A package pilgrimage to war

Except from an old diary

In August 1993 I took a package tour to Medjugorje. The Virgin Mary was appearing on a regular basis to the believers there as she had been since 1981, but the war had put a dent in the business. The front line was about 10 km away, over the mountains towards Mostar, which the Croats were besieging; there was a UN barracks on the edge of the village. But the pilgrims I was with couldn’t care about the war. Now read on …

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On arrival at the airport, ten thirty, meet pleasing woman from Unitours who presses on me a fat plastic wallet containing an air ticket, a short guide to Medjugorje, a Croat-English prayer book, and an insurance policy. This last turns out to have so many exclusions that the prayer book is likely to be more help. She also tells me that there are forty one people on the tour, of whom two are babies. In fact, there are four children, and a heavily pregnant mother.
The only other passenger as early is an American woman, the wife of an air force flyer. I ask her, later, why she is going to Medjugorje. “Because Mary’s there,” she answers; and to make a spiritual retreat. Her mother went five years ago.

Only in the aircraft does fear begin to niggle at me.

I am seated next to Jan from Birmingham on the flight down from Zagreb to Split. At Zagreb airport we were given no hard time at all. Jan said she had been three times between 1988 and 1990, but not since then, and was feeling really guilty about that.

Then she launches into a denunciation of the television news. It can’t really be like that, she says. She looks up the plane. Ahead of us are a group of Dutch UN soldiers. “I couldn’t tell which ones are Serbs and which ones are Croats.” I just manage not to point out that is quite unusual to find on Croat airplanes any live Serbs at the moment.. Are those Croatian troops, she asks, pointing to the UN men.

All her friends in Birmingham think she’s insane to come, she says. But she has had nowhere to go since the fighting started. She is with her daughter. Across the aisle from us is an extended Irish family with four children under five and their heavily pregnant mother who apparently organised my friend’s trip.
I confess to a certain anxiety about flying “Is your life full of fear?’‘ she asks, unself-consciously.

At Split airport the pilgrims are greeted by Slavica, who counts them onto the coach and then as it moves off explains that Medjugorje is an island of peace. Owing to the war, there is a curfew, and all the cafes and restaurants have been shut down. And we may be able to hear the shelling from over mountains in Mostar, because of the Serbian aggression, and the fighting with the Muslims. This party is the largest to visit the village at the moment. She clocks off all the events planned: we will meet three of the visionaries and two others, who have developed a gift of talking to the Virgin even if they can’t see her. There will be prayer walks, and visits round the mountains.

“Some of you may have been to Mostar, which is now a city that practically doesn’t exist.’‘ she explains. “The shelling and the bombing may disturb us at night. but Medjugorje is an island of peace.’‘
“In most regions of Western Herzegovina, or Herzeg-Bosna, our Croatian Bosnia, there is a curfew now, but it is flexible. The cafés and bars have been closed because the young men should be taking shifts at the front.”

Someone asks if the souvenir shops are open. “Yes, some of them still are. But let’s not talk about shopping,. Let’s start the pilgrimage with a prayer. And luckily we have two priests here.” So for the next forty five minutes, as the coach climbs into the mountains, an old Irish priest in the front seats leads the coach through a decade of the rosary, using the tour guide’s microphone.

I’ve seen a lot of religious fervour in my time, but there is something uniquely spiky and lunatic about these devotions. Across these jagged cement-coloured hills a part of Europe is re-enacting a mediaeval religious war with mediaeval savagery in an upswelling of evil from the roots of the world. And here is a coachload of nice middle-aged tourists praying for their own salvation, with all the affected goriness of Irish folk-Catholicism. Stations of the Cross. On such a journey I could see the point of quiet penitence. I could see the point of Pentecostal shouting and rejoicing in the face of apparent doom. But old-fashioned clerical blood-and-hell preaching is like a spit in the ocean compared with what’s going on now, just out of earshot over the mountains.

The other trick this priest has is that he says “Hail Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou and the Fruit (pause of one beat) ofthywombJesus’‘ all in one word. So after about fifty or a hundred repetitions, the idea become fixed in my mind that we are praising something called “ThywombJesus’‘.

Many of the people who heard I was going here thought it would be physically dangerous; but the defence correspondent, who should know, said that he would rather be with the HVO than the people who go to Medjugorje, and as the decades of the rosary mount into centuries I understand more fully what he meant.
A lot of burned-out smashed-up cars by the roadside, and one group of flattened houses, but no indications otherwise of war passing through. And the way people overtake the bus, not only the cars, but the occasional smashed house could well be the result of Croatian driving habits.

“Mary stood at the foot of the cross and watched her son die when he offered himself to the Father for us.” The priest says. No wonder Irish family life tends to the baroque. Seldom have I heard xianity presented in such a cruel and vindictive light. Perhaps it is the mountains, perhaps it is the knowledge of what is going on in these mountains, but I feel like exclaiming with Randolph Churchill, “God what a shit God is!”

At this point we stop briefly to cross into Bosnia Hercegovina, “or Herzeg-Bosna as we prefer to say”, Slavica explains. There is a degree of nervous laughter; a few UN troops at the checkpoint and a white armoured car. There is also a shack by the road advertising itself as “International duty-free shopping’‘

“We need to strengthen ourselves for the tests, the trial, which Our Lady warns us is coming and perhaps what’s happening here in Jugoslavia is part of the start of that’‘, says the Irish priest as he continues his rosary.

After he has finished, Slavica stands to read out the arrangements: who is sleeping where. She also breaks the news that the electricity only comes on at seven in the evening, and that the water supply is intermittent.The pilgrims greet this cheerfully enough, but as dusk falls, a profound melancholy sinks over me. I look at the hills and the shrubs and think of Housman: “This is the land of lost content’‘. So little has changed since I was seven years old, and we drove down to the coast from Belgrade in a Land Rover. We had taken that holiday three times in a row, but this last time, we took a detour to see Mostar, because it was so beautiful; I remember a mosque there, with a roof gentle and rounded like a cushion, and the excitement with which I spotted some bullet-holes in a wall left over from the second world war.
One evening, just like this one, we had stopped at a hill-side café somewhere in central Bosnia. There was a waterwheel, and pork grilled over charcoal by the stream. Fireflies danced in the herby night. And now Dubrovnik has been shelled, Sarajevo is besieged; Mostar “is a city which practically does not exist’‘.

“The roads are better now”, I said to Slavica, and told her a little of this story. “Why would you live in Belgrade?’‘ she asked, with sudden, cat-like suspicion. She had herself been brought up in Sarajevo and Mostar, “But my roots are round here.’‘
Looking back on the conversation, I think, perhaps unfairly, that these people believe that the tragedy of the war is only that their side cannot win quickly.

After supper, a group of us walk down towards the church in the warm velvety night. We are walking through a ghost town, past a quarter of a mile of tightly-packed shops selling religious tat. There is the “Paddy Shop’‘ which sell “liquers and swets’‘ as well as rosaries. There are jewellers, selling rosaries; and there are souvenir shops selling rosaries. If Rosaries are measured by the decade, there are millennia here: there are whole geological eras of the things hung in long rows: some are almost as long as a man is high; others are tiny. All are unsold and look like remaining that way. Perhaps a quarter of the houses you can see from the Church are unfinished: erected for the boom that went away.
Bernard, a widower from Liverpool, had been here with his wife in the Eighties. “When I was here with Janine, none of this had been built. There were just holy stalls everywhere. But this was just fields, and a few houses.
“Still, I reckon this thing will be like Ireland. It will last for hundreds of years now’‘
“I don’t think the world will last that long’‘ interjects his companion.
“No, I don’t suppose so. I think the end is starting now. Our Lady has warned them, but all she can do is to make the punishment less terrible,’‘ said Bernard.
Cheered by this reflection, the group continued to the church. Fr. whoever gestured around at the huge empty spaces. “There were 30,000 people here for Mass once”, he says: “I have seen them turning people away from the church”. Against one side door are stacked the signs for languages which used to be hung on rows of benches where priests heard confessions in every language of Europe. The loudest noise is that of the unceasing cicadas. No one else is in sight at all.

The pilgrims gather round a white statue of the Virgin. “I thought, when people talked about rosaries turning gold here, that it simply meant they looked gold. But there’s a girl from Dublin with the party, and she was here two years ago, when her rosary turned gold. It really is gold. She was showing it to people on the plane.’‘

“Have you ever seen so many stars anywhere?’‘ says Bernard’s friend, as if he, too, had seen some kind of unnatural miracle.
“Isn’t it peaceful?’‘ asks his companion. Dead on cue, the sky behind the mountains towards Mostar, pulses with shellfire, silently, where the Muslims are being killed.
I’d find it more peaceful without the shellfire, I said.
“Ah, but the Christian message must get through’‘ said Bernard, quite innocent of irony. “And then they will have to make peace.’‘

At breakfast the next morning, the Pilgrims discuss the night. Several complain of later, noisy shellfire lighting up their rooms.
“Oh” says Cath. “I thought it was car headlights.’‘
Everyone laughs at her naivete.
John can cap this story. One of the children had woken in the night and started dropping stones from the balcony. Two pebbles had fallen into a car parked beneath. He had gone down to retrieve them: “and there on the back seat was a gun. A real rifle — a machine gun. Ah, I thought, these children are nothing to do with me.”
He gets his laugh..
“Is Medjugorje in Bosnia, then?’‘ Asks Jan. “I had always thought it was in Croatia.’‘