UCI Conferees Share a Vision of Virgin Mary : Religion: The nearly 3,000 attending the event are among millions of believers in a series of reported apparitions of the Holy Mother in a remote Yugoslavian village.

The reported miraculous revelations of a group of peasant teen-agers in a remote Yugoslavian village attracted nearly 3,000 believers to UCI’s Bren Events Center on Saturday to share a message of faith, hope and peace.

The Irvine event, which continues today, is the first major conference in Southern California to explore the messages received in Medjugorje, a village in Yugoslavia where six young people say that, in 1981, they began seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The apparition, they said, brought messages of God’s love.

Their revelations have attracted millions of followers who believe in the sightings, some saying they, too, have experienced supernatural events on pilgrimages to the remote farming village.

The sightings have been dismissed by others as the hallucinations of impressionable youth.

The Catholic Church has undertaken an investigation of the phenomena but has made no pronouncements on their authenticity.

Kay Sentovich, who co-sponsored the two-day conference, said it is not being given under the auspices of the Diocese of Orange and is intended to be an ecumenical gathering, for believers of all faiths.

“It’s really a grass-roots movement. The people who believe are moving it along whether the church approves or not,” she said.

Mark Maravalle, an associate professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, said he became a believer when he visited Medjugorje and experienced the “charity of the people” in the tobacco- and grape-growing hamlet.

“I sensed a certain presence of Mary,” said Maravalle, one of Saturday’s speakers. “I saw the Croation families praying daily and fasting, and it was obviously the fruits of something supernatural going on.”

The Medjugorje (pronounced Med-u-gory) phenomenon began in 1981 when six children--four girls and two boys--reported seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary on a hillside near the village.

The young people, now in their late teens and 20s, say they have seen the apparition at the same spot each evening in the rectory of St. James Church, and that it has been accompanied by messages for world peace through prayer.

Despite the fervor of the youths, others strongly dispute their claims.

“It is noteworthy that all of the sightings of apparitions in recent centuries have been made by teen-agers,” said Gerald Larue, an emeritus professor of religion at USC and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. “If we are going to accept the apparitions the teens say they see, then we should accept the children in Russia who say they see space monsters.”

Larue said he believes that the children originally may have been influenced by emotional problems and stories of other apparitions and that other believers are caught up in a sort of mass hysteria.

“It’s not evil in itself, but it is naive,” he said.

However, there are many who believe their lives have been changed by events in Medjugorje. Rita Klaus, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who spoke Saturday, said her severe case of multiple sclerosis was healed after she renewed her faith in God and through her belief in the apparitions.

Klaus, whose legs are scarred from numerous surgeries, showed a statement from her physician that indicated there was no medical explanation for her cure.

Klaus said she is not sure why she was chosen for such special grace.

“The children at Medjugorje have asked the Mother why they were chosen,” she said. “And the answer was, ‘We don’t always choose the best.’ ”