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!

So what now...? (World Youth Day Part I)

If you've been paying attention, you'll have spotted that one of the newly ticked off items on my 30 before 30 was World Youth Day.

If you're looking at this blog, I guess it's likely that you know what World Youth Day is, but in case anyone's glancing this way without that knowledge, the basic gist is this.  World youth day is a huge gathering of Catholic young people (which for the Church is 18-35), which has been held every 2-3 years since 1987. You get people attending from all over the world. Part of the draw of the whole thing is that the Pope goes and leads the final Mass. Now when I say this is a huge gathering, I really do mean it! At the final vigil/Mass with Papa Frankie, an estimated 1.5-2 million people attended. To put that into some kind of context, Glastonbury tends to have around 150,000 - 200,000 people.

Yep, that's right.

I'll just let that number of people sink in for a minute.

Given how well the media reports on the event, particularly in the UK, you'd be forgiven for not realising what a big deal it is. Being at home during the previous one, held in Rio in 2013, I found it really interesting how the media would report on some of the things Papa Frankie was up to, without actually mentioning the reason for him being there, and from what I can see, the same thing happened with Kraków.  One fantastic example of this was this article, reporting on the tragic martyrdom of Fr Jaques Hamel where the quote from the Bishop of Rouen was taken while he was at "a Catholic gathering in Poland". To be fair to the BBC though, they did also publish some video diaries from a few of our pilgrims.

Being surrounded by that number of young people who all have the same passion for God that you do can be incredibly intoxicating. Right around now, all over the world, young pilgrims will be feeling the WYD come down. This is the key moment for them. For a large number of those 2 million people, this will be a life changing experience. Some will have found their vocations - whether to religious life, the priesthood, or marriage. Others will still be searching, but will have discovered what their next step should be. There will have been some there who have been struggling with their faith, for whom this will have been a call back into the embrace of the church. Some pilgrims will have been to confession for the first time in years, some will have found a new devotion to a particular Saint or saints, and for some this may have been their first experience of the universal nature of the Church.  There will be others for whom this will not feel like a massively life-changing event, but simply another step on their faith journey.

No one can attend a World Youth Day and return unchanged. The important thing now is to keep hold of that change.  It is so easy to love your God, your faith and your Church when you're in that high place. Now is the time to bring that love and joy back and share it with the rest of the world.

As Papa Frankie said in his final homily, what Jesus desires is for us, like Zaccheus, to "Come down, for I must stay at your house today" (Luke 19:5). (If you've not read his homily, go do it. It's challenging and comforting in equal parts, as all good homilies should be! It can be found here.

In today's world, we have a terrible tendency to be Sunday Catholics. We compartmentalise. We say "God, I'm all yours.

...On a Sunday... During Mass."

And  then ignore Him the rest of the time. This is always the danger when it comes to events like World Yourh Day, that's these all consuming, super intense events will be just another Sunday, and we'll go back to our everyday life just as before. Zaccheus was forever changed by his encounter with Jesus, and so too must we be.

I'll write another post soon with more content on what we actually got up to at world youth day, but for now, I'd like to recommend a temporary fix for the WYD comedown... Youth2000 do fantastic retreats, and the big one is coming up - in Walsingham over the bank holiday weekend.

More details can be found at Youth2000's website