The secret reports of the Pontifical Commission chaired by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, set up to investigate the alleged apparitions of Medjugorje, have just been disclosed in the latest book by Davide Murgia, which has just been published by Rubettino editions, Processo a Medjugorje (Trial in Medjugorje), a work that is untranslated to date.
And the conclusion falls like a guillotine’s blade: “No certified miraculous healing has taken place in Medjugorje.”
To get there, Davide Murgia – a journalist at Rai, who hosts several religious programs on TV2000, a medium managed by the Italian Conference of Bishops (CEI) – went through the minutes and other recordings of the Commission created in March 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.
This Commission bears the name of its president, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, vicar for the diocese of Rome between 1991 and 2008. The latter’s mission was to rule on whether the apparitions were of a supernatural character or not and to propose pastoral solutions.
The Commission welcomed into its midst Cardinals Jozef Tomko, Vinko Puljc, Josip Bozanic, Julian Herranz, and Angelo Amato, as well as nine experts: four theologians, a Mariologist, a canonist, a rapporteur from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a psychologist, and a representative of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The conclusions of the Ruini Commission have not been published to date, and all that was known about its findings was what Pope Francis had said about them in 2017, when he returned from Portugal, “the first appearances, which were those of children, the investigation says, more or less, that we must continue to investigate this.”
“But for the alleged current appearances, the investigation has doubts.… I prefer the Madonna as mother, our mother, and not the Madonna as the head of a department, with graphics, and who sends messages every day,” the Holy Father commented, with some embarrassment.
“The documents that I am publishing can, in my opinion, be very useful in forming one’s own judgment,” explains Murgia.
Indeed, it emerges from the Commission reports that, out the 487 cases of “healing” reported in Medjugorje, only 10 were deemed worthy of examination by the medical experts of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, who concluded that none could be considered scientifically inexplicable.
The author also reports the confidences that some members of the Ruini Commission have given him: “Imagine the unprecedented scandal that would arise in the Church if the phenomenon of Medjugorje were to prove to be false, artificial, unfounded. It would have deceived a multitude of people,” said one, on condition of anonymity.
40 years after the first alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, an Italian journalist has published a Vatican report concluding that no certified miracles have ever taken place in the famous sanctuary in Bosnia and Herzegovina.