I'll start you out here and you can continue reading at the UK Spectator (emphases mine; comments in red):
The Medjugorje story begins early in 1976 when a Franciscan monk in the former Yugoslavia, Father Tomislav Vlasic, starts an affair with a nun who becomes pregnant. Frightened he will be exposed as the child’s father, Father Vlasic persuades her to move away to Germany. She hopes he will honour his promise to leave the ministry and marry her. She writes a sequence of increasingly anxious letters when this does not happen, telling her former lover she is so miserable that she is praying she will die in childbirth. But he piously orders her to ‘be like Mary’ and accept her destiny in a foreign land — and never to tell a soul who the father really is.
Unfortunately for him, some of his letters fall into the hands of the woman’s landlord who, scandalised, copies them and sends them to a friend [read carefully now] in the Vatican.
Six years later Father Vlasic is ‘spiritual leader’ of six children who say the Virgin Mary appears to them daily in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the local bishop is having none of it. The priest writes to Pope John Paul II to say that Satan is working through the bishop and to request direct intervention against him. But, worse luck, the Vatican official with copies of his love letters takes an interest in the case and sends them to the bishop in question.
Disgraced, the priest then heads for Italy where, with a new mistress, he sets up a mixed-sex religious community devoted to the apparitions and continues to party like a bad dog for the next 17 years until the Vatican official who ruined everything for him becomes Pope Benedict XVI.
Three years into Benedict’s pontificate, Father Vlasic today finds himself severely and publicly disciplined in a way which is rare for a person linked so closely to a movement as popular as Medjugorje, which has attracted 30 million pilgrims in 27 years. He is in big trouble, accused of heresy, schism and sexual immorality ‘aggravated by mystical motivations’, as well as ‘the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspect mysticism and disobedience towards legitimately issued orders’. He has refused to co-operate with the Vatican and is under an interdict confining him to a monastery on the pain of excommunication.
Continue reading, Sex, Lies and Medjugorje . This takes you to the first page. Click the page numbers at the bottom - there are 4.
Related:
The obedient are not held captive by Holy Mother Church; it is the disobedient who are held captive by the world!
3 Somebody Comment!!!:
Quite a revelation that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is the Vatican official who received the letters from the German landlord...I wonder if Simon Caldwell is really certain of this...because it is remarkable!
Tominellay
This the the first time this information regarding Medjugorje not being true has come to my knowledge and I am in shock. I truly believed in the early 1990's that our Lady was appearing there. Over the years I forgot about it and just got on with my life until a relative of mine sent me an email with details of the fraud. I decided to go online and find out for myself. I'm still in the early stages of sifting through the evidence and unfortunately it's not looking good. I just feel that it's something tragic. I believe many many people will now say that Bernadette/Lourdes, Jacinta/Fatima etc etc are not true and that even the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not true. God help us all!! from an honest, practicing Catholic Patricia
Anon 4-2-2009:
One cannot lump an unapproved apparition like Medjugorje in with approved apparitions like Lourdes and Fatima.
The dangers of following apparitions not approved is illustrated well by your comments. If the Church should, after years of careful study, render a negative judgment against a place like Medjugorje, then people begin to question other, legitimate matters of the faith.
That is why Holy Mother Church does not quickly approve something. Truly, we ought to always watch for the local bishop's reaction. Even if he is wrong, we commit no wrong in following his lead and standing back. But, if he is right, and people villify him, as they have in Medjugorje, it is very God-displeasing behavior.
That is what tipped me off - the attacks against the local bishop. I just could not reconcile it with the Blessed Mother appearing there. That she - a model of humility and obedience would not firmly guide the children (when they were young, and even now) to obey his repeated orders to cease having public displays of the visions and dissemination of messages, is beyond my comprehension. It flies in the face of other authenitc visionaries who were docile to their bishop or superior even unto wrongful persecution.
Such persecution is a test of authenticity. Those in Medjugorje have seriously failed this particular test.
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