When Chantelle Ogilvie was at World Youth Day in Cologne in 2000, she attended a forum where she heard a young South American woman crying as she explained: 'I can't believe there are so many people who care about what's happening in our village.'
It showed Chantelle another side of World Youth Day — the positive impact it has on those from the majority world.
Religious experience in the majority world seems more intense and Catholicism seems edgier in its action, the further we move away from privilege.
Examples abound. When the Government of Northern Uganda was negotiating a peace settlement with the Lords' Resistance Army some years ago, it was a Catholic agency that was trusted by both sides to facilitate.
Colombia has been in the headlines recently because of the dramatic rescue of Ingrid Betancourt. There, left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary and the army struggle for control. Currently, it is the Colombian Catholic bishops who are talking with these groups, in an attempt to broker a negotiated peace.
Margareta Brosnan, who now works for the Catholic Church's aid agency Caritas Australia, spent the last four years working in Paris with the International Young Catholic Students Association. During that time she travelled to 32 different countries in the majority world visiting places as diverse as Haiti, Uganda and Sri Lanka.
Faith, she explains, gives hope in some pretty desperate situations, for example to the Palestinian Christians.
'Young people in the majority world are more called to faithful institutions because of the sense of hope that these institutions are able to instil. They provide a sense of hope and community that young people otherwise wouldn't find,' she says, adding that it is not necessarily just Catholic faith communities that have the effect.
Sister Clemencia Kobi, OLSH, from Papua New Guinea, believes that for young people from her country World Youth Day will be an opportunity to move out of 'their own corner'.
She agrees that the experience of faith is more intense for her Papua New Guinean people than it is for those from the privileged world. 'Our faith is so rich in our place there,' she says.
Sr Kobi believes it is harder for young people in the affluent world to experience such rich faith, because they have so much access to technology and other distractions.
Chantelle echoes the idea: 'I often joke that in the West we don't need God because we've got air-conditioning.'
One of Chantelle's parents is Australian,