The Medjugorje Deception

Medjugorje Revisited: 30 Years of Visions or Religious Fraud? investigates the alleged visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, looking at their origins, and their impact on the Catholic Church. It is an expanded, revised and updated version of Understanding Medjugorje, which was published in 2006. Since then there have been important new developments, including the formation of an International Commission to investigate the alleged visions. Millions of people have visited Medjugorje, even though it has received no official Church approval. Medjugorje Revisited focuses on the transcripts of the original tapes of the visionaries made in June 1981, and the credibility of the visions and the visionaries, demonstrating the serious problems involved in accepting Medjugorje as genuine. It also examines the role of theologians, and the Hercegovina Franciscans, in promoting Medjugorje, and its tangled historical and religious background, as well as its links with the Charismatic Renewal, In sum, it examines all the relevant evidence about Medjugorje, and concludes that, despite some "good fruits," it bears all the hallmarks of a vast religious fraud.

A complete corpus of all the messages of the apparitions of Medjugorje, from the beginning to the present day. Book size is A5, with a compact type-font for ease of portability.

Various articles are presented covering psychological, sociological and cross-cultural topics or relevance to religious/spiritual researchers and academics.

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In June 1981, six young Croatians in the village of Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. The Medjugorje visionaries say that Mary has returned every day since then, bringing them important messages from heaven to convey to the world. Throughout history, people have reported encountering extraordinary religious experiences-apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visions of Jesus Christ, weeping statues and icons, the stigmata, physical healings and miracles, and experiences of the afterlife-and interpreted them as supernatural in origin. Scholars have often tried to reinterpret such experiences, including those described by the great mystics like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila, into natural or psychopathological categories, such as hysteria, hallucination, delusion, epileptic seizures, psychosis, the workings of the unconscious mind, or fraud. Are such reductionist explanations valid? Over the past three decades the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to extensive medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while undergoing their visionary experiences. Daniel Klimek argues that the case of Medjugorje affords a rare opportunity to understand a deeper dimension of extraordinary religious phenomena. Presenting and analyzing the scientific studies on the visionaries in juxtaposition with the major scholars and debates surrounding religious experience, Klimek concludes that a multidisciplinary approach grants a more holistic and deeper understanding of such extraordinary religious experiences.