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Pilgrims visit a visionary in a Shelby County field

The Birmingham News, USA
Aug. 2, 2005
Greg Garrison, News Staff Writer
www.al.com

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Wednesday August 3, 2005

Agnes Totten of Belfast, Northern Ireland, has visited what she considers some of the world’s most important religious shrines: in Rome, Jerusalem, Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje, and Shelby County, Ala.

Totten and several hundred other pilgrims knelt and prayed in a Shelby County field Monday with Marija Lunetti, who is known around the world as one of six visionaries who began claiming to have apparitions of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the former Yugoslavian village of Medjugorje in 1981.

Lunetti believes the Virgin Mary has been appearing to her every day since then. The Roman Catholic Church has not ruled on the authenticity of the apparitions, although Lunetti said she met with and received encouraging correspondence from Pope John Paul II.

Lunetti said the church will not rule on the visions while they are still occurring. Similar reported apparitions, in Lourdes, France, and Fatima, Portugal, have been approved by the church.

The remote village of Medjugorje in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina draws millions of religious tourists every year because of the reported visions.

Lunetti came to UAB Hospital in 1988 to donate a kidney to her brother, Andrija Pavlovic, and since then has had dozens of her visions in a Shelby County field next to the home where she stays during visits to Alabama. So the field has also become a pilgrimage site more convenient for American religious tourists, most of them Catholics.

Totten caught a ride to Alabama with Colleen Henny of Junction City, Kan., whose husband died earlier this year.

“I’m looking for peace and direction,” Henny said.

After kneeling and praying with them on Monday morning, Lunetti spoke to a crowd of pilgrims for about 15 minutes. She said that Mary helps Christians get closer to her son, Jesus.

“To be ready, we need our heart open,” Lunetti said. “God gives us his beautiful grace to be here and pray together.”

After Lunetti’s brief talk, Totten spoke with the visionary for several minutes. “If you went to Medjugorje, you wouldn’t get this close to her,” Totten said. “This is Medjugorje for America. You can feel the presence of Our Lord and Our Lady.”

At Caritas until Friday:

Lunetti welcomed pilgrims from Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Texas and other states who came to spend the week praying with her.

“It’s a holy place,” said Fernando Valverde of Orlando, who has been to Medjugorje and believes that the Virgin Mary appeared to Lunetti and five others from her village. “You can feel peace, tranquillity and love from God.”

Lunetti will be at Caritas of Birmingham, a mission organization headquartered on Shelby County 43 off U.S. 280, until Friday.

She said her visions of the Virgin Mary have been continuing daily, including Monday at 6:40 p.m., and that Mary brings simple messages of prayer and peace.

“She asks that we pray for peace,” Lunetti said.

Caritas, which promotes the visions in Medjugorje through newsletters sent to 130 countries, has chartered an airplane to fly directly from Birmingham to an airport near Lunetti’s home village next week. Lunetti, her Italian husband, Paolo, and their four sons – Michele, 12; Francesco, 9; Marco, 8; and Giovanni, 2 – plan to fly out of Birmingham on Monday with about 200 pilgrims for a 10-day retreat in Medjugorje.

For those who can’t go, a pasture near Sterrett serves just fine as a religious shrine for the visiting visionary. “It’s good, it’s positive, it’s a miracle,” said Valverde. “People are praying, going back to God.”