http://www.croatianrelief.org

Who is Father Zlatko Sudac? 

Father Zlatko Sudac was born on January 24, 1971 in Croatia and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Krk in Croatia in 1998. According to his bishop, Msgr. Valter Zupan of Krk he is in good standing and highly recommended. Shortly after his ordination and first assignment, Most Rev. Valter Zupan, Bishop of Krk assigned Father Zlatko to the diocesan retreat center to preach the retreats for the Evangelization of the Church. Father has taken this assignment very seriously and began to draw crowds to his retreat house. 

In September 2001 Fr. Sudac was sent to the US to study English and Spirituality. We believe that his mission will one day cross the borders of his diocese in Croatia. His love for Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament, his healing touch and call to repentance has changed many lives. Some even claim that they were healed at his Masses, adoration, seminars and Eucharistic Adoration. 

Father Sudac humbly accepts invitations to come to any parish where the pastor and the local bishop invite him to preach and celebrate the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration.


You can write to Fr. Sudac at:

Fr. Zlatko Sudac
P.O. Box 710
Fairview, NJ 07022

Email: FATHERSUDAC@AOL.COM 



DATE TIME HOST 
Saturday
3/16/02 8:00pm Cathedral of St. John the Baptist 381 Grand St., Paterson, NJ
973-345-4078 

Tuesday
3/19/02 6:00pm Saint Therese's Chuch 7207 N.W. Highway 9, Kansas City, Missouri
816-279-4509
816-587-5543 

Monday
4/1/02 8:00am - 9:00pm St. George Catholic Church 501 East State Street, Georgetown, OH
937-378-6829
937-378-4396 

Saturday
4/20/02 8:00pm Cathedral of St. John the Baptist 381 Grand St., Paterson, NJ
973-345-4078 

Tuesday
4/30/02 7:00pm Our Lady Queen of Martyrs 110-06 Queens Blvd., Forest Hills NY
718-268-6251 

Saturday
5/18/02 8:00pm Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
381 Grand St., Paterson, NJ
973-345-4078 

There are other unconfirmed dates. Which will be added once they are approved. Please check this site frequently for additional dates.

SUMMER PILGRIMAGES TO
MEDJUGORJE AND MALI LOSINJ

5 Days in Medjugorje
5 Days with Fr. Zlatko Sudac

Space is limited so please fill out a registration form as soon as possible
Sign up for a Retreat

All prices include Price does NOT include 
*Round trip from Chicago, New York, Newark, Boston
*Accomadations in Private Guest House in Medjugorje
*Lunch and Dinner in Medjugorje
*All ground transportation
*Overnight with supper and breakfast on ferry
*Breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Mali Lusinj
*5 days at 3-star Hotel Aurora on Adriatic
*Overnight at Hotel Esplanade in Zagreb
*All local and hotel taxes *Airport Tax $88
*All Tips
*Trip Insurance (optional $140)
*Single supplement $370
*Resonable add on fares:
Philidelphia, Miami $120
Minneapolis $150
Dallas, Houston $250
LA, San Diego, San Francisco $360
Pheonix, Portland, Seattle $360 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The schedule for these retreats is listed below. All prices are based on double occupancy and the additional days in Medjugorje. You can fill out a Registration form online, by clicking here. For more information on these retreats or if you wish to skip the extra days in Medjugorje call Fr. Gio at 201-945-4891. 




FATHER GIORDANO BELANICH 
OUR LADIES CHAMPION OF THE HOMELESS
Medujugorje Magazine, Spring 2001
By: Larry and Mary Sue Eck

Have you ever had a really good friend you never met? That was our relationship with Father Gio until February 23, 2000 when he walked through the door at the Tinley Park Conference Center to attend the two day retreat by Father Zlatko Sudac. We have talked to Fr. Gio countless times by phone over the past seven years or so. We've spoken to him so often in fact that we almost forgot we'd never met him. He didn't look anything like what we'd pictured him to be from his voice. He is bigger, taller, handsomer and younger. During anyone of the numerous calls back and forth between us over the years, we should have asked Father Gio how he became the priest in charge of the Croatian Relief in this country. People who do magazines usually ask those kind of questions early on - often they produce great stories. But we did not ask - that is until just the other day. Evidently the Lord wanted us to wait until now to share Father Gio's wonderful life story with you.
Father Giordano Belanich has wanted to be a priest since he was a little five-year-old Croatian boy. "I always thought God was calling me to be a priest, but I dismissed the idea when I turned eleven," Father Gio began. "That's how old I was when my family had to leave what was then Yugoslavia and run for our lives to Italy, away from Communism." In the refugee camp in Italy, for the first time, Father heard English spoken. He knew it would be the language of their soon-to-be country, the United States of America. "I thought I would never be able to learn that language so I dismissed the idea of the priesthood, assuming I wasn't smart enough to ever master it, so forget it. I also decided I wasn't worthy to be a priest." 
A family with three children immigrated to America with Father Gio's family. One morning, as was his custom, he went to their house to join the boys in play. They were still asleep but the boys' father had left the door open when he went to work and Gio went inside and sat quietly at the kitchen table, waiting for the others to awaken. On the table, open, lay a magazine someone must have been reading the night before. It was St. Anthony's Messenger, printed in that time in Chicago by the Croatian Franciscans from Mostar. There was a story with a large headline reading, How Did I Become a Priest? Father told us, "I devoured that story. It was about a young boy in Spain who thought he was unworthy to be a priest. Reading that, I realized this was how I thought about myself becoming a priest. I finished the story, banged my fist on the table and said, ‘Darn it, if this kid could make it, I can too;" Giordano Belanich was twelve years old and he never looked back. 
"I started going to Mass every morning. One cold, snowy morning I passed my father waiting for the bus to take him to work. When he saw me, he asked, ‘Why didn't you stay in bed? Can't you see nobody's out today?' I told him, ‘But daddy, you are out. You're going to work. You have to be about your business and I have to be about my Father's business.'" 
One evening, Gio's cousins came to take him to a dance in the church hall. "Of course," Father Gio laughingly admitted, "in those days that meant going at eight and coming home at nine. The priest was there, walking from table to table greeting everyone. When he came to our table, he looked at me and asked, ‘What is your name?' When I told him, he said, ‘I thought you were a seminarian.'
"'What?'  "'I see you at Mass every morning so I thought you were a seminarian.' I told him I wasn't but that I'd like to talk to him about the priesthood. "'How about tomorrow?' The next afternoon we were discussing the possibility of my going into the priesthood."
Gio was attending public school and his counselor was a Jewish lady. One day she asked Gio what he intended to major in college. He explained he wanted to be a priest. The lady looked at him as if in shock. "Is that bad?" asked Gio. "No, no, no, but I can't help you there. You'd better see your parish priest!" Gio assured her he had already done so.
He joined the minor seminary of the Edmundite Fathers at the Mother of the Savior Seminary in New Jersey. He was sixteen years old. He had no Latin so they told him he must repeat his junior year. "Whatever is the will of God," Gio responded. Then, through a remarkable series of events, he ended up being a senior at Easter, graduating in June, entering the novitiate and eventually being professed for three years. When his temporary vows expired, however, Gio decided not to extend them or renew them. 
"I decided I wasn't meant to be an order priest. I went to my local bishop but he told me he couldn't accept me without my having to go through the seminary again. Then he said that the Patterson, New Jersey Diocese was very small and I should go there. As soon as the vocation director saw me, he said, ‘We have a Slovak church and they don't have a priest. You are just what they need.' ‘I'm not Slovak, I'm Croatian.' Low and behold, I was ordained in 1975 but even as a deacon my first assignment was to St. Mary's Slovak church. When I started saying mass in Slovak the people understood me better than the pastor, who was a native American. To this day, I can say the Mass in Slovak, I learned it that well."
After seventeen months, Father was transferred to another St. Mary's where he stayed for four years until the new Archbishop of Newark called the Bishop of Patterson and said, "Father Gio is the only Croatian priest in New Jersey, and we need him here. Will you lend him to us?" Father's bishop agreed but Father himself had to give consent. "I told him I'd think about it and pray. I asked my father what he thought I should do. He told me, ‘If it's the will of God, why not just say yes and go there, where you're needed?'" 
It was twenty years ago that Father Gio accepted that new assignment at St. John's Catholic Church, where he remains today. 
Two years ago the Patterson bishop called. Father asked him, "What's the matter, bishop? You want me back home?" "No, no," replied the bishop, "but to tell you the truth, I've forgotten what you look like. Gio you've been there eighteen years now and you're welcome back but if you intend to stay there why not get incardinated in Newark?" Father Giordano's position then simply became the reality he was already living. He laughed, "So, last March, I was made part of the Archdiocese of Newark, exactly what I wanted to be thirty years ago!"

3,000 Flock toCroatian Priest

Thousands seeking to meet the man they believe may be a futuresaint.

The Rev. Zlatko Sudac, also known as the "stigmata priest," greets overflow crowd out side St. Athanasius Church Wednesday night.

3,000 flock to stigmata priest Crowd overflows Bensonhurst church (froma Front Page)
By Patrick Callahue

The Brooklyn Papers 

Alaimo Rosario sat in the first row of folding chairs set up beside the pews at the St. Athanasius Roman Catholic Church, 
21 st Avenue at 61th Street in Bensonhurst, Wednesday  night, alongside her daughter Joanne, who suffers from multiple 
sclerosis. A few seats down, Tina Lubrano-Scarpati, suffering from lung cancer, was also among the worshipers. 
Both women were among the throngs, well over 3,000, that came to see the Rev. Zlatco Sudac, a Croatian priest believes to bear signs of the stigma, a mystical phenomenon which wounds of Christ on the cross appear, or are felt, on a person's body. 

 Along with the stigmata, some—Sudac among them—are also believed to be endowed with supernatural gifts, such as healing powers, psychicabilities and bilocation.

On March 13, Sudac celebrated Mass at St. Athanasiusas part of his five-month tour through the metropolitan area., In previous appearances he has attracted thousands seeking to meet the man they believe may be a future saint, and this evening in Bensonhurst was no different.

The church prepared facilities for 3,000 to attend. Besides the main chapel, the lower hall downstairs and the gymnasium across the street were equipped with monitors where the Mass wouldsimulcast.

Well, before the service began, however, all of the facilities were packed to the gills with worshippers who came for reason varying from the pedestrian to the mystical.Diana Juliano of Park Slope said she was simply interested to see who the man was, as she waited on line in the cold rain in front of the gymnasium."If there is any kind of blessing or healing from someone's presence, then I'm open to that," she said, but added that she did not comewith a set of expectations

"I think people just want to be in his presence,"  said Monsignor David Cassato pastor of the St.Athanasiusas Church" (After)
the events of Sept. 11, people have first of all reawakened in themselves a need for God and the supernatural. Someone like Father Sudac coming to a church really makes you aware of the supernatural and God."

Sudac, 31, is from the town of Vrbnik, on Krk Island in Croatia. He began studying for the priesthood in 1993, and was ordained on June 29, 1998.

Almost a year after his ordination a cross was said to have appeared on his forehead, and it was determined by the Gemell Clinic in Rome, not to be of human origin. On Oct. 4, 200O, he reportedly bore markings on his side,wrists and feet, which he claims spontaneously bleed.

The first marking on his forehead reportedly appeared the Friday after the beatification of St. Padre Pio and the second, on the day of the feast of St. Francis Assisi—both of whom are believed to have borne the stigmata.

Traditionally, the Vatican has been slow to recognize or acknowledge such claims, though the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens has been positive but cautious about Sudac's visit to Bensonhurst.

"He certainly appears to be a priest in good standing," said Frank DeRosa, the Brooklyn diocese spokesman. "There's been no position taken on the question of the stigmata, [but] if he helps people grow in their spiritual life, that's positive."

In recent years, Sudac has generally kept a low profile, choosing to express himself to the public at Mass rather than in the pages of the media or on television.

Shortly after 7 PM, Wednesday, before a church filled with more than 1,000 people, Sudac took to the altar to deliver theservice, the cross on his forehead faintly visible. Speaking in Croatian, with a translator beside him, Sudac celebrated a standard Mass, passionately speaking of the need for unity, faith and love."We live in such times, that we must awaken the consciousness of unity," he said through a translator.

Many, such as Rosario, had come with hopes that Sudac would be able to heal their loved ones, but that was an expected ambition that Sudac seemed to deflect toward the personal faith of hose in attendance.

"Do you see sick people in this church?" Sudac asked, adding faith for those who have faith, "Jesus would touch their hearts, butonly by his holy will." While the service may not have been out of theordinary  the audience responded to the slight, soft-spoken Sudac with moreemotion than at regular Masses. Rosario frequently burst into tears as did manyparishioners in the church.

As the Mass neared its end, Sudac knelt at the altar and closedhis eyes. He offered prayers for people in attendance - for a mother to havepatience with her depressed teenage daughter, for a child having trouble movinghis arms and legs, for people with psychological problems and for a girl withlung cancer that had spread to her liver

Lubrano-Scarpati, who is suffering from breast cancer thatmetastasized to her liver, watched on. When asked if she thought he might bereferring to her, she simply smiled and said, "I hope so"

Sudac lifted the gold crucifix from the altar and slowly walkeddown the aisles and stopped before the pews to offer his blessings. Some peoplelifted photographs and others brought their ailing loved ones to stand closer tohim as he approached. Some trembled as they clasped their hands together in hispresence.

The cliché that people would rise from their wheelchair, theblind would see and the sick be cured, did not occur. Instead they wiped theireyes of tears as he passed.

"It was beautiful," Rosario said. "I feel no illness,no sadness," but then added, "I hope my daughter gets better."

Lubrano-Scarpati, 30 sat calmly following the Mass. She wasalready grateful for the time she had lived and that she was alive,"because of God." After all she noted, when she was diagnosed fouryears ago, doctors told her that she had two months to live.

"It was very uplifting and spiritual," she said of theMass. "It made you think of your life and what he wants for you. And weshould be asking God more what he wants from you."