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Article_Pilgrims in D.C.

Feature News | Thursday, January 22, 2015

Pilgrims in D.C.

Miamians' long day includes snow, long walks and adoration

WASHINGTON, D.C. | It took two hours and one plane to get from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore-Washington airport.

It took three hours, two subways, a public bus and a very long walk in the dark to get from our Washington hotel to the Patriot Center on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia.

“We walked seven miles today,” said Daenne Dolce of Notre Dame d’Haiti Church in Miami — and it was only 5 p.m.

And so the idea of pilgrimage became the reality of pilgrimage for a group of about 30 young adults from the Archdiocese of Miami.

Representing Notre Dame, Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Divine Providence, Our Lady of Lourdes and Encuentros Juveniles, they make up the first pilgrimage to be organized by the archdiocese’s newly reopened Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry.

“We’re expanding our family today,” said Rosemarie Banich, the office’s director, as she led the group in an icebreaker while they rode a yellow school bus from the airport to their Capitol Hill hotel.

The day had officially started at 5 a.m., when the group met at Fort Lauderdale airport. It officially ended at 10:30 p.m., after some final instructions from Banich about the next day’s schedule.

True, the snow came right on cue: Within minutes of arriving at our Capitol Hill hotel, as the group stepped outside to walk to midday Mass. The flakes were falling faster by the time Mass ended a half hour later, so much so that some in the group who had never seen snow declared themselves “over it” a couple of hours later.

But the young adults did not come to the nation’s capital to see snow, or even the sights (although they will have time to do that as well). They came, as one speaker put it at the “Life is Very Good” evening of prayer, “to be God’s voice to this generation.”

The event at the Patriot Center, put on every year by the Diocese of Arlington, was headlined by the music of Catholic recording artist Matt Maher and the motivational speaking of Catholic evangelist Chris Stefanick (www.RealLifeCatholic.com).

The evening of prayer is one of several mass rallies staged to coincide with the March for Life, which brings hundreds of thousands of young people from throughout the country to our nation’s capital every Jan. 22: the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. They can be seen everywhere along the National Mall, walking in groups with matching backpacks or scarfs (the Miami young adults have both).

The idea is that a pilgrimage for a cause — the right to life of the unborn — will help young people realize that faith is more than Mass on Sunday; that they are not alone in that faith; and that faith requires them to live up to, and speak out for, certain principles.

But as they sat in the nosebleed seats of the Patriot Center, listening to Rend Collective (a Catholic rock group from Northern Ireland), the Miami young adults sat bemused, as below them thousands of their peers — actually, the majority seemed to be high schoolers — jumped and clapped and swayed and sang and raised their hands in praise.

Perhaps it was the long day, the missed dinner, the layers of clothing to ward off the cold, but the Miami group was not participating. They were simply sitting. Watching. Feeling foreign to it all? As if a rock concert — even a Catholic one — is not the way young people express their faith in South Florida.

But then came adoration, and as the lights were dimmed and the music slowed and the host was raised, the Miamians knelt along with everyone else. The Eucharist made them one with all the others.

All the while, Father Manny Alvarez, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Hialeah and the group’s chaplain, had been hearing confessions. After giving his young penitents absolution, he would ask them where they were from and how they had gotten to D.C.

He put the day — and the pilgrimage — in perspective on the way back to the hotel, as he shared what he had heard.

“Some drove all through the night, 24, 27 hours,” he said, from as far away as North Dakota and Oklahoma. “It’s just amazing to hear some of the stories of how they got here. And we flew up. I feel pampered.”

On tap for today: Visits to the offices of House Speaker John Boehner and Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart as well as Sen. Marco Rubio. Then the March for Life at 1 p.m. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, you can catch live updates on Instagram (CatholicMiami) Twitter (@CatholicMiami)and Facebook (Archdiocese of Miami).

FYI
The young adults are not the only archdiocesan representatives here: Joan Crown of the Respect Life Office is leading a group of 120 high school students and their chaperones — students representing all but one of the archdiocese’s 13 Catholic high schools. A group of 12 seminarians and a priest from St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami also are coming, as are college students from the University of Miami and other campuses in Florida.

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