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The non-facts are these: On June 24, 1981, a 14-year-old peasant girl, unoriginally named Ivanka Ivankovic, unoriginally came across a light that she took to be the Virgin Mary. Not many hours later, three other girls and two boys claimed to have had the identical experience, or sense-impression. Within a matter of weeks, thousands of the credulous had started to appear at the site, and it has now been trampled by millions. Those who turn up have emanated a number of false claims, such as the ability to stare calmly and without harm at the sun (a pointless achievement even if verifiable) and the more acquisitive and medieval capacity to turn their rosary beads into pure gold. Every sort of foolishness is indulged, and every green acre of this once backward village has been transmuted into a knick-knack mall.

Three things, however, distinguish Medjugorje from the average racketeering religious hub. First, the children claimed to go on seeing the Virgin Mary every day, and some of them keep up this claim to the present moment. Since she exists in their imaginations, and is not a weeping or bleeding statue of the traditional sort -- smeared with pig's fat or otherwise rigged -- she is harder to expose than the more palpable frauds at the shrine of San Gennaro, say. Second, the Vatican and the local hierarchy will not, as they have with similar hallucinations at Fatima or Lourdes or Knock, bestow recognition on the supposed miracle. Third, the political element of this miracle is so obvious as to do what no cowled blue lady can do: make a non-believer catch his breath in wonder.

Part of the fraudulence of Medjugorje is manifested in its political opportunism The site is in the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina, but it also lies within the area claimed and occupied by Croatian irredentists. In the unbelievably awful souvenir shops that pollute the entire landscape, the accepted local currency is the Croatian kuna, supposed by the Dayton accords to be illegal tender in these parts.

Here, the wreckage of an entire city and the ruin of an entire society is still open to view. The bridges are down, the minarets are amputated: In many parts of town there is still not one stone piled on another. And all this was done, in plain view of NATO, by Croatian government forces who had pictures of the Virgin taped to their rifle-butts. While the pilgrims chanted only a matter of miles away, and gave out stupid and cupiditous yelps about their rosaries turning into gold, the soldiers of Christ were methodically leveling every sign of the existence of another monotheism -- Islam. They were also killing, deporting and torturing those of their fellow citizens who professed the wrong faith, or who didn't profess the right one, or who professed no faith at all.

Next page | The church's hostility toward the Virgin of Medjugorje