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Medjugorje Grey Book

Open Your Hearts to MARY Queen of Peace

Date: November 7, 2006 , Last update March 1, 2008
Author: Dr. Fra Slavko Barbarić, OFM , Fra Tomislav Vlašić, OFM
Category: Early Medjugorje Reflections Books , Books , Priests of Medjugorje

This book is the first of the four volumes of sermons and discourses given by Fr. Slavko Barbaric and Fr. Tomislav Vlasic during 1984 - 1987 in Medjugorje, and contains talks given from Easter until December 1984.

All chapters of this book are now included

Open your hearts, ask God; and I will ask for you

Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ. You are the True God, therefore You are the Word, You are the Food that nourishes us, because You are the God of Life.

We pray to You so that all of us here present now, through Your Word and through the messages of the Word, may feel life and strength and may return home with the experience of having met the Living Jesus, Jesus who saves us. Amen.

I will explain what has happened during the last four days. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, most of the parishoners fasted on bread and water. Some people and some families did not go to work. They only prayed. Many people fasted for the whole of the Novena. Yesterday was a day of prayer and the whole of the Parish prayed. It has been the happiest day of my life because I felt full of joy. This is my personal reason. Another reason is that as a priest, I have never seen so many miraculous conversions as during this time. All the priests who were hearing confessions agree. People really threw themselves into their confession asking how to mend their ways, what they had to do and were truly ready to change their lives. We have had some unexplainable cases of people on their way to the seaside feeling a force pushing them here to Medjugorje to pray and to go to confession. There have been examples of deep confessions after a lapse of fifteen, thirty five or forty years.

Yesterday and the day before, many young men and women came here in the deepest of faith to be consecrated to God and to Our Lady.

The reason for our happiness is that the visionaries say Our Lady is very joyful at this time. On all three days she said: “I am very joyful, continue, continue, continue. Continue to pray and to fast.” The visionaries say that Our Lady has never been as happy as she was yesterday. She was full of joy, just like a bud about to blossom, and she said: “Continue, continue. Open your hearts, ask God; and I will ask for you.”

The most moving of her apparitions was the following : the two young visionaries, Jelena and Marjana, gave Our Lady a small Madonna (Child Mary) from Lourdes on our behalf and asked her to bless it specially so we could have something by which to remember yesterday. Jelena said that Our Lady looked at it and started to weep, her usual tears were followed by tears of blood transformed into tears of gold and she said: “Never in my life have I wept in sorrow as in joy this evening. Thank you.” This is the reason why we are so happy.

The important matter for us priests now is what is happening at an interior level. As I said, we have seen a great many conversions and have been able to really feel the peace in people and in their souls. Yesterday I really understood what the Lord’s Day meant not a day for tourism, we have transformed Sundays and Feast Days into sight seeing days. This is what we are poor in spirit. Yesterday, as I told you, I lived a true Lord’s Day because people had prepared themselves for it by fasting and prayer and prayed all day. So I asked the population of this village to go ahead for thirty four days, because then we celebrate the Eucharistic Congress of the Croation Church and, on the same day 9th September the Feast of the Cross on the hill here. I have asked people to transform Sundays into the Lord’s Day, into a day of prayer, if they want to feel this is truly the Day of the Lord.

I am lying when I say I have no time to pray. In the past few days, as you have seen, I have been very busy but, in spite of this, I have recited many Rosaries because we decided to pray more and more. I took my Rosary wherever I went with the nuns, with people, in the car, and so I prayed all day. I told myself that I had been lying when I said I had no time to pray. After this, I felt purified within and other people, too, gave testimony to me of how they had been able to pray. For example, during these past few days, many families have not worked but prayed. Some young people asked their parents’ permission to pray and set up tents in the woods; they took bread and water with them and prayed and fasted all day. There were some wonderful experiences.

(Fr. Tomislav Vlasic 6th August 1984)

 

Source: Friends of Medjugorje Association

 


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