Blazenka Brdar: 83 years old and still organising pilgrimages!

date: 11.04.2005.

These days, the 83-years old Blaženka Brdar from Rijeka (Croatia) is celebrating the 150th pilgrimage that she has organised to Medjugorje. She came for the first time on May 7, 1983, and she remembers well this difficult time when the police was forbidding to the pilgrims to climb the Apparition Hill and Cross Mountain, and when the Franciscans from Rijeka were disapproving her going to Medjugorje. During the first years, she was taking two cars a year, and with the time, there were 12 cars a year. Everything was happening without any advertisement, simply by phone and through personal contacts.

For the pilgrims who came to Medjugorje with her, she is saying that “they never come back home the same as they left”. She is especially happy because of one vocation for the Carmel, which is a fruit of these pilgrimages: today, this young religious is in the Carmelite monastery in Marija Bistrica, in the Croatian national Marian shrine.

Blaženka Brdar is a member and a promoter of the Rosary Movement, which has 580 members in Rijeka, and she speaks with joy about the prayers that rise to Heaven. Personally, she is spending hours and hours with the Rosary in her hands, interceding for all possible intentions… From the day that the Pope John Paul II has died, she is especially invoking him who told to all of us: “Do not be afraid!”