JASNA
GORA, Poland | On his first trip outside the U.S., Marcus Mickey got the honor
of a lifetime.
The
18-year-old graduate of Cardinal Gibbons High School in Fort Lauderdale
proclaimed two readings (the psalm and the epistle) inside one of the most visited shrines in the world:
Our Lady of Czestochowa.
He
stood beneath the icon of Poland’s beloved Black Madonna as a multitude of
people, standing shoulder to shoulder, looked on, and an endless stream of
devotees, many walking on their knees, snaked their way around him.
“My
knees were shaking,” Mickey told his excited friends a few minutes later.
“There were so many bishops and tall hats.”
Indeed,
less than a foot away from the ambo where he stood sat six American bishops — from
Camden, N.J., Buffalo and Syracuse, N.Y., Springfield, Mass., Bridgeport,
Conn., and Fargo, N.D. — not to mention four dozen priests and Archbishop
Thomas Wenski, who celebrated the Mass July 24.
Mickey
volunteers as lector, altar server and extraordinary minister of holy Communion
at St. Sebastian Church in Fort Lauderdale. He is one of two young adults from
the parish who traveled to World Youth Day with the Miami archdiocesan group. The
two joined the 27-member group from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort
Lauderdale.
They
and the other archdiocesan pilgrims spent the day touring the monastery of Jasna Gora, home to members of the Pauline community that was founded there in the 1300s. The crowds made movement sluggish: Polish
families on a Sunday outing as well as lines of young people from all
over the world already in Poland for World Youth Day.
But
Rosemarie Banich, the archdiocesan director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry, said
the crowds were just as big on a weekday in February, when she came to prep for
the pilgrimage.
In
his homily, Archbishop Wenski called Jasna Gora — translated as “mountain of light” — “the spiritual lung of Poland, where Poland draws its
breath.”
He
noted how for centuries — through invasions and occupations, Nazism and
Communism — “many people of simple faith came here to ask Mary to intercede for
them.”
“The
witness of the Polish people is an example of the power of that intercession,”
Archbishop Wenski said. “The prayer of the Polish people did not go unheard.”
As
for Mickey, he has a date pending with Michael McCormick, St. Thomas Aquinas
theology teacher and World Youth Day chaperone. It was McCormick who chose him
after Banich asked for a student to read at the Mass.
“You
owe me big time,” McCormick said, inviting himself to a steak dinner.
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
St. Sebastian parishioner and Cardinal Gibbons grad Marcus Mickey proclaims the second reading during the Mass as Archbishop Thomas Wenski listens.