The Visions of the Children: The Apparitions of the Blessed Mother at Medjugorje

By Janice T. Connell

In Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on June 25, 1981, five teenagers and a nine-year-old began telling others that they were seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary on a local mountain with the Infant Christ in her arms. The religious visions of the children continued daily. The Blessed Virgin Mary, who identified herself as the "Queen of Peace" on that day continues to bring messages for the entire world.

Like Lourdes and Fatima before it, Medjugorje has become a holy pilgrimage site for Christian worshippers around the world. The Visions of the Children, Revised and Updated Edition features exclusive conversations with the six apparitioners who have been receiving, since June 1981, visions and messages of the Virgin Mary. After 25 years, three of the original visionaries continue to see the Blessed Mother daily.

This revised and updated edition includes:

-new information on the six visionaries who first saw Mary at Medjugorje

-Messages from the Virgin Mary through June 2006

-extraordinary secrets about the final chapter in the history of the world

-A new, updated list of Marian Centers worldwide.

This is a must have volume for anyone interested in the Blessed Virgin Mary, Marian apparitions, or Mejugorgje.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466869905

Janice T. Connell

Janice T. Connell is an attorney and the author of Angel Power and Meetings with Mary. She is a prolific and dynamic lecturer who speaks all over the United States and abroad. She lives in Arizona.

Book preview

Prologue

The fire of love is strongest when the way is dark.

Every book has a reason for being. On May 25, 1987, Mary, the Mother of God, spoke to the world through the visionaries at Medjugorje:

Dear children, I invite everyone to start living in God’s love. I am your eternal mother and therefore I want to lead you all to perfect holiness. I want every one of you to be happy here on earth, and every one of you to be with me in heaven. This is, dear children, the reason for my coming here and my desire. Thank you for your response to my call.

The reason for this book is so that all people on earth may know their spiritual mother and have an opportunity to respond to her call.

There is a special reason for this Third Edition of The Visions of the Children. Who could have imagined the meltdown of the Iron Curtain, followed by a tragic civil war that violated much of the region of Bosnia? Mysteriously, the village of Medjugorje remained an oasis of peace, unscathed by the war. An unprecedented proliferation of apparitions, heavenly messages claimed by Medjugorje pilgrims and others, and extraordinary spiritual phenomena are now being reported all over the world. Marian centers exist in towns, villages, and hamlets everywhere. The Internet has its own Medjugorje Web sites that instantly inform the world of events in the village as they occur (see Chapter 14). Nothing like Medjugorje has happened in the known history of mankind. Miracles of reconciliation, conversion, and physical, mental, and spiritual healings continue to remind the world that Medjugorje is also unique in the spiritual history of the world.

In April 1987, my family was having a meal at a restaurant in Rancho Santa Fe, California, as we planned my youngest son, Will’s, graduation from Phillips Academy. We had much to celebrate. It was a large graduating class, nearly five hundred, and Will was receiving one of five academic awards. He was captain of three sports teams, and always was surrounded by friends of all types. Little did I fathom then that destiny would lead him to prayer, fasting, and service as a U.S. Navy physician in a war zone. We didn’t get too far planning the graduation festivities, however, because the front page of The New York Times carried a feature article about apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Ukraine. According to the secular reporters covering the story, at least one hundred thousand people claimed to have actually seen the Blessed Virgin Mary in the spring of 1987. This is incredible, I said in astonishment. Suddenly all the love and longing for the Blessed Mother I had experienced as a child came flooding into my heart so quickly that I was caught quite off guard. In those days nearly everyone had heard about the eighteen apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to Saint Bernadette at Lourdes, and some fortunate ones even had little jars of blessed water from the miraculous springs in the grotto there. Everyone seemed to know the messages of Fatima and of the visions of the three little shepherd children who saw Our Lady on the thirteenth day of six consecutive months and faithfully gave her messages to an unbelieving world. People still spoke of the great Miracle of the Sun that happened at Fatima in 1917 before nearly seventy thousand