Coming to Medjugorje to participate in this festival of the youth after being in World youth day in Australia, leaves you with the feeling that the whole world is Catholic. Obviously, it is just an emotion, but our Church is nevertheless large. This festival is another outpouring of The Holy Spirit over the Church. A 19-year-old tradition, it feels as if it has life for many years to come. The number of youngsters is increasing every year; youth come from over 68 nations, as well as a great number of clergy of all walks of the religious Catholic world, and the diocesan lines are  included by the hundreds.
Medjugorje has been a place of pilgrimage for over 80 years, and many events have been taking place here, and in the immediate neighboring cities and villages. Some events during the communist regimes of the Soviet Union were bloody and produced a great number of martyrs, especially from among the Franciscans, many of whom were burnt alive after refusing to deny their faith in Jesus and the Catholic Church. Many other events also took place in the last war, an ethnic war where Catholic and muslims alike were violently persecuted by the Serbs of Russian Orthodox backgrounds, who had serious ties with the British masons. The Serbs'  intentions were to annihilate them all.
Another event, a great and powerful one, is the apparitions of our Lady Queen of Peace to six Medjugorje youngsters, whom for 27 years have been experiencing a mystical relationship with the mother of Jesus: Mary most Holy.
 
The great and unfortunate crisis we as Catholics have today in many countries, is the lack of interest of some of the local Churches, where the faith has turned into a bureaucracy, and when the youth return filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit to their parishes from these types of events, wanting to ignite the fire all over the rest of the congregation, they are stopped and disheartened by their spiritual authorities. We have to pray so that the whole church renews itself from within the clergy and into the whole body of it, everyone included. We need to radically change our ways of being Catholic. It is devastating to see how many souls we lose to so many fables, magical and esoteric formulas, and the thousands of plastic Christianities mainly manufactured in north America. 
Let us support the youth, they are the future of the Church!