“Budget fruits you will know them.”

One of the clearest bad fruits of Medjugorje is Ivan Dragičević.

For nearly 45 years, he has claimed that the Mother of God appears to him every single day while his public identity, speaking appearances, and family pilgrimage business have grown around that claim.

Authentic Marian visionaries do not make themselves the center. They tremble, obey, suffer, retreat, and disappear behind the message.

Ivan became a traveling attraction whose appearances were promoted with the expectation that an “apparition” would occur while he was there.

He married the former Miss Massachusetts, has made a fortune off the apparitions, and now lives in a multi-million dollar home in Boston when he is not needed to put on shows and cater to manipulated pilgrims in Medjugorge.

In 2013, Rome intervened.

The CDF warned every U.S. diocese that Ivan was touring American parishes and was expected to receive “apparitions” during his visits. Clergy and faithful were not permitted to attend events where the visions’ credibility was taken for granted.

Think about how spiritually grotesque that is:

The Queen of Heaven reduced to a scheduled feature on a parish-event itinerary as though Ivan could carry a daily apparition from venue to venue while the Church itself still refused to authenticate it.

And the concerns about money are not internet gossip.

Published accounts of the Ruini Commission’s confidential report say it was especially severe toward Ivan, recording grave and substantiated reservations about his credibility and criticizing the visionaries’ ambiguous relationship with money. 

The commercial overlap remains visible.

Pilgrimage companies advertise “Medjugorje with Ivan,” including seven nights in the Dragičević family home, meals, a private chapel, spiritual activities, and opportunities connected with Ivan’s presence and testimony.

Does that prove criminal fraud? No, and I will not claim what I cannot prove.

But it reveals something spiritually ugly: the alleged daily access to Our Lady and the family’s commercial pilgrimage enterprise are not cleanly separated.

The visionary is part of the product.

Medjugorje defenders answer: “But look at the conversions!”

God can draw souls even from confusion. The Rosary works. Confession works. The Eucharist is Jesus Christ.

None of that authenticates Ivan or transforms celebrity, commerce, scheduled visions, and grave credibility concerns into good fruit.

Ivan is not the entire case against Medjugorje. He is one bad fruit among many: conflict with lawful bishops, dubious messages, celebrity visionaries, financial entanglements, and nearly half a century of claims the Church has never declared supernatural. 

I do not believe Our Lady is behind it.

And I love her too much to call this hers.

Source: @BreeSolstad

N.B. Agreed: conversions prove God was at work. They don’t prove the alleged apparitions or the location of conversions was necessary to the working of grace or are the source of it. Bernadette and other approved visionaries withdrew from the world and did not enrich themselves as seers of the apparitions. Bernadette said, “The waters are not for me” after Our Lady told her, “I cannot promise you happiness in this life, only in the next.”