South Korea’s Kwangju archdiocese has issued a letter warning its priests of activities by supporters of an alleged Marian visionary who has incurred excommunication. In its letter, sent on April 15, the archdiocese said supporters of Julia Youn have recently distributed leaflets and DVDs in parishes without approval, UCA News reports.
The archdiocese has asked parishes to dispose of them.
Youn and her supporters claim that the Catholic laywoman started receiving Marian “revelations” after her statue of the Blessed Mother “started weeping” in 1985.
She and her followers then established “the Blessed Mother´s Mountain,” the name they gave to their center in Naju, located in Kwangju archdiocese.
According to the archdiocesan letter, Youn’s recently distributed DVD claims she experienced a “second Eucharistic miracle at the Vatican” during which a communion host allegedly turned into a bloody lump of flesh in her mouth.
An archdiocesan priest, Fr Thomas Park Seong-yeol, told UCA News that June 30 is the 25th anniversary of alleged miracles claimed by the group. He surmised that Youn’s followers are expanding their activities to get official recognition from the Church on this occasion.
Kwangju archdiocese had rejected the supernatural claims of the group, and issued directives in 1998, 2003 and 2005 banning Catholics from visiting and participating in ceremonies at their center.
In January 2008, then Archbishop Andreas Choi Chang-mou of Kwangju declared that Youn and her followers who had insisted that divine miracles had taken place, had incurred latae sententiae excommunication.
This means the excommunication is not imposed by judgment but automatically results from an action that places one outside the community of faith.
The Vatican had also said it respected the archdiocese’s decision on Youn. Her followers, however, insist that the Vatican supports them.
According to Fr Park, Youn’s DVD contains an interview with the retired Archbishop Giovanni Bulaitis, former apostolic nuncio to Korea, in Rome. In it, he allegedly said that the ban on liturgical activities at Youn’s center was “absurd,” and that Archbishop Choi had “no authority” to make this declaration.
Fr Park pointed out that Archbishop Buliatis expressed his own opinion, and that it was not the Vatican’s position.