My brother was married to a Catholic girl. We would always get together for the holidays. Her mother and I would always sit down separately and talk religion because we were both religious. My background is Orthodoxy. Hers is Catholicism. We were speaking mutually about religion. 

One of the holidays, she brought with her a stack of books. There was one called Queen of the Cosmos. For some reason, that drew me. It was a blue paperback book written by Janice Connell. She was an attorney. It was an interview with six children who said they saw the Virgin Mary. 

Me, having worked in schools, I thought, “Okay, I’m going to glance at this and see what they’re saying.” I had never heard of apparitions. I knew very little about Fatima, maybe that there was something, but I didn’t know the whole story. Lourdes I had heard of because there was a Catholic Church in my town called Our Lady of Lourdes, but that’s all. 

Being in schools and psychology, I was very familiar with children. As I’m reading these interviews, their answers were incredibly descriptive, more than many children would be able to even convey. As I read the history of it, I saw how they were responding. You can break a 9 year old. You can break a 15 year old. You can break these kids easily. Divide them up, you can break them. I’m reading this, and they can’t be broken. 

There is no way that a young child under the communist regime where they would pull them out and actually threaten and be cruel, I was reading all the things they threatened them with, and the kids would continue persistently saying this is what they saw. I knew that this was real. 

That’s what began for me my whole journey about Medjugorje. That’s what kicked it off because I could see that it was real. That would have been maybe in the late 80s or early 90s. 

I was in research in psychology. I’d gone all the way through to my doctorate, except I didn’t complete it because my daughter Christina was born. I had two kids at that point so I couldn’t do my dissertation. They gave me what’s called a professional diploma. I had two Masters in psychology and education. 

My thing was research so I began to research everything I could get my hands on about this phenomenon. Everything I was reading affirmed for me, at least in my heart, that this had to be real. 

I started to pray the Rosary. That became a bridge between Catholicism and Orthodoxy for me.

Fast forward. Probably a lot transpired in between. I kept doing a lot of reading. Then my husband passed away in the year 2009. He was in Greece. We had to go out for the funeral. 

Christina was working. She was at the end of her four years of college. She began working for Kelly Ripa in New York. She had moved out of the house. She was working in the city. She was coming back and forth on weekends.

At work, they had given me a laptop computer that I could take home. I had never had a laptop before. Medjugorje just popped into my head again. I thought, “Let me see if there’s anything on the computer about that.” Up comes this YouTube video, and it was Mirjana. It was showing her have an apparition. I had never seen anyone have an apparition. I was really taken by it. Then all of a sudden, Medjugorje came back again. All this had transpired, years had gone by; it came back again. 

Christina would come home on weekends. She came home that weekend. As usual, she wanted to watch TV, like Saturday Night Live or something. I said, “Christina, come here. You’ve got to look at this.”

She came and sat down. I put in the YouTube of Mirjana. I wanted her to see someone having an apparition. All of a sudden, I don’t know what happened, it was like a lighting bolt hit. She starts cry. I’m thinking, “What is going on?” I didn’t expect that kind of response from her. 

She watched all of the YouTube. Days are going by, and she’s crying for days. I’m getting worried. For me, it was gradual. For her, it was like a lightning bolt. From watching Mirjana’s apparition.

She started going back into the city. All of a sudden, her life changed. She got up early. She was doing food banks. She was feeding the homeless, all kinds of things. She said to me one time, “I want to go to Medjugorje.”

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I would ever come to the place that I was reading about.

To appease her, I thought, “Let me see if there are people that come here.” I googled and I found that Ivan had just begun apparitions in Boston. He lives in Boston. I thought, “Well maybe then that will satisfy her as far as traveling is concerned.” I looked it up, and the first one that I could see was in December, but it was too close to Christmas. I said, “Why don’t we just plan on February. I have a break that week. Let’s go to this one.”

We go to the apparition. It was at MIT in the chapel. We were early, and it was empty. There was nobody in this little chapel. We sat down not knowing anything about protocol or whatever. Christina and I sat in the first two seats of the small chapel there. Eventually people started coming in, little by little. 

Then Ivan walked in with some people. We recognized that it was one of the visionaries. As he’s walking towards the front, we looked at each other and we thought, “These are his seats.” 

The priest was there. He was a wonderful person. I said, “We’re gong to move. I didn’t realize.” The preset spoke to Ivan and said, “No. You stay right there.” Ivan actually came and sat at the end of our pew.

They started Mass. 6:40 came and Ivan walks up to the front in front of the altar and he’s literally in front of us in apparition. For us who really didn’t have the background or understanding, we’re sitting here and the Virgin Mary is manifesting Herself to him and we’re a few inches from him. It was amazing. We both walked out of there and said, “What an amazing experience.”

Afterwards, when people were chatting, we walked over. Ivan was there. We wanted to meet him. A woman turned to us and said, “You should come on pilgrimage. We’re going on the anniversary. It’s June 24th and 25th.”

I said, “Thank you so much, but we really can’t because my husband died on the 24th and we have to go to Greece to be there for his annual memorial service. Maybe another time.” She gave us some information.

The next morning at 7 o’clock, my sister-in-law called me from Greece, and she said, “Can we possibly do the memorial service a week later? My son-in-law wants to come and he is in Mexico and can’t come until then.”

That opened the door for us to go. That was 2010 on June 24th. Had he not passed on that day, I don’t know whether that would have coordinated that way. We decided to go ahead with this. My son, my daughter, and I all came to Medjugorje together on pilgrimage, but we didn’t stay the entire time, and then we left and went to Greece. 

We were here maybe three or four days. It was amazing. June 24th, Christina and I walked up Apparition Hill to pray for my husband. We did our memorial prayers for him up there. We were all very moved by the experience we had on that morning.

We left. We went to Greece. We did the memorial service. We came back to the states. Both of us were tremendously moved. 

Christina then began to say, “You know what? I want to make a documentary. I want to do something.” She was in the industry.

It was Christmas time. It was close to New Year’s. She couldn’t go back because she was sick. We stayed home that night, and she said, “I really want to go to Medjugorje. I want to do a film.” She was very interested in Mirjana because her initial contact was that YouTube video she saw of Mirjana. Christina said, “How would I ever get into a visionary’s house? I’m just a person.” She’s sitting there on the computer, and Trinity Pilgrimages comes up with Jim Benzo. She writes to Jim, and said, “Can I get an interview?” 

Somehow Jim said yes. He must have asked Mirjana and they made an arrangement. Christina said to me, “I want to leave my job.” 

I’m thinking, “You want to leave being Kelly Ripa’s assistant? Is she really going to do this?” Sure enough, she decides she wants to do this film. She quit her job, which is, I can tell you, and incredible thing for a young girl in her 20s who had come out of school in the film and communication industry, working for a celebrity to decide she’s going to quit because she wants to go do a movie. 

That started her with the whole connection she had to Medjugorje, very devoted to this very day. This is how her whole life evolved. Our Lady took her step by step. All the things that occurred in our life, as I look back, I can see all of the steps and the sequence of how everything happened. 

We became very devoted to Our Lady’s apparitions and wanting to be near Her. She’s everything. I’m so grateful to Her because Her intercession took me by my hand and led me. She wants to do that with everybody. You just have to open your heart. My heart opened to Her. 

When She interceded for my son, it wasn’t the end of the story for me. 

I just wanted to be close to Her. I knew that She was real and in our lives. That continued as She took me by the hand and brought me into the school, because it’s a school. It really is an education. My whole life has been education. From the get go, to going through college to two Masters degrees to a doctorate program through research, through all of that all I cared about was education. 

This is an education on a higher level, if we just open our hearts. We need this. Just like you need to start with the basics in arithmetic, addition and subtraction, before you can get to algebra and geometry. You have to begin just willing. All you need is the willingness and She takes you through the entire education that your soul needs.