This article examines and interprets the phenomenon of Medjugorje as a new religious phenomenon. The name of this Bosnian-Herzegovinian village not only refers to a long series of Marian apparitions, but it is also used as a metaphor for the religious and political developments that occur in relation to those visions. The argument is that in the context of interaction with nationalist agendas and church politics, Medjugorje must be seen as a contested apparitional site that has reinvented itself into a highly successful grassroots religious movement. Medjugorje devotees and the faithful, inspired by tradition, are creating an idiosyncratic devotional expression of Catholicism, in which the individual endures the hardships of pilgrimage for a personalized experience of charismatic gifts and the miraculous. The article contends that this distinguishes this devotional movement from mainstream Catholic pilgrimage culture.

In the late summer and fall of 1950, Juliet Hughes, a self-appointed promoter of a Marian apparition at Lipa in the Philippines, joined the crowds assembling for apparitions of the Virgin in Necedah, Wisconsin. The story of Hughes’ visits to Necedah—including a miraculous rose petal she brought from Lipa as well as her meetings with visionary Mary Ann Van Hoof and a number of Necedah pilgrims—highlights the importance of person-to-person encounters at an active apparition site. Indeed, the events described here suggest that when miraculous objects and miracle stories are shared among various sites, these encounters can trigger powerful experiences of signs that enable devotees to perceive these apparitions as testifying to the same transcendent reality. These experiences function as building blocks for a global apparition network.

This article examines recent decisions made by the local Catholic Church and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Rome regarding the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a Carmelite novice in the town of Lipa, the Philippines. Officially declared to have excluded any supernatural intervention in 1951, the stories of the apparitions and accompanying miracles circulated anew in the public sphere in recent decades, sparking a revival in devotion to this particular Mary that was tolerated to varying degrees by Lipa’s archbishops. In September 2015, after a six-year investigation, the presiding archbishop issued a decree that declared the apparitions of Mary “supernatural in character” and “worthy of belief.” This brought swift action from the CDF, which nullified his decree, upholding the original negative decision on the case. Drawing from official Church communiqués and decrees circulated over the past year, as well as previous fieldwork and archival research, I discuss what the final intervention of the CDF reveals about intra-hierarchical dynamics and the limits of bishopric authority vis-à-vis global Church authority in the discernment of apparitions.