Photo: https://www.fotodjani.com 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 last week.
“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 at the beginning of the month. Fourteen archbishops and bishops and about 700 Catholic priests joined the festivities.
Meeting
Meanwhile, the Pope’s apostolic visitor to Medjugorje, Archbishop Henryk Hoser, who presided over the festival, 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”.
More than 40,000 apparitions have been claimed over 38 years at Medjugorje, where six teenagers reported first seeing an apparition of Mary on June 24, 1981 while herding sheep.
In May 2018, Pope Francis named Archbishop Hoser as apostolic visitor, after a papal commission recommended that Medjugorje, which attracts up to three million visitors annually, be designated a pontifical shrine with Vatican oversight.