Vandals have desecrated statues of the Virgin Mary and set fire to an outdoor altar at Medjugorje in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, days before tens of thousands of young Catholics are due to arrive for an annual gathering.
Police in the Herzegovina-Neretva canton said they received a report at 4.30am on July 28 that a statue in the hamlet of Bijakovići had been damaged and covered in inscriptions. A fire was reported half an hour later at the outdoor altar behind St James Church.
Herzegovina-Neretva interior ministry spokeswoman Ilijana Milos said officers had secured the scene and an on-site investigation was under way.
Images published by local media showed the statue on Podbrdo, known as Apparition Hill, with its face, hands and chest covered in black paint. The words “Devil in a skirt” were written across the pedestal.
A statue at the nearby Blue Cross was daubed in the same way. Banners left at the sites carried messages in English and Polish attacking the six people who say they have received messages from the Virgin Mary since 1981 and who are known locally as visionaries.
Security camera footage published by local media showed a man approaching the outdoor altar with a canister in the early hours of the morning, dousing the area and setting it alight.
The Medjugorje parish office said the damage had caused great sadness and that repairs were already under way. It called on believers to respond “through prayer, fasting, and forgiveness”.
The parish confirmed the 37th International Youth Festival, known as Mladifest, would go ahead from August 1 to 6. Organisers expect between 50,000 and 60,000 participants.
Medjugorje, about 140 kilometres southwest of Sarajevo, draws more than a million visitors a year. Six young people reported seeing the Virgin Mary there in June 1981, and the site has remained among the most contested in modern Catholic practice.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a note titled The Queen of Peace on September 19, 2024, authorising public devotion at the shrine. It stopped short of ruling on whether the reported apparitions were supernatural in origin.
The attack comes amid a documented rise in incidents targeting Christian sites across the continent. The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe recorded 2,211 anti-Christian hate crimes in 2024, including 94 arson attacks, almost double the previous year’s total.
In March the European Parliament used the term “Christianophobia” in a formal resolution for the first time, noting that the European Commission has appointed no coordinator to address it. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been an EU candidate country since December 2022.
