By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY – The Vatican has established an international commission to study the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, a small Bosnian town, at the request of the Bishops of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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 17 March.
Jesuit Fr Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said the commission would have about 20 members, but he did not say if or when their names would be published.
Journalist Andrea Tornielli of the Italian daily Il Giornale has named several members of that commission.
The formal Vatican announcement indicated only that the investigatory commission would be chaired by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the former vicar of the Rome diocese; no other names were given. But Tornielli – whose reports on internal Vatican affairs have been consistently accurate – says that the other members include Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo; Archbishop Josip Boznic of Zagreb; Cardinal Julian Herranz, the former president of the Pontifical Commission for Legislative Texts; and Father Tony Anatrella, a French psychologist and Marian expert. The commission will also include lay members, the Giornale reporter says.
Conspicuously absent from the list of commission members, Tornielli points out, is Bishop Ratko Peric of the Mostar Diocese where Medjugorje is located.
Fr Lombardi said the commission is unlikely to make any statements. Their work and recommendations, if any, will be turned over to the doctrinal congregation.
He said that in the 1980s the Diocese of Mostar-Duvno, 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.
As 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 breakup 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 travel 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 is expected “to take some time.”
The commission was announced just three months after Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna made a very public visit to Medjugorje and said the church must recognise that private pilgrimages to the village result in prayer and reconciliation.
But Bishop 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.”