SCIENTIFIC TESTS ON THE VISIONARIES

Marija and Ivan undergo medical tests during apparitions

Marija Pavlović-Lunetti and Ivan Dragićević photographed wearing monitoring apparatus during a series of intricate medical/scientific tests which they underwent in Medjugorje in 2005.

Speaking about the tests Marija said:

“Our Lady did not mind the tests at all. She neither forbids them nor advises participation in them. We have total free will in life, and so too in this matter. It is up to us to decide if we shall participate in the tests or not. I just hope that, through them, we shall bring more hearts closer to Our Lady. That’s why I agreed to the tests. But, I have to say that I am a bit tired of all these researches. I just wonder what else people need in order to accept the truth.”

On the tests Ivan said simply: “I agreed to the tests because the Church asked me to cooperate with this.”

No other claim of supernatural manifestation has ever undergone such detailed medical and scientific analysis as Medjugorje.

The visionaries are normal and healthy

The visionaries of Medjugorje are by far the most scientifically examined seers ever in the history of Christian mysticism. The decade-long duration of the apparitions, along with the modern advancements in medical-scientific knowledge and equipment, have allowed doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and physicians, to study the visionaries and their apparitions as closely and accurately as never before.
Among the many tests and examinations that the visionaries have subjected themselves to, four major ones stand out. Performed by independent teams of scientists in 1984, 1985, 1998 and 2006 their results confirm and complement each other.
The visionaries have reacted to the scientific interest in their experiences by willful cooperation, but also with a spirit of detachment. Only one among the many scientific conclusions has really meant something to them – namely the conclusion that they are absolutely healthy, normal people who only happen to have a most  unusual experience.
The first doctor to arrive at this conclusion was psychiatrist Dzudza Mulija. This she did as early as June 29th 1981, the sixth day of the apparitions. She worked in the psychiatric wing of the hospital in Mostar and met the visionaries when local Communist police officers brought them to see her. She was referring to the Communists when, according to visionary Vicka Ivankovic, she ended her examinations by telling the seers:
“It is the people who brought you here that are insane. You are absolutely normal.” (1)
Next in line was Dr. Nikola Bartulica, a psychiatrist who was born in Croatia, but lived in the United States when he came to Medjugorje in October 1981 and later in 1989. During his first encounter with the visionaries he studied Vicka for almost two hours, all the while Vicka did not know that her conversation partner was a medical specialist.
“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 persoon. In psychiatry, you can quickly determine if a person is sincere”, Dr. Bartulica later concluded. (2)
Talking about all of the visionaries, the Croatian psychiatrist added:
“It does not take an expert though to tell that the children were normal, sincere, and that their experience was not invented.” (2)
The Italian doctor Lucia Capello examined the visionaries for three days in February and March 1984.
“They appeared to be discreet, well-mannered, careful in their dress and in their speech and absolutely mindful of the surroundings in which they found themselves. Their behavior seemed to conform perfectly with that of young people of their own age”, she concluded. (1)
In 1998 the third major scientific examination of the Medjugorje visionaries and their apparitions was undertaken by a team of Austrian and Italian experts headed by Fr. Andreas Resch, an Austrian priest and professor of clinical psychology and paranormology at the Pontificial Lateran University in Rome. Fr. Resch and his team concluded that “the seers enjoy optimal psychophysical health”.
Referring to the state of complete disconnection from the outside world that the visionaries enter during apparitions, a condition known throughout Christian history as spiritual ecstacy, the team concluded that “ecstacy is not a psychopathologic event and that after 18 years of daily apparitions it has not provoked any damage to the psychophysical health of the seers”. (3)
In other ways, too, the so-called Medjugorje 3 Commission confirmed the conclusions of the first scientific commission that studied the Medjugorje visionaries.  This group of scientists was headed by the French doctor Henri Joyeux who brought to Medjugorje a crew of medical specialists along with a battery of modern equipment back in 1984. Theirs was the first among the four major medical-scientific examinations of the Medjugorje visionaries.
“The visionaries are psychologically healthy, without neurosis and hysteria. Their ecstacies are not a pathological phenomenon. (…) It is a functinal phenomenon that facilitates a valuable experience which is coherent, healthy, enlivening and, to the visionaries, human as well as spiritual”, Dr. Joyeux wrote in conclusion. (1)
“They are country youngsters who do not appear to need either a psychologist or a psychiatrist. They dress in the normal fashion of other young people of their country. They give no impresssion of being bigoted, each seeming to have his or her own personality; we felt at ease with all of them: they are neither geniuses nor simpletons; they are not being manipulated but remain free and healthy in mind and body”, Dr. Henri Joyeux also wrote. (1)
“The phenomenon is scientifically inexplicable. The visionaries of Medjugorje are not drop-outs or dreamers, nor are they tired or anxious; they are free and happy, at home in their country and in the modern world. The ecstacies are not pathological, nor is there any element of deceit”, Dr. Joyeux later said before concluding:
“No scientific discipline seems able to describe these phenomena”. (4)
Though this is so, the many scientists have long been able to point out with certainty what the apparitions in Medjugorje are not about. That is: The alternative explanations known to science have all been ruled out.

Sources:
(1) Dr. Henri Joyeux and Fr. René Laurentin: “Scientific and Medical Studies of the Apparitions at Medjugorje”, Veritas Publications 1987
(2) Medjugorje Tribune # 1, January 2007
(3) Paul Baylis with Dr. Marco Margnelli: “The works of the third committee on the seers of Medjugorje”, quoted here from Marian Times
(4) Mary Craig: “Spark From Heaven”, Ave Maria Press 1988

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES HAVE BEEN EXCLUDED

When it comes to apparition experiences, a whole range of alternative explanations are well-known to science. In taking on two among the most obvious – fraud and hallucination – the Croatian psychiatrist Dr. Bartulica concluded in 2006, starting out with his impressions of visionary Vicka Ivankovic when he studied her in the 1980s:
“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 p.m..” , Dr. Bartulica testified. (1)
In fact, with the exception of hypnosis (which was only later ruled out with certainty) the entire collection of known alternative explanations had been excluded by independent scientists as early as 1984. This was when a French medical team headed by Dr. Henri Joyeux became the first one to deeply examine the Medjugorje visionaries with the entire battery of modern equipment known and used by medical science by that time.
Dr. Joyeux, a cancer researcher, headed a team of scientists from the University of Montpellier. The team made video and audio recordings of more than 35  apparitions and conducted a battery of tests. Among the many tests performed by the team were brain, vision, hearing, voice and cardiac function tests, using electroencephalographs, electrooculographs and other scientific devices. (2)
In their conclusions the French team of scientists excluded manipulation, epilepsy, catalepsy, dreams, hallucinations, hysteria, neurosis, pathological ecstacy, and fraud. (2)
On January 14th 1986 a French-Italian commission of scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists and theologians published the results of its investigations of the Medjugorje visionaries in a 12 point conclusion. While the nine later points were more theological in nature, the first three conclusions were strictly scientific:
“1. On the basis of the psychological tests, for all and each of the visionaries it is possible with certainty to exclude fraud and deception.
2. On the basis of the medical examinations, tests and clinical observations etc, for all and each of the visionaries it is possible to exclude pathological hallucinations.
3. On the basis of the results of previous researches for all and each of the visionaries it is possible to exclude a purely natural interpretation of these manifestations.” (3)
Dr. Enzo Gabrici, an Italian neuro-psychiatrist, examined Ivan, Vicka, Marija and Jakov for five days in April 1984. He became the first scientist to exclude hypnosis as an explanation “because in this situation, subjects are not able to remember anything while in the trance. The Medjugorje visionaries, however, remember exactly what takes place during the ecstasy, discounting the hypnosis theory”. (2)
While this conclusion relies on the visionaries to tell the truth about their experiences during the apparition, hypnosis was scientifically ruled out as an explanation in 1998. Headed by Fr. Andreas Resch, a theologian and psychologist from Institute for the Field Limits of Science in Innsbruck, Austria, among the primary purposes of the 1998 examination was to determine if the apparitions could be due to hypnosis.
Experts from Center for Study and Research on Psychophysiology of States of Consciousness in Milan, Italy, were also included in the team, and so were experts from European School of Hypnotic Psychotherapy Amisi of Milan and The Parapsychology Center of Bologna, Italy.
To determine whether the state of ecstacy experienced by the visionaries could be due to hypnosis, the examined visionaries was hypnotized. While in hypnosis the seers were led to re-experience the apparition experience by suggesting to the visionaries that they saw the Virgin Mary before them. The aim was to determine if the visionaries displayed the same physical and emotional reactions found and measured by the scientists during the real apparitions.
They did not, as it turned out:
“The hypnotically induced state of ecstasy did not cause the phenomenology of spontaneous experiences and therefore it can be deduced that the ecstatic states of spontaneous apparitions were not states of hypnotic trance”, the scientists concluded. (4)
On his own account, team leader Fr. Andreas Resch later said the results were even clearer than that:
“The experiments show a radical difference between the states of hypnosis and ecstacy. Therefore the point of view that ecstacy is a sort of hypnotic state that can be induced from the outside or automatically can be excluded”, he wrote seven years after the experiments. (5)
With hypnosis also excluded, scientific experts had ruled out all the known alternative explanations of the apparition phenomenon. And along the way of determining for sure what the visionaries do not experience, the scientists had also determined the charateristics of spiritual ecstacy. Some of them had even concluded that this state of complete disconnection from the exterior world is what the visionaries actually experience.
Sources:
(1) Medjugorje Tribune # 1, January 2007
(2) Dr. Henri Joyeux and Fr. René Laurentin: “Scientific and Medical Studies of the Apparitions at Medjugorje”, Veritas Publications 1987
(3) Dr. Luigi Frigerio et al: “Dossier Scientifico su Medjugorje”, Paina 1986
(4) “Research on the Visionaries”, results from the Medjugorje 3 Group, quoted here from Medjugorje Parish Bulletin # 109, January 27th 1999
(5) Fr. Andreas Resch: “Die Seher von Medjugorje im Griff der Wissenschaft”, Resch Verlag 2005