Senior Vatican representatives joined the first officially approved church festival at Medjugorje, three months after Catholic pilgrimages to the site in Bosnia-Herzegovina were authorised by the pope.
“We are called to share the difficulties of our contemporaries and we have a responsibility to care for them,” Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for New Evangelisation, told 60,000 young people from 97 countries Aug. 5.
“For something to happen, we have to offer something: our poverty, our misery, our borders, our contradictions. But God will change all that because God works miracles,” he said during the final evening of Mladifest, or Youth Festival.
Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, papal vicar of the Rome Diocese, formally opened the event Aug. 2. Fourteen archbishops and bishops and about 700 Catholic priests joined the festivities, which concluded Aug. 6.
Meanwhile, the pope’s apostolic visitor to Medjugorje, Archbishop Henryk Hoser, who presided over the festival Aug. 3, said the hilltop shrine had become “a place of meeting and knowing,” adding that “the secret of Medjugorje” was “an invisible reality, but intense and very present.”
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With thanks to Crux, Catholic News Service and Jonathan Luxmoore, where this article originally appeared.
