Cardinal Peter Turkson, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, celebrated Holy Mass in Medjugorje on Friday, February 13. He was on a private visit to this place, and accompanied by his secretary, he visited the Medjugorje prayer sites, Radio Station Mir Medjugorje…

Cardinal Turkson has held a number of positions in the Vatican, he was President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 2009 to 2017, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development from 2017 to 2021, and before that he was Archbishop of Cape Coast in Ghana from 1992 to 2009. He was appointed Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

He is a member of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Dicastery for Evangelization and the Dicastery for Christian Unity.

Before the start of the Holy Mass, he was welcomed to Medjugorje and thanked for his arrival by the parish vicar of Medjugorje, Fr. Antonio Primorac, who also preached at the Holy Mass. In an interview for Radio Mir, he spoke about Medjugorje.

”I heard about Medjugorje a long time ago – when the story of Medjugorje began with the visionaries, and especially when this event was put up for study and research by the Vatican, because I am part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. That Office, as you know, had this great task of confirming the authenticity of the apparitions and the entire events surrounding it, so I always participated in these studies – when certain cardinals were sent here to investigate, the rest of us followed all of it from there. That is the intellectual level – study and research. But there is also another dimension that is personal and spiritual, it is what brought me here. Not the part about research and study, but a personal and religious experience. Just as I shared with the friars, I was encouraged to come here by a friend who is a doctor from Ghana, and she has been in Germany for 38 years. She told me her story and encouraged me to come here to visit and experience it,” said Cardinal Turskon, emphasizing that he had heard many testimonies about Medjugorje.

“Although it is my first visit to Medjugorje, the word about Medjugorje preceded my arrival here. It is already clear: the daily masses are always packed – you can see that people come to the church with their chairs as if they knew that the church would be filled. And that already thrilled me. Coming from a place like Italy – Rome, actually – where there is a religious experience because Peter and Paul passed through there, the experience of the early Christian martyrs of Rome – and all this history of experiences of religious witness in that place – but it does not encourage people as it is the case here. Perhaps the reason is that it happened there long ago, but religious experiences should not be a thing of the past, because that past serves to give us one statement: that God is here, that He is alive – and because of that statement, it is not history, but a reality with which people should always live. The passage of time should not lead to a decline, in terms of religiosity, but should nourish and be in the service of growth. So the difference here is that faith is still alive, people come to find faith here. I have heard some experiences of people moving away from the Church after their confirmation, and here they find meaning and faith again. That is the experience of this doctor I mentioned, because her practice in Germany has proven that miracles do exist. When patients come to her, even before she gives them medicine, she starts a conversation with them and they already feel the healing. I would not like to use the term power or strength – but, the religious experience here spreads so that it touches people’s lives and makes these people capable of bringing the religious experience they have here further, to other people and other lives”, said Cardinal Turkson, who is also a member of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and was involved in the process of making the ‘nihil obstat’ decision of this Dicastery for Medjugorje.

“This document serves to strengthen the faith of people who have the experience of what happened here. It is a confirmation of the experience, it gives importance to what happened here. In that sense, it encourages pilgrims and their desire to come here, to renew and establish their relationship with God – with Jesus, through the mediation of His mother Mary”, said Cardinal Peter Turkson.