I am the Queen of Peace
copy of this transcript is from Marytv.com.
Marija Pavlovic Lunetti June 24, 2013, St. James:
The talk began with the 7-7-7 prayer. Marija said:
We definitely need it, these 7 Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory bes!! We all know that in the Church of St. James in Medjugorje, every evening after Mass, we pray the Creed, 7 Our Fathers, 7 Hail Marys and 7 Glory Bes. Why do we do it?? We do it in thanksgiving to the Queen of Peace. Today in a special way we can say with all our hearts, we can really say to Our Lady, “Thank you!” And what we do every evening here after Holy Mass, all the people who know about this prayer, they stay and straight away they kneel down, and they gladly stay for a few extra minutes to say this prayer in order to give thanksgiving to Our Lady. However some people do not know about this prayer, after Mass is over they simply get up and they leave the church or the church grounds. We have our habit here.
When we kneel in the sacristy, we do kind of a favor for each other. Especially when it is cold or when it is hot in the summer time, we always kneel on a small pad, a kind of little carpet that we can use to kneel. Sometimes it is just a little towel. In the shops here you can get a little pad to kneel on. In the Sacristy with the parish priest…I have to say that the parish priest is an amazing grace for us because he is a Medjugorje vocation, he is a fruit of Medjugorje. Not only him, but also his sister who is a nun! In a special way there is a great joy in our heart to see them, because they are both fruits of Our Lady’s apparitions. And when the prayer to Our Lady begins they always come to me to give me something to kneel on. I then say, “Sister, maybe you can give it to someone else!!” Or maybe I take it and then give it to someone else who has difficulty kneeling down. And then in my heart I say, maybe this is a little sacrifice that I can do. To kneel down without knee pads. Maybe someone next to me needs it more than me. Then I always see a beautiful smile on the face of that person. And that smile shows so much love, and that smile is full of love.
And this is something that I like here in Medjugorje! When pilgrims come for the first time, they are a bit confused and they don’t have experience. And what we have learned, that Our Lady is here, and she loves us and she wishes us well. She is here to hug us and embrace us, and at the end we all feel good, and above all we feel privileged. We even feel more and more [that we are] Our Lady’s children. The heart of Our Lady is a heart that beats in our own bodies because we can feel her love, we can feel her joy to be here present with her children. She is here to love us, to teach us, to change us.
But Our Lady says to us,”Living the way you are living you will not have a future or eternal life.” Then we respond, “We are sinners but we are your children.” And this is something Our Lady knows, and that is why she says to us, “Go to Confession. Choose a priest who will become your spiritual guide. Leave sin. Renounce sin and start walking on the pathway of holiness.”
She, at the beginning, began guiding the parish of Medjugorje in this way. And so many people were saying at that time, “But what can she tell us??” She speaks a lot, they say. And those who oppose Medjugorje say that she speaks too much. But we can say she wants to guide us on a beautiful way, and that sooner or later we will be on that pathway in her Immaculate Heart, because she wants us to be inside her Immaculate Heart. She invites us, she loves us and she says to us, “Dear children.” She says to us, exactly as she did at the foot of the Cross with the Apostle John, when the other apostles were lost, when they were helpless, she says there is still hope for them, for us, because Jesus, their Master is dying for them on the Cross. And Jesus said to Our Lady,”Mother, behold your son.” And what did He say to John? He said to John, “Behold your Mother.” And we are those who through John receive this call from the Mother. We also have become the children of God and the children of Our Lady. We have become what Our Lady invites us to be.
Today, with her extended hands in today’s world, Our Lady comes to us. She comes not to 1000, or 30,000, or 100,000…no she comes to all of us. Each one of us is important to her. We are poor. We are poor souls in everything, but especially in a spiritual way….
We can’t say we began a movement. All we can say is that Our Lady appeared and she told us to place God in the first place in our life. Maybe you are sick; maybe you do not have health. You do not have faith. Maybe you are searching for something supernatural, so that you can feel something in your heart. I am saying to you, you are at the right place. Our Lady says, “Pray, pray, pray.” You are not here because of beautiful hotels. There is no luxury here. There is not air conditioning everywhere here. You are not at the coast, because there is no sea here! But we are here before the heavenly sunshine, before the sea of Love with Our Lady, in the school of prayer that Our Lady started here.
Our Lady wanted this parish and she started giving messages. So many times she was saying, “My dear children, I am your mother.” And she said to us so many times, so that we would not forget this, “You need God. Without God you do not have a future.” Even if we have everything in this world, all the material things, we will leave everything behind, clothes, cars, houses. You will leave it all behind. And those who have more will leave more behind.
But there is one thing to know, that if you have everything, but you do not have God, what do you have? Nothing! God created us in His image, and without Him we have nothing. I believe we all know a person. Suppose that person’s name is “Stanko”. We can say that I knew that person, that person laughed with me. I knew his hair style, etc. But that person is dead. Then we say that that person yesterday was driving a car, was walking, was working, was talking, and now that person is gone. That person has a body, but the spirit is gone. We also know many people who are alive, who work and walk and live, but who are spiritually dead. They are dead spiritually, even though they are walking around.
There is a friend of mine who shares that there are volunteers who go to Africa to help. Those volunteers are often very rich people. They come from rich families. However they are not happy, they are not pleased, they don’t see a future for themselves. And yet they have everything. Those people are from families which have provided everything that they needed and yet those young people are not happy. And they say that they come to Africa to help, and after their experience in Africa they go home completely changed. One day I spoke to one of those young men, and I said to him, “What did Africa give you??” And that young man said to me, “Africa gave me the joy of life.” Why, because that young man could see children who did not have anything but the shirt on them, but they were happy. They had an improvised ball and that ball was a piece of plastic. And that was the way that they learned to play football. And he said, “I played football with them, and I ate with them, and I ate very little. And I would try to get some sleep, but I would go to bed hungry. I had pains in my stomach, because we couldn’t eat more. There was not enough. Then I would remember the times I would go to my kitchen and open the refrigerator, and it was full of food, and I would still complain that there was nothing in this house for me to eat!! And yet the refrigerator was full!! Then I understood what it meant to have nothing to eat. That person came back from Africa and started studying and working for missions with a group of people who pray. And he works and whatever he earns, in the afternoon he puts it aside for the missions in Africa.
How often are we indifferent? How often do we see those who have nothing, who have no clothes to put on and we do not think of them? Our Lady has been saying to us, that prayer and fasting can even stop wars, even the wars in your hearts…those moments when you don’t think about God. When there is not God in your heart, when we do not think about God’s commandments, and when we do not live them. That is why Our Lady says, “Wake up, wake up from the sleep of lack of faith.” I am thoroughly convinced that the person who starts praying becomes a better person. That person is ready to serve other people and more and more that person becomes more sensitive and a person of feelings.
We see that Our Lady calls us to return to God, renounce sin, convert. We need to know how to do this work. Place the Sacred Scripture in the first place in your family homes. Read from the Bible, open the Bible every day. And Our Lady says to us, “Choose a priest to be your spiritual guide, a spiritual guide who will help you, who will teach you, and who will give you absolution in the name of God.” And in the name of God he will help you, so that the name of God will be there for us in the moment when we need it. And Our Lady says, “Place the Holy Mass in the center of your life. There you will meet God. There you will receive God. And with the help of God you will find your pathway on this earth, in the world, he will give it to you.”
We were children when the apparitions started, and I remember we were saying that there were so many young people who were lost, and we could see so many young people who were lost in drugs and lost in alcohol. That was a time of Communism, and the Communist’s wanted to make everyone believe that God does not exist. I was a student, and at school we had to learn about Marx and about Communism, and they used to say faith is the opium for the masses. And imagine me; I had to study all about this, me, who was able to see Our Lady! So who was right, Our Lady or that poor man with his ideology? Thanks are to God, Communism is gone, but unfortunately now there is consumerism and materialism around us, but Our Lady comes and says to us that our life is temporary, that it will pass. As the Sacred Scripture says, for those who are strong maybe they will live for 70 years. And today science says we may live longer, that people will live to 150 years…But yet, what is all that compared with eternity?? Is it worth insisting on being here?? Why don’t we do our best to deserve and merit heaven??
I have to say that all of you are courageous to be here in this sunshine. I can say that maybe you can say “I will give this as a gift to the Lord. And I offer this for the conversion of so many other people or for the healing of so many people who are here in our midst, for the healing of so many children who have commended themselves to my prayers who have Leukemia.
I remember the time when we were young, in 1989, when we wanted to convert everyone. We wanted to be perfect as Our Lady is. I remember we wore long skirts because we didn’t want to scandalize anyone. And we were telling people who were not properly dressed to put something on their shoulders, so they wouldn’t scandalize anyone. We could also see many young people who were far from faith. There were young people who didn’t have faith. So we decided we would found a prayer group, and every Friday night we would pray for those young people who are far from God. And that is exactly what we did. We asked our parish priest if we could do it, and we just asked for the church to be given to us, nothing else, nothing more, but just the church to go to and pray. But he asked who wants to come. We told him, all the young people in our prayer group. And he said yes. We were so happy and content because we were given permission from the parish priest. And we started singing and praying before the Lord. And then I remember we would soon see that it was 3:00 in the morning! We didn’t even go to bed at all. Imagine! We were young people full of enthusiasm. But we were not really ready for this. But slowly, slowly, we were down on our knees, and our heads were bowed, and we looked like Muslims, who are praying. And then you could see and hear nothing, but silence, because everyone was in silence. You couldn’t even hear the birds chirping. As we say here, it was the silence of the tomb. Then we were all asleep, and we could hear someone snoring. Then we would tease that person. Then after a while Our Lady said to us,”Bring the Sacred Scripture. Have the Bible with you.” And then we would joke, when someone fell asleep and snored that that person was profoundly meditating, when that person was actually asleep! And I remember one person, a man there with his wife, and when he would snore, his wife would kick him, and then he would wake up and just continue, “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”
I always say that the family that has a future is the family that prays, the family that exists. And as Our Lady said to us, “We are now going to pray a rosary a day.” Often we would be tired at work, but we would still be able to pray at the end of the day the Rosary. And the wife of that young man would say, “Ok I will say the first part of the Hail Mary, and then I will kick my husband and tell him to pray the second part, Holy Mary…!!” She loved her husband, and she wanted to pray together with her husband, because in marriage man and woman become one.
And on the bus that goes from Medjugorje to Mostar, it stops at least 15 times. And everyone knew that this husband was from Medjugorje because everyone knew that if someone bumped him on the bus and woke him up, he would simply start to pray!! He was not a fanatic, just a person of good will, someone who worked hard himself, and who loved his family. And that is what Our Lady asks of us. Our Lady doesn’t want us to become fanatics. And she doesn’t want all of us to become missionaries and to go to Africa. But she says, “Go to your families!” From the Mount of Tabor, go back to your family. And do what you can do, through God’s blessing and Our Lady’s intercession, that your family, that your parish community can become worthy of the presence of God. So that we who are able to say we want God and we want the Blessed Mother in our families and at every single level of our family life.
That is what Our Lady asks of us. She desires to say to us,”Convert. Change your life! Without God there is no future, no eternal life, because without God we do not have a future.” That is why Our Lady says to us, and she is tirelessly inviting us, “Pray!” She has been appearing here for a long time, and she has been saying”Return to God.” So often she repeats, “Pray, pray, pray!” There is time for you when you get back home to play, to shop, to rest. But the hill where Our Lady appeared is here. The Cross Mountain is here. And Our Lady chose this country to wake us up again, and to say to us “I am your mother. Go back to your family and take me with you.” If we start to think with the heart of Our Lady, then we will feel the urgency to convert and to give witness to all those who live close to us. We will be worried for our children who are far from God. We will be worried about our husbands or wives and we will desire to pray for them and to be an example to them with our lives. Then for them we will be willing to make sacrifices. We will go even to Apparition Hill.
I remember a friend of mine who came to Medjugorje just for one day. At that time she wasn’t a friend of mine, but now she is a friend of mine. She is a very modern person. She really takes care of her body and she is very much into sports. She works in a pharmaceutical company and she has a pharmacy herself. And people would come to her and say, “Can you give us advice. What should we do?” And then on the day of their wedding anniversary, her husband came to her and said, “I am going to bring you to Medjugorje.” And she said, “OK, but just one day please.” But Our Lady waited for her here. And Our Lady really loved her and changed her. And she really fell in love with Our Lady. She has three children. And she even has a dog. Every morning she doesn’t go up Apparition Hill, but she wakes up at 5:00 in the morning and she is an exemplary mother, very modern, very into sports. But every morning she goes jogging with her dog and she prays the Rosary. Our Lady didn’t say what way, because you can pray a rosary while you are preparing your meal, while you are driving, while you are ironing. No one said in what way we should pray. But Our Lady simply says, pray the rosary. Maybe in the beginning it will be a rosary, but we will pray without thinking about it. But as we say, eating you learn how to eat, and we say, praying you learn how to pray. And we are here to learn how to pray and how to have peace with God and Our Lady.
And Our Lady gives us messages. She says, “Put my messages into practice. Live my messages.” And I say to you – Live the messages. The messages of Our Lady are nothing new. They are already written in the Sacred Scripture. Maybe those of us here will never meet again, will never see each other. But what you have met here and what you have experienced in your heart here will remain an amazing treasure. That is why I say do not waste time; make good use of your time in Medjugorje. Use this time in Medjugorje and pray.
I remember my own personal experience when I asked Fr. Slavko to become my spiritual guide. I said to him, “Can you be my spiritual guide?” Then he said yes. Then I said, “Can we meet? When, where, how?” And then he looked at me in a really profound way and he said to me, “Ok tomorrow morning at 5:00 in the morning at your house.” I was 16 years old. And you know what young people do at that time in the morning? What do they prefer at that age, what do they like more? At five o’clock they are back from the disco, and they just want to sleep. But I never went to the disco, but I loved sleeping, and when he said 5:00 am, it was amazing for me. And I said, “Ok…I have this plan…at night when I go to bed I will put clothes on, and put even my shoes on, and sleep with my shoes off the bed, a when Fr. Slavko would pass by, I would be ready with clothes and shoes on! But I have a strong will, and I said to myself, I have to do it. Not really that I have to do it, but I wanted to do it. And I can say that when I have that desire in my heart to be better, more holy, in reality to try to live more and better the messages of Our Lady, I have lived some of the most beautiful moments of my life.
When Fr. Slavko would come, he would begin, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” He wouldn’t say, “Dear one, did you get any sleep? Did you get enough sleep, did you sleep well?’ He wasn’t just talking, as many Italians are doing when they are up on the hill! They talk, talk, and talk! But I believe in a special way Our Lady loves Italy, because she sent me to Italy to convert you! No, I am just kidding. I believe that God in his mercy will convert all of us!
That is why I desire to say with my heart, “Use this time. This is a time of great grace for us.” When it happened to Jakov, the visionary, that Our Lady said the time has come when you won’t have any more daily apparitions, Jakov remembers those times and he would love to see her now every day. And now when he meets me he will say, “How was it yesterday – how was it. What was it like?” And I often will see a tear in his eye. And I ask myself, why did they stop for him, and I still have them? Why is it not the other way around? Why was it us, and not somebody else? We have many questions. I am not perfect, I am not a saint. I am a sinner. But I have a desire in my heart to be better and to convert, to really become a child of Our Lady.
Start thinking in this way: I believe that Our Lady’s children will become better. Maybe we will make a decision and start a prayer group. Maybe we will be able to help each other. Maybe we will learn how to pray properly the mysteries of the Holy Rosary of Our Lady, and every day we will become richer and more content, happier, because God won’t be up there in the clouds in heaven far away, but in our midst. Because we live as Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am present there.” And we, in the name of Jesus, will be able to start living a brand new life for ourselves, for the world, and for our future, for our own children.
Our Lady said once when we consecrated ourselves to her Immaculate Heart, and it was during the time of one of the apparitions, and all of the people were there, and I was in Sicily and one of the officials of the government in Sicily, when he read the consecration prayer to Our Lady, Our Lady answered and said,”You won’t regret this, neither your children nor your children’s children.” I wish that in your act of coming to Medjugorje for your personal conversion, that through your personal conversion to her Immaculate Heart, I hope and pray that Our Lady will act and work in your heart and will be able to say to you, “You won’t regret doing this, neither you, nor your children, nor your children’s children.” This is something that I wish for all of you from the bottom of my heart.
And this evening when I am together with Our Lady I am going to pray for all of you. I can’t remember all of you by name, but I am sure that all of you are already in the heart of Our Lady. And I am going to pray for all of you and for all of your intentions. And I am going to pray for all that you carry in your heart, for all the members of your family that you left at home. We will also pray for all those people who do not have the faith or courage to come to Medjugorje. Maybe they are sick, confined to bed, and they cannot come to Medjugorje. I am going to pray for all of you and present all of you to Our Lady. I will pray for all of you. Thanks be to God we have so many priests here. We will ask one of them to do what they do, to bless us all. It is a grace that they can do it because we receive Jesus from their hands. And we really have to pray a lot for our priests. And we have to love all priests. We ask all our priests to pray over us and for us that they may give us God’s blessing, so that we can live in our hearts, act in our hearts and our lives with God’s heart and God’s eyes. (All the priests came and blessed us!)
Happy Anniversary, one and all!!
Cathy Nolan
(c)Mary TV 2013
Her School of Love 