‘Devil in a Skirt’: Medjugorje Virgin Mary Vandalized, Altar Set on Fire
Mladifest, a Catholic youth festival at the Medjugorje shrine, opens on August 1.
Medjugorje, located in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been a pilgrimage site for Catholics since the Virgin Mary appeared to six children in 1981.
It’s a sacred site for Catholics.
But the Virgin Mary statue has been vandalized and the altar set on fire.
This morning, shortly before 5am local time, a man entered a shrine in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and set it on fire. Outside he wrote 'Devil in a skirt' on a statue of Our Lady. Medjugorje is one of the world’s best-known Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites. pic.twitter.com/Tto8sm8nyK
— Colm Flynn (@colmflynnire) July 28, 2026
The terrorist in Medjugorje wrote '1242' along with some anti Marian slogans on the statue
What meaning could 1242 have? pic.twitter.com/md86YBse9z
— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) July 28, 2026
The police received a report of the vandalism at 4:30 AM and one about the fire at 5 AM.
Video shows a man spraying the altar with flammable liquid before setting it on fire.
A banner at the altar written in Polish said, “Ivanka, Mirjana, Milk, Vicka, John, and Jacob are fraudsters. I have evidence.“
Those are the six children who saw the Virgin Mary in 1981.
The police arrested a suspect, but did not release a name.
“In a special way, we invite all faithful to respond to this event in the way that Our Lady has been teaching us for over forty years in Medjugorje: with prayer, fasting, and forgiveness,” urged the Medjugorje parish office. “We pray for the conversion of the hearts of those who committed this act, that the Lord may touch them with His grace and lead them on the path of goodness. We also pray for peace in the hearts of all people. Our Lady constantly invites us to be carriers of peace. May this event encourage us to take her invitation even more seriously: not to return evil for evil, but to witness love, forgiveness, and hope with our lives.”
The Vatican approved devotion at Medjugorje in 2024, but did not pronounce the apparitions as authentic.
Mladifest, a Catholic youth festival at the Medjugorje shrine, opens on August 1.
[Featured image via Facebook]
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Comments
Veronica Leuken used to be on the radio every night dictating live messages from the Virgin Mary, which resembled official boilerplate mostly. I liked it because it showed a brain working open loop, like a tiny LLM machine with biblical training data. She had a large but strange following.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Lueken
I myself liked the Virgin Mary appearing on toast.
Whatever. It’s pretty much for sure the Pope won’t be condeming this action nor will any mainline Protestant church leadership issue statements in comdenation of this person’s actions. That’s for sure. Christians of all denominations will simply ignore it and pretend all is well in the Christian world. And as long as that happens this kind of thing will happen over and over again to Christians worldwide.
eot
Medjugorje has always been controversial within the Christian community, even among Catholics.
I was raised Catholic and never heard of Med-whatever. Neither I would have guessed would most Protestants.
This may well be a one-off nut-job……
But it’s silly to just ignore the history of Islamic desecration / destruction of non-Muslim religious sites. To this day in many full-Islamic states it is illegal to build a new or even make repairs to an existing Christian shrine or church. And let’s not forget what they do to “Pagan” international historic sites. Muslim viewers supposedly cheered seeing a recent “Life of Saladin” movie scene where he saw an alter cross fixture toppled and – out of respect – set it back upright. Because it showed his great heart and consideration of others. IG. Ignored is the factoid that it was toppled in the first place the the Muslims who attacked that church.
Of course Protestants won’t. They hate Mary.
No, Protestants are a large group of people. I am one, and I don’t hate Mary. I respect her a great deal. I think the perp might have Muslim, because I don’t expect any Protestant of good will would call her call Mary “devil in a dress” or desecrate an altar at the site. I am happy to speak against this horrible action, but I have no official clout
That’s stupid. No Moslem would call her that either; Moslems revere Maryam bint Imran and would be no more likely than Protestants to do this. Sure, Moslems object to anything that smacks of worshiping her, but so do Protestants.
This is more likely to have been done by someone who believes that what the children saw on the site was not Mary, but was instead a demon or devil. Such a person could be Catholic, and thus believe in such apparitions in general, but disbelieve in this specific instance. Or they could be Protestant or Moslem and not believe that Mary ever appears to people like that.
And again Mamdani’s disciple rushes in to defend the faith of his masters.
What a good dhimmi!
If your reference to “worshipping” Mary is pointed at Catholics, it is not true. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school; and although Mary is revered as the mother of Jesus, we were taught she is not to be worshipped. The reason Catholics pray to Mary is to ask for her intercession with Jesus on our behalf.
And again the literal demon from Hell rushes in to defend his Master, the Prince of Lies. Especially if his Master was in fact the entity that appeared to the children at this site, pretending to be Mary (assuming that anything did appear to them).
Stevie, of course Catholics deny Mariolatry, but they come awfully close to it, Note that I carefully wrote “anything that smacks of worshiping her”, precisely for this reason. Catholics insist they carefully stop just short of crossing that line, but Protestants, Moslems, and Jews generally perceive them as crossing it; or rather they put the line farther back than Catholics do, and regard the distinction Catholics draw as insignificant. Thus a particularly zealous Protestant or Moslem would be equally likely to be moved to do this.
Jews too, but I think they can safely be ruled out in this case, both because there aren’t a whole lot of them in the area, particularly very religious ones, and because Jews have more practice at being a small minority and therefore avoiding provocative acts like this which would attract retaliation from the majority religion.
Thinking about it more, this is far more likely to be the work of a zealous Protestant, or even of a Catholic, rather than of a Moslem, because while Moslems and Jews do object to anything that smacks of worshiping Mary, they also object, even more strongly, to any worship of Jesus himself, which all Christians openly and proudly admit to. The only ones who draw a sharp distinction, saying that worshiping Jesus is right and proper, but giving even the appearance of worshiping Mary is wrong, are Protestants.
Even more so zealous Catholics who do come close to that line but are very careful not to cross it, and are vigilant about policing other Catholics and making sure they don’t cross it either, and might react this way if they perceive what happens at that particular site to be crossing the line. Maybe a sedevacantist sect? Are there people in the sedevecantist world that particular object to this site, and the apparition that’s alleged to have taken place there?
Why do you fixate so in Hell, Democrat?
Do you miss it that much? Your vile home wherein your masters put you to the task you so enjoy, being the latrine that gleefully engorges itself on the masses of excreta they supply?
I am not a denizen of that place, Democrat, I am Azathoth, who sits at the Center of All Things surrounded by my accursed horde of drummers, dancers and flautists.
And when the inevitable Muslim is pulled forth as the vandal, you will be there, faithful lickspittle ready to take up your masters side once more.
Azathoth the liar from Hell lies again. Being Jewish I don’t even believe Hell exists, but Azathoth is a lie too, so it’s fitting that a liar comes from a lie.
Muslims don’t revere anybody except their “Allah”. That was a very evil act in my opinion.
That is just an outright lie. Moslems revere many humans; they don’t worship them, but they do give them extreme reverence. Starting but very much not ending with their founder, whom they call The Prophet with no need to specify which one. And one of the people they revere very much is Maryam bint Imran, who is known in English as Mary.
Oh, and “their ‘Allah'” is the God of the Bible. The very same God; He is no more “theirs” than anyone else’s. Any attempt to distinguish them is nothing but dishonesty and bigotry. One might even call it “taqiyya”.
Allah is NOT the God of the Bible. The differences are so huge that only a man ignorant of God would make such a claim.
Don’t be silly.
And you know this how?
This Presbyterian condemns the fire and desecration. No excuse for it.
.
You confuse rejection of false godly attribution with hatred.
1 Timothy 2:5
King James Version
For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
That is untrue and offensive.
Looked up what significant event happened in 1242 in the Balkans. That was the year of the invasion of the Golden Horde. Maybe that’s it.
And the Golden Horde became Muslim. Since they won’t release the name, I am going to place a wild guess that he is a Muslim.
A problem with messages received from the divine (or godly) is that, in order for them to be effective, they must be comprehensible to the human mind. The human brain/mind forms a bottleneck that results in the impossibility of a human’s reception of any message more “elevated” than that which a human is capable of creating, making any message from a godly entity impossible to distinguish from a message from a human.
Even if the elevated entity is capable of transmitting a message directly into the human and somehow bypassing this (initial) bottleneck, the human who receives the message must still transmit it to other humans in terms they are capable of understanding, so the bottleneck remains (in the minds of those to whom the message is related) along with the potential for fraud.
This problem is why all religious belief and alleged messages from divine beings can never be elevated above that which humans are capable of inventing for themselves, making all religions and all divine messaging indistinguishable from human invention.
If a god or gods exist, only other gods would truly be able to communicate with them and to transmit their thoughts to other, similar, beings.
Whoever downvoted me must think he has a mind capable of understanding the mind of his god (whatever or whoever that god may be).
God gave us scripture in a form that can be absorbed by humans.
you have not absorbed a word of it.
not one.
You ate of the Tree of Knowledge and were ruined in the attempt to swallow, in one fevered gulp, all that your god knows.
Curious about “1242” I followed the links, leading to some insanely long Wiki articles on bizarre cults whose membership probably barely reaches double digits. Of course they were all “right-wing neo-Nazi extremists”, so scary threatening us all OMG!!!!
I found two arguably historically significant events for that year…..
(1) Russians defeated German(ic) invaders (the Teutonic Knights) in battle stopping further german conquest in the direction – at least for a while.
(2) The Great Horde (The Mongels) stopped their invasion of Europe (they had reached as far a Hungary) because their Great khan had died and a successor had to be chosen. They never resumed that campaign – which was fortunate for the Europeans as everywhere else they chose to attack the either conquered or ethnic cleansed the cities. If the campaign had continued the most likely result would be a Mongel-ruled Europe – and likely later an Islamic one.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the religion of peace.
Former Yugoslavia is Cray Cray. We’d go through a Eastern Orthodox/Serbian village or a Muslim village aka Kosovo (really Albanian by ethnicity) village and in both wed get the same answer to the question of ‘what happened to/where are the Serbs or Muslims’. In both cases we’d get a shrug and the answer was a variation on ‘meh, they moved away/I don’t know/real shame but watcha gonna do’. Despite lots of intermarriage over the centuries and lots of local cooperation when the opportunity arose many seemed to take advantage to get back at ‘those people’. IMO much of it boiled down to wanting to take someone else’s farm/home/business and religious strife/civil conflict was used as a convenient excuse for open theft/murder.
Islamic inspired hatred
It appears that a Polish person, Krakowiak Bartlomiej Wlodzimierz, has been arrested for this crime. Assuming they have the right guy, he would be at least ethnically Catholic, which would inevitably shape his views on this site.
He also made a pilgrimage to this site 9 years ago; perhaps it made a negative impression on him, which has festered since then, or perhaps subsequent events in his life made him reconsider his experience negatively.
It’s possible (but this would be pure speculation) that he became a Protestant or a Moslem, and this was his way of rectifying what he now regards as his former sin that he committed during his pilgrimage. Anything’s possible, especially when dealing with the insane.
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