The following questions are excerpted from the Question and Answer Session with Mirjana at the Totally Yours Conference in St. Charles, IL, 4/26/09. Mirjana was very joyful and joked a lot. She said Our Lady wants us to be joyful.

Q:  Can we put butter on our bread [when fasting]?

A:  I would like to say one thing, in fact. God is Love and He truly loves His children, and even if you put butter on your bread, He will still love you. But do you love yourself?   That is the question. I cannot be the one to decide about that. I can only repeat what Our Lady says, and how you shall do that further is going to be your choice. God gave you freedom. He is just telling you through His Mother what is good for you. But it doesn’t mean that you have to do it right away. Go slowly, step by step.  

  A friend of mine named Joyce, when she comes to Medjugorje, she always says, “For Friday I will fast on bread and water,” and she doesn’t know that they tell me she was eating cheese as well. [laughter]

Q: Why does Our Lady ask for  Wednesday and Friday to fast?

A:  When the things through Medjugorje are supposed to happen, then you will be able to understand why Wednesday and Friday – or why every 2^nd of the month and every 18^th of March. Every day and every date has a meaning.

Q: Can we drink tea or coffee with our bread?

A:  Guy (the MC) complains of this, and I know him so well. In Medjugorje he eats nothing but bread and I’m sure he’s asking because of some other people, and the answer is the same. [laughter]  [ By the same, we think she means the same thing she said in her talk the day before, when she said that you can drink coffee on fast day “ as long as you get up before Our Lady.” ]

Q: How much bread can we eat and how much water can we drink?

A:  Our Lady didn’t talk about the amount of bread or about water, but believe me, I tried. I ate so much bread, I thought it would satisfy my hunger, but I just got a big stomach [ache] and I was still hungry.

Q: I was told that if I fall asleep praying my Rosary, my guardian angel will finish it. Is this true?

A:  And why wouldn’t it happen that when you want to put butter on your bread, you decide, “I will give this butter to my guardian angel and then I will eat only bread?”  [ roaring laughter]

Q: We went on a pilgrimage and we were blessed to stay at your house once and we noticed the Pope’s shoes are in a little display at your house. Can you tell us how Pope John Paul II’s shoes arrived there?

A:  I am the only one of 6 visionaries who was lucky enough, had the honor, to encounter Pope John Paul II. You can imagine how the other 5 are jealous of me. [laughter] Jakov always says, “Oh, yea, you have been with Pope.” 

   I was in the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, with an Italian priest. Holy Father was walking by and he was blessing us. When he approached me, he blessed me and he just continued to walk. However, this Italian priest loudly said to him, “Holy Father, this is Mirjana from Medjugorje.” He came back and blessed me again and he set out. And I said to the priest, “ He just thinks I need a double blessing.” But then after, he received a note, an invitation to Castle Gandolfo, close to Rome, in order to encounter the Pope. I couldn’t sleep all night because I really loved him and I respected him and I could really feel his love for Our Lady.

   So the next day when he and I met alone, I was just crying. I couldn’t say a word out of excitement. He noticed that I was excited. I think he tried to talk to me in Polish because he thought in the Slavic languages there are things in common. I didn’t understand a word! But I finally had enough strength and courage, I asked him, “What are you trying to tell me?” Then we talked. Among other things he said to me, “I know everything about Medjugorje. I’ve been following Medjugorje. Ask  pilgrims to pray for my intentions, to keep, to take good care of Medjugorje, because Medjugorje is hope for the entire world. And if I were not Pope, I would have been in Medjugorje a long time ago.”

   So recently on the Mount of Apparitions, I saw a pair of shoes of the Pope in front of me, and after the apparition, this gentleman who brought these shoes ( he didn’t introduce himself), he said, “It was the Pope’s desire for a long time to come to Medjugorje. I said, ‘If you do not go, I will take your shoes.’ And that is how I brought his shoes, so they may be present during the apparition.”

   Now I have a pair of his shoes in my home.    But what is funniest in this, a man who made the shoes for the Pope, an Italian from Rome, he heard that I have a pair of the Pope’s shoes, and imagine, he wouldn’t believe it. He made two pairs of Pope’s shoes for me. My number’s 38 [in the US, size 7].