A Week in Łódź (this title works better if you pronounce it Woodge) (World Youth Day Part II)

One day I will get better at posting on here more regularly.  Today is not that day...
I've been slightly distracted by getting back into the swing of work, and then running off again to spend more time in a field with Jesus (Youth2000 retreat in Walsingham.  Another post will be coming on that later...)

So anyway... back to Poland.  We spent the first week in a lovely little city called Łódź, which has a fascinating history. St. Faustina grew up near Łódź and moved there when she was 16.  3 years later she saw a vision of a suffering Jesus, who instructed her to go to Warsaw to join a convent.  St Maximilian Kolbe was another nearby resident.  On the more secular side of history, Łódź had the largest and longest lasting Jewish ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe.

We were there to take part in Paradise in the City.  A festival organised by the Chemin Neuf community.  Whilst nothing compared to Krakow the following week, there were attendees from 79 countries, and over 5000 people.  For pilgrims who hadn't been to a world youth day before, it was a nice little opening to how hectic Krakow might be.

(photo from WYM facebook page)

The programme was pretty busy, ranging from talks and workshops to praise and worship concerts and adoration.  One thing I particularly enjoyed was how the length of adoration increased throughout the week, presumably as people became more accustomed to sitting in silence with the Lord. Talks were given by a wide variety of people ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to a Catholic sexologist. Although I didn't attend the former's talk, I've been assured it was excellent, whilst the latter gave a fascinating talk reminding us that the Church wants body, heart and soul to be in one accord, and that we need to remember to always see each other as people and not as things or labels or categories.

Despite the busyness there was still plenty of time for friendship and fun.  Some of the afternoons were for free time, with sports being available for those so inclined.  I am very definitely not a sports person, so instead with a couple of friends, we decided to head up to the ghetto, but on the two occasions we tried, we realised that we wouldn't have time to get up there and back in time for the next event!  So instead we did the obvious thing of going and finding a rather beautiful bar instead...

Given that it was a 20-30 minute walk away from where we were based, that still counts as exercise, right?

During this week we were blessed to have the opportunities such as have Mass in the cathedral in Łódź and a reconciliation service in front of the Blessed Sacrament in the beautiful Church of Our Lady of Victory:

(photo WYM)

Don't bother trying to find me in this group photo though, I managed to miss it whilst distracted elsewhere!

Continuing the theme of it being like a mini world youth day, the final event of the week was a huge Mass at a local sports arena.  What would a pilgrimage be without a short walk or two?  With this in mind, and as preparation for the much longer walk ahead of us in a week's time, we headed off for our hour long walk.

(photo WYM)

Having been to a few of these types of things, I'm fairly used to there being huge numbers of priests around now and then.  I was still taken by surprise at just how many priests were there saying Mass!

(photo WYM)

All those people standing  on the floor there?  Priests.  They go further back too, but I don't have a good photo to show just how far back.  We completely filled the huge arena though!

So that's a short summation of what we got up to in Łódź, coming up next, Częstochowa and Krakow!