MEDJUGORJE MIRACLES -- REPORT OF DR NIKOLA BARTULICA

[Articles and testimony of Croatian psychiatrist, Dr Nikola Bartulica appear all over the Internet. The following was extracted from www.medjugorje.com. It has only been slightly edited by me]:

Name: Dr Nikola Bartulica, a Croatian psychiatrist, originally from Split, but now lives in the USA.

Place and date of testing:  Medjugorje, October 1981 and 1989.

Test or procedure: Dr Bartulica was among the first to examine the visionaries. In October 1981, he examined Vicka for nearly two hours, all the while she was unaware that he was a psychiatrist. He stated the following about that visit:

“When a psychiatrist hears that a person has visions, he first wonders if that person is mentally healthy. So I asked Vicka what did she see, hear, how did she react. She answered spontaneously, without fear or hesitation, and you could see that this was a determined, completely normal person…in psychiatry, you can quickly determine if a person is sincere.”

In 1989, Dr Bartulica returned to Medjugorje to carry out new psychiatric tests on the visionaries. In Medjugorje, he spoke to Marija, Ivan, Vicka, Mirjana and Ivanka. Only Jakov Colo was absent.  “I examined each of them for half an hour and a pilgrim from California recorded it with a video camera so there is evidence of the event.”  Dr Bartulica presented his conclusions on the Medjugorje phenomenon in the book Are the Visionaries Telling the Truth? published in 1991 in Chicago.

Conclusions:

In October, 1981

“I asked Vicka what did she see, hear, how did she react. She answered spontaneously, without fear or hesitation, and you could see that this was a determined, completely normal person.”

In watching Vicka in ecstasy for the first time, four years after his first interview with her, he said:

“She was very expressive. I was watching her moving her lips, nodding…It made me think, if she doesn’t see the Blessed Mother, and is just staring into the wall like the rest of us, and behaves in such a manner then she is making fools of all of us. You have to ask yourself if it is possible that she is deceiving us. The answer is that it might be possible, but if that was the case, all the six seers are capable of this simultaneously for a period of 25 years. That in itself would be a phenomenon. And anyway that cannot be because it has been established scientifically that their ecstasies are authentic. Besides, there is no such case in the history of psychiatry that six children start simultaneously hallucinating at 6:40 pm (every evening)” says the psychiatrist. “It does not take an expert though to tell that the children were normal, sincere, and that their experience was not invented.”

He said that he has met many people in his line of business that were faking their experiences. But in the case of the visionaries of Medjugorje he is completely convinced that they have had the experience they testify to. He has visited Medjugorje more than 20 times and has often attended the apparitions.