Pope laicises priest accused of creating Medjugorje claims

PADDY AGNEW in Rome

POPE BENEDICT XVI has laicised Fr Tomislav Vlasic, the controversial Franciscan priest who long served as the “spiritual adviser” to the six young Bosnian Croats who claim to have had more than 40,000 visions of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje in Bosnia.

In a motu proprio (an impromptu papal ruling) widely reported in Italian media this week, Pope Benedict has returned Fr Vlasic to the lay state and dispensed him from his vows.

It is believed the pope approved this “unfrocking” as far back as last March, while Fr Vlasic had requested to be laicised.

It was in 1981 that Mirjana Dragicevic, Marija Pavlovic, Vicka Ivankovic, Ivan Dragicevic, Ivanka Ivankovic and Jakov Colo claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary on a hillside near Medjugorje.

From the beginning, both the Vatican and local Catholic Church figures were sceptical about the claims.

Even though Fr Vlasic wrote to Pope John Paul II in 1984 to say he was the one “who through divine providence guides the seers of Medjugorje”, Bishop Pavao Zanic of Mostar-Duvno, the dioceses in which Medjugorje is located, had already expressed his doubts, accusing Fr Vlasic of creating the whole apparitions phenomenon.

Fr Vlasic left Medjugorje in the mid-1980s, ostensibly to establish the Queen of Peace community in Parma, but also because his position had become untenable after it became public knowledge that he had fathered a child with a Franciscan nun and had then tried to cover up the affair.

Suspended by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January 2008, Fr Vlasic was under investigation by the group “for the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspected mysticism, disobedience to legitimately issued orders” as well as on charges of immorality related to his affair with the nun.

All of the charges were linked to the “context of the Medjugorje phenomenon”.

Over the years, three church commissions failed to find any evidence to support the claims of the “seers”. In 1991, the bishops of the former Yugoslavia said: “It cannot be affirmed that these matters concern supernatural apparitions or revelations.”