I have gotten to know Patrick Coffin personally in the past year, and I enjoy his friendship. He’s a very smart and funny guy. We’ve talked about many things, but one thing we haven’t discussed is Medjugorje. My wife and I went there once almost twenty years ago. Is the Virgin Mary appearing there with messages for the world? The best answer I can give to that question is this. “How should I know?” I’m certainly not infallible. My personal opinion is that the messages are the real deal, as in authentic. One thing that is indisputable, from my personal experience, is that Medjugorje is HOT, as in supernaturally. My wife and I have many stories to tell about all the wild things that happened to us while we were there.
Which brings me to a recent article by Patrick on Medjugorje. He recounts a legendary tale about the Virgin Mary appearing in the village, but uncharacteristically attired all in black:
How could the Blessed Virgin Mary possibly endorse a story as absurd and blasphemous as the tale of the bloody handkerchief?
Number 10 requires some spelling out. This anecdote began to circulate in and around the village in late summer in 1981. It’s a variation of a pious European old wives’ tale in which a certain cab driver came across a man who was covered in blood from head to toe. This man handed the cabbie a bloody handkerchief and ordered him to “throw this in the river.”
The cab driver drove on and then came across a woman dressed all in black. She hailed the cab and asked him to give her a handkerchief. He gave her his own hankie, but she said, “Not that one, the bloody one.” So the cabbie demurred and handed her the bloody one. The lady in black replied: “If you had thrown it into the river, the end of the world would have occurred now.”
Now, most reasonable people would find such an occultic tall-tale hard to believe. But seer Vicka doubled down, and her testimony about the red hanky/black lady/end of the world story is part of the public record. She wrote in her diary on September 4, 1981 that not only was the lady in black the Gospa, but the man dripping with blood was Jesus.8
I had never heard that story before, but it reminded of this eerie picture my wife snapped. It’s at the site of a group of martyrs who were burned alive for their faith, if I am remembering the story correctly. Directly above the plaque appears what I always thought was a rather ghostly image of a woman dressed all in black. I thought how strange (and appropriate) that such a mournful appearance of a woman would show up at the site where brave men and women were marched to such a gruesome and painful death.
Patrick’s story raises a question. (Cue the sinister organ music.) Could the woman be the legendary apocalyptic Virgin Mary?
