Medjugorje judged diabolical by six voters on 2016 Vatican committee: report

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Six Vatican consultors judged the Medjugorje phenomenon to be diabolical and called for the visionaries to receive a “condemnation of their memory,” according to a new report.

On August 17, Italian journalist David Murgia published on his blog Il Segno di Giona a new report about the 2016 secret vote of 33 theologians and cardinals concerning the possible supernatural character of the Medjugorje phenomenon.

According to Murgia, six of the 21 dissenting votes not only held that the alleged apparitions were false, but explicitly attributed a diabolical origin to them and called for exemplary punishment of the seers.

“For these six voters — three of whom were cardinals (and I want to stress this) — everything that happened and continues to happen in the small village in Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘cannot be explained without the original, direct, and foundational intervention of the Evil One.’ Consequently, we would not be dealing with a Mariophany but with a Satanophany,” Murgia wrote.

The six opinions rested in part on two assessments. First, the voters reportedly considered the Church’s official teaching to have already rejected the supernatural character of Medjugorje through the 1991 Declaration of Zadar by the then Yugoslav Bishops’ Conference.

READ: Vatican committee rejected supernatural origin of Medjugorje events in 2016: report

Second, the six voters reportedly challenged the conclusions reached by the international commission established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 under Cardinal Camillo Ruini. While that commission initially expressed a favorable view — at least regarding the earliest alleged apparitions at Medjugorje — the dissenting theologians argued that its positive assessment was based on partial knowledge of the documentation held by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The proposed response to Medjugorje was also reportedly unusually sweeping. The six opinions called for the complete rehabilitation of the doctrinal and pastoral actions of Bishops Pavao Žanić and Ratko Perić of Mostar-Duvno, both of whom opposed Medjugorje. They also urged the Church to avoid “harming pilgrims” whose good faith had nevertheless been “exploited.”

Most strikingly, the report says the six voters wanted the presumed visionaries to be punished through a “damnatio memoriae” — literally, a condemnation of their memory, more than an explicit condemnation of the whole phenomenon.

The alleged apparitions of Medjugorje began in June 1981 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On March 17, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI established an international investigative body known as the Ruini Commission to study the phenomenon. This commission examined the events and was generally more open to the possibility of a supernatural origin, especially regarding the initial alleged apparitions of 1981. Pope Francis later suppressed the Ruini Commission on January 17, 2014.

After reviewing the Ruini report, Pope Francis referred the Medjugorje case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s ordinary “Feria Quarta” session. This led to a secret consultation held on September 17, 2016, in which 33 cardinals, bishops, and experts submitted written judgments on whether the events were of supernatural origin. Twenty-one participants concluded that the Medjugorje phenomena were not supernatural, nine judged them supernatural, and three said the supernatural character had not been established. The group included several high-profile prelates and members of the earlier Ruini Commission.

READ: Former Medjugorje devotee identified as suspect in act of desecration

On May 12, 2019, Pope Francis authorized pilgrimages to Medjugorje, without making any declaration about the supernatural nature of the alleged apparitions.

A major shift occurred on May 17, 2024, when the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued new norms for evaluating alleged supernatural phenomena. These norms emphasized assessing pastoral and spiritual fruits rather than issuing positive declarations of supernatural origin, which the document explicitly states are no longer foreseen even in favorable cases.

Applying this new framework, on September 19, 2024, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández published a “Note About the Spiritual Experience Connected with Medjugorje,” describing the site as rich in spiritual fruits — conversion, renewed sacramental life, vocations, prayer, and charity — while insisting that such fruits do not prove supernatural origin.

The “Note” acknowledged theological imprecisions and problematic elements in some messages but concluded that the phenomenon merited a nihil obstat, encouraging pastoral engagement while maintaining doctrinal caution and clarifying that no one is obliged to believe the alleged messages. Fernández stressed that the Church’s current approach focuses on spiritual vitality rather than proving supernatural origins.

Murgia argued that the newly revealed 2016 voting results illustrate the deep division within the Church over Medjugorje, a controversy he believes risked creating an “almost schism” between those calling for a decisive rejection and those advocating a more open assessment of at least the earliest events.