The Secrets of Medjugorje: The Ten Secrets, the Seers’ Messages, and the Church’s Discernment

The ten secrets of Medjugorje constitute the most mysterious core of the apparitions that, since 1981, the six Bosnian seers have claimed to receive from Our Lady of Peace. None of the secrets has yet been publicly revealed: each seer received his or her own, promising to keep them until the moment appointed by Our Lady. This article examines what the seers themselves have been able to say about the content of these secrets and about the regular messages Mary has conveyed over the decades, placing them in the context of the Church’s ongoing discernment.

The Messages of Medjugorje (since 1981): The Six Bosnian Seers, the Recurring Themes, and the Question of Authenticity

In 1981, six young people from Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina)—Ivan, Marija, Vicka, Jakov, Ivanka, and Mirjana—reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary with messages of prayer, fasting, conversion, and peace. The canonical status of the apparitions remains sub iudice. In 2024 the Holy See issued guidelines that permit local veneration without a definitive pronouncement on their supernatural character.

This is the question that pilgrims put to parish priests and to the commissions. Later on, everything was channeled into Mary’s monthly messages, on the 25th of each month. These messages were published in R. Laurentin, Messages et Pédagogie de la Vierge à Medjugorje. Some claim that the Medjugorje messages that are regularly disseminated are banal and repetitive, possibly even trivial, because they repeat what is essential in the Gospel with regard to our times: prayer, conversion, fasting, the reading of Sacred Scripture.

In day-to-day reality, those who have forgotten the Gospel come to see it once again as something important. They find it and put it into practice, and it was fasting above all that brought Medjugorje back to life.

As for the repetitiveness, R. Laurentin once had occasion to reply to a cardinal: “Your mother, who gave you your basic upbringing, must surely have repeated many commonplaces, but that is precisely why you became what you are.”

One may discuss the problem raised by this criticism of repetitiveness. Might it perhaps be an automatism that prolongs the spontaneity of the first dialogues between the astonished seers and the apparition?

There are many reasons that allow us to answer this increasingly cited hypothesis. What cannot be called into question is the sincerity of the seers. For each of them, receiving the last secret meant the end of the experience, albeit in a singular way in the case of Mirjana. She was the first for whom the daily apparitions ended, at Christmas 1982, but since then she has had not only the annual apparition on her birthday, but also contact in prayer, sometimes accompanied by an apparition, on the first Monday of every month.

Some seers still have daily apparitions: Ivan, Marija, and Vicka. The others have only an annual apparition. The seers’ simple, Gospel-centered messages posed no problem.

Some formulations are ambiguous, but, once examined, they say nothing more than the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council, which Saint John Paul II also applied, even with non-Christian religions, on the basis of a principle of equal dialogue in prayer.

The Ten Secrets of Medjugorje: What the Seers Have Revealed about the First Three and the Remaining Seven

Another point discussed somewhat blindly concerns the secrets: nothing is known about them, because the seers keep them closely guarded and have not even told one another anything. Nevertheless, the little they are able to say about them ensures a real consistency in this regard.

Let us summarize the little they have disclosed:

• The first three secrets are warnings announcing great events, which the seers call chastisements: a self-punishment of the world, which is destroying itself because it is abandoning God and legalizing evil. The second warning would be a visible sign, apparently to be given on the hill of the apparitions, to revive faith whenever particularly difficult times draw near.

Ivan, whom the commission asked to reveal the secrets, ended up handing over a sealed letter, in return for a promise that it would not be opened until the content of the secrets had been verified. To René Laurentin, who was astonished that he had opened even this small breach, Ivan replied that he had said nothing in that envelope. Since René Laurentin had passed this news on to the commission, the commission once again tried to intimidate Ivan, telling him that, under those conditions, they could open the envelope. When they opened it, it turned out that the young man had said something (very little) about the warning: he had spoken of a visible sign on the hill. With a peasant’s prudence, rather than write nothing, he had limited himself to saying the minimum of what he thought he could reveal. For this relative indiscretion and for the lie, he was taken to task by the commission. During a retreat with the five seers and Slavko, Ivan humbly became aware of his limitations and of the problems arising from his shyness, against which he had always struggled effectively, especially with the help of the one who appeared to him, as he testified.

• The last seven secrets all seem to be dark and dramatic, especially the seventh (which was somewhat mitigated thanks to the prayers and conversions of Medjugorje, beginning with Mirjana’s) and the tenth. These secrets broadly announce the apocalyptic self-punishment of the world, though it is impossible to say whether the seers see it as the end of time or the end of an era.

But what will the secrets be? Like all secrets, they will no doubt seem disappointing, because the most successful predictions are never those that tell how history will unfold before it happens. Rather, they are warnings mixed with what seem to be snapshots, incomprehensible before their fulfillment. Their meaning is truly revealed only after the event has taken place.

The Prophecies of Medjugorje and the Church’s Discernment: The Ambiguity of Predictions and the Position of the Holy See

Will the predictions of Medjugorje prove to be fundamentally correct?

We ask this because Mirjana had foretold the arrangement for the revelation, which would be entrusted to a young Franciscan, starting in 1985. After that, nothing happened. Since she knew the date on which the revelation would be authorized, why did she foretell it so early? All of this remains a mystery.

Predictions, however, are the most ambiguous field there is in the world, since they can never be verified or analyzed before they are fulfilled. Even if the Christian authenticity of the fruits of Medjugorje, so widely recognized, is presented under the best conditions, no prediction can be made about what the fulfillment of the prophecies will or will not be—prophecies on which the six seers, independently of one another, seem tacitly to agree.

The little that has been said about the progressive revelation of the ten secrets (with the apparitions ending at the tenth) is presented coherently and has not given rise to criticism.

The message of Medjugorje—prayer, fasting, conversion, and peace—finds an echo in the central themes of John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater, which presents Mary as a watchful mother who guides her children toward Christ and toward reconciliation with God.

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