VATICAN CITY (CNS): At the request of the bishops of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Vatican has established an international commission to study the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, a small Bosnian town.
The commission will be led by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, retired archbishop of Rome, and will operate under the direction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican announced on March 17.
Vatican spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi said commission members would include cardinals, bishops, theologians and other experts.
He said the commission would have about 20 members, but he did not say if or when their names would be published.
However, Fr Lombardi said the commission was unlikely to make any statements. Their work and recommendations, if any, will be turned over to the doctrinal congregation.
Fr Lombardi said that in the 1980s the Mostar-Duvno diocese, where Medjugorje is located, established a commission to investigate the claims of six young people who said Mary appeared to them daily beginning in 1981.
Because the alleged apparitions were having an impact beyond the diocese, the local bishop asked the national bishops’ conference to investigate. At the time, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of Yugoslavia.
With the break-up of Yugoslavia, “the question did not arrive at a conclusion on whether or not the phenomena were of a supernatural nature”, Fr Lombardi said, although in 1991 the bishops’ conference issued a statement saying “it cannot be confirmed that supernatural apparitions or revelations are occurring here” and asking priests and bishops not to organise official pilgrimages to the town.
Responding to a question from a French bishop in 1996, the Vatican confirmed the position that official pilgrimages should not be organised, but also said individual Catholics who travelled to Medjugorje should be given pastoral care and access to the sacraments.
Fr Lombardi said the bishops of Bosnia-Herzegovina asked the doctrinal congregation to study the alleged apparitions.
He said the commission’s work was expected “to take some time”.
The commission was announced just three months after Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna made a visit to Medjugorje and said the Church must recognise that private pilgrimages to the village resulted in prayer and reconciliation.
But Bishop Ratko Peric of Mostar-Duvno, who repeatedly has questioned the authenticity of the apparitions, said the cardinal’s pilgrimage “added new sufferings” to the problems of his diocese and did “not contribute to its much-needed peace and unity”.
Fr Lombardi stressed that the opinion of Bishop Peric was not the authority in the final outcome on Medjugorje.
