Authorities in Bosnia are investigating the desecration of a statue of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, a popular Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in the southern part of the country. Someone painted the statue’s face and hands black — the paint still fresh at dawn — and scrawled an inscription in English across the pedestal: “Devil in a skirt.” A shrine at the site was also damaged by fire overnight, according to the Associated Press.
Medjugorje, a village in the wine-making region of southern Bosnia, became a focus of global Catholic attention in 1981, when six children and teenagers reported seeing visions of the Madonna on a hill. Two years ago, the Vatican formally approved pilgrimages here, giving its highest institutional blessing to the site. The vandals’ act is an assault on a place the Church itself has consecrated by its authority.
The words on the pedestal tell us more than the vandals knew. A skirt is a woman’s garment. The contempt in that sentence is not just for the Mother of God but for womanhood itself. The one who carved it into stone wanted to say that the feminine is evil, that the woman who bore God into the world is not blessed but cursed, that the body is a trap and the woman is the bait. This is older than Christianity. It is the old lie that has been called by many names, and the vandals gave it an English one.
Isaiah named this inversion twenty-eight centuries ago. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” he said. The vandals did not merely break a statue. They called holy what the Church has called blessed for two thousand years “evil,” and what the Church calls blessed “devil.” They set fire to a place where the poor have come to pray, where the sick have come to hope, where the lowly have come to feel held. This was not vandalism as property crime. This was a theological act, spoken in the grammar of hatred.
I have to say something my own tradition does not want to hear. The contempt that wrote “Devil in a skirt” did not come from nowhere. The Church has sometimes treated women as suspect. It has carried the old lie in its own vocabulary — calling the body a temptation, naming woman as the source of sin, treating the feminine as dangerous rather than holy. The case of Marko Rupnik — the once-celebrated priest whose accusers are still demanding the Vatican clarify the status of his trial — is the most glaring recent instance of an institution failing to see the female body as anything but a vessel or a threat. We who are Catholic should look at that inscription and recognize the extreme form of a sickness we have harbored in milder doses. The vandals said it in English on a pedestal in Bosnia. We have said it in Latin from the pulpit and in canon law from the chancery. The mirror is ugly. It is ours.
This is not the first time in months that a statue of Mary has been treated with contempt. In Lebanon, Israeli soldiers were sentenced to military prison for desecrating a Virgin Mary statue in a different act of degradation. Different actors, different contexts, same refusal to see what the tradition sees in that face — the face through which God entered the world, the face of the woman who said yes when the angel asked everything.
Mary’s own words answer the act that was done to her statue. She sang: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” The proud are the ones who need Mary to be a devil. If she is what the Church says she is — the humble one, the handmaid, the woman who carried the Word into the world — then the inversion she announces is real. The powerful will be brought down. The lowly will be lifted up. That is the news the proud cannot bear, and the contempt on the pedestal is the noise of their fear.
To whoever did this: you are a person. I do not know your name. I do not know what made you hate her enough to paint her face black and burn her shrine. But you are not beyond return. Mary herself stood at the foot of the cross while the men who killed her son cast lots for his clothes. She has seen worse contempt than yours, and she does not cease to be mother. The door is open.
The statue will be cleaned. The shrine will be rebuilt. Pilgrims will still come to Medjugorje, carrying their sick children and their broken prayers, because they know that the woman who sang about the proud being scattered is still the mother who waits. The vandals wrote “Devil in a skirt” on her pedestal. She answers, as she always has, with the words she spoke to the angel: “Let it be done to me according to your word.”