As in the First Days...
December 3, 2020
St. Francis Xavier, Priest
Dear Family of Mary!
“By reading the Sacred Scripture you will discover Jesus' birth and joy, as in the first days which Medjugorje gave to humanity. History will be truth which, also today, is being repeated in you and around you.” (11/25/ 2020)
Our Lady spoke to us about history, about the truth that is found in history, in her message of November 25. She told us that we can find the same joy that was discovered at Jesus’s birth and that was also displayed in the first days of her coming to Medjugorje. She tells us it will be repeated in us and around us in these times as well. Because these are times in which God is revealing Himself to us as He did at Jesus’ Birth and at Our Lady’s first coming to Medjugorje. And that revelation will change us forever!
In the “Jesus Rosary” for this week, Frano Zubac describes the impact of Our Lady’s coming in 1981, as only a firsthand witness can! His memories are powerful and help us to understand what Our Lady is telling us in her message.
I have transcribed below Frano’s opening comments during the “Jesus Rosary” for December 2, 2020. You can watch the video here: https://marytv.tv/jesus-rosary/
Frano’s memory of the first days in Medjugorje for “Jesus Rosary” for December 2, 2020:
I would like to tell you a little bit about the history of Hercegovina before the apparitions in Medjugorje took place and shortly after the apparitions took place. I would like to tell you the way in Hercegovina we who lived here survived and lived just before the apparitions.
The people produced tobacco and in Yugoslavia it was well known, as Yellow Gold – Tobaccos of Hercegovina. It was a yellow color, yellow gold. And everybody was involved in the production of tobacco. Every square inch of earth in Hercegovina was covered with tobacco plants and grapes (wine) too. The children of this region, school children, everybody was involved, particularly in the summer, picking the leaves of tobacco, taking it home and putting it up to dry, exposed to the sun. It was left up until Christmas time when the tobacco company would take it and give us some money.
It wasn’t enough money for the families, particularly the big families with many children. So, you could say that every second man of this region left the country, went to Germany and other western countries to work as laborers, to earn the money needed to raise their families and educate them.
My father went to Germany when I was the age of nine, my brother was five. We were waiting and waiting for him to come home. Vicka’s father, who had eight children, went to Germany and worked there thirty years, in order to raise them up, educate them. The mother and grandmother were here, and everybody raised tobacco.
So that was the normal environment of Hercegovina. And that is why Mirjana was sent down from Sarajevo to the village, to help her grandmother pick the leaves of tobacco daring the summer holidays.
Now I would like to tell you something I remember about Christmas trees. I told my children that in my childhood we could not cut down fresh Christmas trees, but we could only use a bush. It was only when my father brought back from Germany a plastic Christmas tree, that we had a tree in our house.
It was because the Communist Government was strictly against the cutting of Christmas trees, and against the celebration of Christmas in public, or the decorations in stores for Christmas. No, during that time here, nobody had any decorations, or preparations for Christmas in the public places, because the Communists ruled the state. Christmas doesn’t exist. They made sure that the children on Christmas Day were coming to school. In case someone was missing, they would send for the parents to come to the school, and they would shout at them.
That was the ideology of the society and the communists ruled. In 1980, Tito, the last Chairman of the Communist Party died. And in 1981 Our Lady appeared.
Just before I talk about the time of the apparitions, I would like to talk about Vicka and her family. I knew Vicka before the apparitions took place. As a young girl of 15 or 16, we laughed and joked together with her younger brothers and sisters, and she talked about (this was before the apparitions began) “Dynamo” – a football club. She was a great supporter of Dynamo, and I was too. And she said, “Tomorrow is Sunday, we are going to win! We will beat them!” You know the Croatian football club, Dynamo. And you can even see Jakov in a Dynamo shirt, supporting Dynamo at that time. Everybody supported Dynamo in this region.
So why do I mention that? Because they were just ordinary children.
And another thing she said, which I remember clearly, “Tomorrow is Sunday, and all these young people are going to have a Mass for the school children. And we have a new parish priest, pastor of Medjugorje. And he has Mass for one hour! That’s too long. One whole hour!!” That was Fr. Jose, the new pastor of Medjugorje. And that was her comment about Mass. She never, ever, talked about Our Lady, never, never mentioned the faith or anything like that. She was just an ordinary girl.
When the apparition took place, I met her afterwards and she was talking about the message, the first message, that really broke through the Communist State, and shook everyone:
“I have come to tell you God exists!”
In the whole ideology that the Communists had, God did not fit. Now you see the six children saying that Our Lady gave the message, “God exists!” That is why the Communists stood up to the destroy Medjugorje, block it, to stop it, because the children were giving testimony that they were meeting the Mother of God and they were giving testimony that God exists!
That was something that they could not easily gloss over, because for years and years they had been teaching at school that God does not exist. The Communist ideology. Now the combat started on the ground. But the Joy! This is what I want to say…the Joy that we felt, the Happiness, the Joy…it was felt by those people who accepted the apparition. For sure there would be obstacles from the people who didn’t accept or believe.
When Our Lady has said that History will be true, and she compares the apparitions with the Birth of Jesus! I read the Scripture about the Birth of Jesus, and similar things really happened there. The people who didn’t accept the Birth of Jesus were very nasty. Even Herod tried to kill the Baby Jesus. So similar things happened here. Those people who accepted the apparition were full of joy and tried to share the news with others. Without cost, with love and joy and happiness. And others tried to squash it down and threaten them like a dog for what they did.
I remember when I came from Germany and it was September, they told me that this evening there will be a meeting in the county hall, the Communists were organizing a meeting. Everybody was supposed to come. You had to go. So, I thought, Ok I want to see what they are about. Four or five “comrades”- the communist leaders- two who I knew, they were younger, and three of them older, were giving a talk about Medjugorje. They were saying that Fr. Jozo was trying to manipulate the children. They were saying it was dangerous to send the girls to the church because the priests would rape them. They said awful, awful things. What were they talking about??
They spread propaganda. That this was part of Croatian Nationalism. This would make the people poorer, unless we extinguished what was happening in Medjugorje. The Communists will never build a factory in that area, so we would be even more poor and treated like dogs. And nobody will support us. And no jobs for the young. It will be a catastrophe. It will be a financial catastrophe for Hercegovina. Nobody should go to Medjugorje. You must not go there. You must not support what is happening. You must not go to church.
Then one man from the next village, who was working in Germany, stood up. Of course, if you opposed them, you would be put in jail. But Elia stood up and said, “You can’t stop the people from going to church. It is in the constitution, it is the law, that everyone is allowed to go to church. How can you stop them?” And straight away they were asking who he was. And they found out that that man had married a Serbian lady and had been going to church in Germany every Sunday. But they couldn’t label him as a “nationalist” and they couldn’t do anything against him.
Then my young friends called the two younger “comrades” to come over and they started to sing a church song “there is one long road of faith and hope and peace”. And that was the answer of the young people to what the comrades were trying to impose on them, saying don’t go to Medjugorje. These Communists threw everything nasty under the sky at the apparitions, the visionaries. They said they are stupid, no one will ever marry the girls, they will never get married. They will never be employed. Forget it, they will never finish school because the schools belong to us. Whoever supports Medjugorje will have no jobs. No future here.
But Our Lady poured joy into the hearts of the people, and the people would walk to Medjugorje’s church through the fields, singing! Singing! Full of joy and happiness. And you couldn’t stop it. And slowly, slowly it started moving the way Our Lady wanted it. And slowly, slowly, through the messages that Our Lady is giving us, all of us even today, every month, she is trying to lead us and guide us. Prepare us.
It is now almost the 40th anniversary, and history is repeating itself. That story we heard long ago we compare it to when Moses took Israel from slavery in Egypt to the promised land. Forty years through the desert. Conversion, conversion, conversion through the desert. And Moses brought them to Mt Sinai and gave them the 10 commandments, the 10 pillars of our faith. And in a similar way, Our Lady is coming and bringing us messages of hope, messages of joy, the message that she is with us, that Heaven is with us. What Our Lady said, to feel the Heavenly Joy, we have to remember Jesus’ birth. What we prepare during this Advent is ourselves, through confession and through loving each other, so that peace will dwell in our hearts.
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
©Mary TV 2020
PS. Our Team at Mary TV wants to put together a Christmas greeting made up of short videos from you shipmates from around the world. We hope that you can take your phone or computer camera and point it at yourself, and just say Merry Christmas to our Mary TV family, and share something you like about Mary TV or even more about Our Lady of Medjugorje. You can upload the video from your computer or phone to this link, and we will take it from there. Just make sure there is audio, and that we can see you!! Share from your heart! We need to encourage each other this Christmas.
Christina Zubac will receive your video here:
