The Miracle of the Sun at Medjugorje

The air hung thick with the scent of turned earth and woodsmoke as I stood among the cluster of villagers outside St. James Church. It was the second of August, late in the afternoon, and the crowd had gathered as it did most evenings near apparition time. Some knelt on the packed dirt. Others held rosaries loose in their fingers. The sun still rode high enough to cast long shadows across the fields.

I had come from Podmiletine that day with neighbors. Word had spread that the visionaries would be inside the church soon. A few hundred people already waited, their voices low. Then someone near the front pointed upward.

The sun had begun to move.

It did not flicker like heat on the horizon. Instead it turned on itself, slow at first, then faster, a bright wheel detaching from its center and sliding downward. I stepped sideways toward the southern wall of the church to see more clearly. The light pressed against my face yet gave no pain. Around me voices rose and broke. One woman dropped to her knees. Another man crossed himself and backed away.

The wheel swung left, then right, like a pendulum. From its edge small spheres of light peeled off and drifted toward the village, carried as if by wind that did not touch us on the ground. I heard Niko Vasilj, the taxi driver from Podmiletine, call out that the same thing had happened to others near him. He stood a few paces away, his hand shielding his eyes even though the glare had softened.

A thin beam separated next. It stretched like a rainbow and pointed toward the hill where the first apparitions had been reported weeks earlier. The beam bent and settled on the church steeple. On that steeple Niko later told Fr. Janko Bubalo he saw the clear outline of a woman without a crown. I could not make out the shape myself, only the light fixed there for several long seconds before it thinned and vanished.

Fifteen minutes had passed. The sun climbed back to its ordinary place. A white cloud drifted over the hill and stayed there while the crowd remained quiet. Some wept. Some began the rosary again. Others walked away without speaking.

Vicka, one of the six young visionaries, learned of it afterward. She had been inside during the time, speaking with the figure she and the others described. She told Fr. Janko she had seen none of it and did not need to, because she had already witnessed enough. Nikola Vasilj, for his part, said he would swear to what he had seen. He did not claim everyone around him had seen every detail the same way.

That evening the story moved through the village in pieces. Priests from nearby parishes heard versions from their own parishioners. One serious priest watching from higher ground confirmed the wheel and the spheres but said nothing of an image on the steeple. The local bishop later formed a commission of theologians and psychiatrists. They examined the visionaries and the reports and called the apparitions hallucinations. A second commission appointed at the request of Rome continued its work without issuing a final judgment.