttled off to the auditorium across Bay Parkway and have to hear the service on closed-circuit. As church officials say, "No church is big enough for Sudac now." Two weeks earlier, 300 people, unable to fit inside Immaculate Conception Church on Gunhill Road in the Bronx, huddled on the church steps in a sleet storm, listening to the Mass on a loudspeaker. Two Masses at Our Lady of Pompeii in Greenwich Village attracted nearly 4,000 people. At St. John the Baptist in Paterson, New Jersey, fire marshals attempted to clear the seriously overcrowded room, leading one firefighter to say with a sigh, "Burning buildings is one thing, but throwing people out of Mass? That's not how I was brought up. Especially now . . ." Especially now. It was no surprise God had chosen this particular time, in the neo-apocalyptic wake of 9/11, to send a messenger like Father Sudac, said Pat F., a fortyish typist who had driven down from Peekskill. The world was a mess, said Pat, always a "good Catholic" even in her punk-rock phase. People had deluded themselves into thinking TV-inspired materialism, the rat race of work, and relativist ethics were the actual state of things, Pat said. It was like The Matrix, where evil, soulless computers generate "fake reality" and humankind is either too beaten down or too "plain lazy" to do anything about it. "Nine-eleven changed that," Pat said. Like Oz, 9/11 "punched a hole" in the cheap curtain. Nine-eleven made it clear that pop culture and "the rest of what they hand you is not cutting it." Bush's version of "political good and evil" was just more confusion. The real battle was between God's truth and men's lies. That was the value of people like Sudac. Pat said that he showed "a way to see through to the real truth." The first known receiver of the mystical stigmata (The Catholic Encyclopedia cites 321 recognized cases) was Saint Francis of Assisi, afflicted while in deep prayer on Mount Alverna in 1224. Suddenly, according to Felix Timmermans's often-quoted retelling, "it was as if the heavens were exploding and splashing forth all their glory in millions of waterfalls of colors and stars." Inside the "whirlpool of blinding light" was Jesus on a fiery cross, his wounds like "blazing rays of blood." Like a "mirrored reflection," Jesus' fiery image "impressed itself into Francis' body, with all its love, its beauty, and its grief." Then, "with nails and wounds, through his body, his soul and spirit aflame, Francis sank down, unconscious, in his blood." Sudac, whose wounds have been declared "not of human origin" by Vatican doctors at the Gemelli Clinic in Rome, is somewhat less dramatic when discussing his holy affliction. It happened at "a friendly get-together in one family's home," the priest says in his only interview available in English (given soon after his initial stigmatization). Unspecifically noting that the wounds imbued him with "a tremendous fear of the Lord," Sudac says he suffers little pain from the stigmata, except when he is praying. "Then I feel it pulsing," he reports. "On first Fridays . . . it's known to bleed and leak as though it is crying." Other marvels Sudac received along with stigmatization include "gifts of levitation, bilocation, and knowledge of upcoming events." Of these, bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once, is particularly "interesting," Sudac says. "You have the feeling that you are at one place, but your heart and imagination want to be somewhere else." The priest says he wouldn't have believed he'd been in two places at the same time until "some people had come forward and confirmed it all."One would like to engage Sudac, to discuss why he doesn't bleed to death. Or whether his wounds smell like roses and tobacco, as Padre Pio's were said to. But Sudac does not speak English and is not currently talking to the press. Nor does Sudac display the stigmata at his Masses, a fact that does not seem to bother many of the people on line in the rain outside St. Athanasius. A young Caribbean woman who described herself as a "black Catholic" says, "What's in it for you to say it isn't so?" It was a question of faith, people on line agreed. St. Athanasius is still an Italian parish, but Russians have moved in, Mexicans and Filipinos, too. Outside is the usual New York babel, half a dozen languages and accents, from wherever Roman Catholics came in black robes and conquistador armor. Tom, an Eastern European–born postal worker, says these various ethnicities will matter little tonight. Of course, Father Sudac would appear to be talking in Croatian, but actually his words would be uttered in "another tongue altogether." It was something he'd come across in this reading, Tom said. Stigmatics, due to their special relationship with God, often entered a meditative state in which they could "communicate" with others bearing the wounds of Christ. Since more than 60 saints have borne the stigmata, Tom said, there was every reason to believe that Sudac would not simply be speaking for himself.
