By Reverend Christopher Kulig, O.Carm.

What is the point of pilgrimage?” I asked the German congregation of Sankt Franziskus in Neuendettelsau, the Sunday before World Youth Day. Drawing on Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:25- 30), I then addressed my fellow pilgrims, the two dozen young adults from Slovenia (weekend guests of the parish): “Just as Jesus went to the foreign land of Tyre and Sidon and was changed by the faith he found, if we go to Cologne with open eyes, open minds, and open hearts, we, too, like Jesus, will find something unexpected and be changed by it.”

Walking to Marienfeld

I had been in Germany a week, also the guest of a family of Sankt Franziskus, the Gebauers: Michael and Margit and their teenaged children, Miriam and Johannes. Margit had invited me to her parish for these “Community Days” shortly after we met at the funeral of her uncle Edmund last summer in Ohio. Edmund Söder, my best friend’s father and woodcarver by trade (one of his last pieces, a processional cross, remains at Saint Bernadette’s in Houston), succumbed to an aggressive cancer in May, 2004. He had told me of the beauty of his hometown of Sandberg, tucked in the Rhön valley of northern Bavaria; and although we had talked about my accompanying him to visit the extended Söder clan there, that trip never materialized. Rather, I saw Sandberg on pilgrimage, offering mass in German at their family church, Sankt Michael, in remembrance of Edmund just the week before. And even though the weather rained intermittently, as if Edmund were crying from heaven, Sandberg was as beautiful as his words and pictures made it out to be.

This week of “personal” pilgrimage, courtesy of the Gebauers, afforded me a first-hand experience of German family life, replete with hiking in the Alps, family bike tours through small villages, and evening strolls in town. Margit and Michael were the epitome of hospitality. Johannes and Miriam were the typical teen boy and girl, colored by the culture; for Johannes’s pre-occupation with sports focused mainly on the German soccer “Bundesliga,” and all of Miriam’s posterboys were European soccer stars!

After an outdoor mass on the morning of the Assumption, I made my way to Niederkassel (just south of Cologne), where I met up with my group: 114 pilgrims from Saint Mary’s LifeTeen in Dedham, the single largest group from the Archdiocese of Boston. That evening, the parish in town hosted us and a group from Italy with a meal and evening prayer, replete with a procession to the Marian shrine in town. The pastor was unavailable (I can only guess that German priests, like American ones, like to relax on Sunday nights!), and so I found myself elected to lead a multi-lingual service in German, Latin, Italian, and English. With me as the impromptu presider with the assistance of priests from Italy and Boston, we successfully celebrated a prayerful compline. This, perhaps, was my “unexpected find”—that after a week of speaking conversational German and celebrating two masses “auf Deutsch,” I was able to effectively lead a mostly-German, multi-lingual prayer service on a moment’s notice.

	The Cathedral in Cologne, Germany

The ensuing week was just a joyfilled celebration, in which our rather large group successfully navigated about Cologne, celebrating liturgies (adoration, morning office, daily mass), greeting Pope Benedict from the shores of the Rhine as he arrived on Thursday, wending our way up the tower of the Cologne cathedral as well as joining the hordes of pilgrims in honoring the relics of the three magi on the cathedral floor itself that Friday. Along the journey, I was able to talk with the youth of Saint Mary’s at length, conversations ranging from the mundane to the deeply theological and moral; although I had attended some of their functions in the parish over the past year, my studies at Boston College limited my ministerial contact with them. These conversations comprised a memorable part of the pilgrimage. The week ended with the huge mass at the Marienfeld that Sunday, in which the greatest miracle was that our large group, separated by the sheer volume of pilgrims departing en masse at the end, all returned to our gathering point in Cologne successfully and rather punctually. After a final night in Cologne, we went to Brussels for a day and a night and returned to the States from there.

So, what was the point of the pilgrimage? What did I “take home,” aside from visions of the natural beauty of Bavaria, a taste for German cuisine and beer, and a new interest in the Bundesliga soccer standings? Did I experience any change interiorly as I had preached the week earlier? On this last point, I must say “yes.” And in a word, “unity.”

In an excellent homily given at Sankt Andreas in Cologne to the whole Boston Archdiocesan contingent on Saturday, Archbishop O’Malley preached this memorable line: “Uniformity is easy; real unity is difficult.” Underneath all of the “uniformity” present in the various groups clad in matching hats and shirts, there was a desire to celebrate faith as one community in the Spirit that permeated the air as we all walked about Cologne.

The unity of my priestly ministerial journey seemed to unfold before me in a series of surprise meetings. From my first assignment in Houston, I met one of my old altar servers from Saint Bernadette, Donald, on the Marienfeld. I also ran into the whole entourage from neighboring Saint Paul’s (I had helped with their LifeTeen ministry while in Houston) in the Fußgängerzone (walking mall area) of downtown Cologne. From the world-wide Carmelite family, I fondly recalled the recent hospitality afforded me from my visits to our houses in Bamberg and Straubing when I was greeted in Cologne by Demott from the Irish Province and Neponek from the Upper German Province, both of whom spotted me in my habit by the cathedral.

Even deeper, though, was the feeling of unity I had felt my first week in Germany, most evident at the various kitchen tables of the siblings of the Söder family as I “broke bread” with them in my broken German. The unity of German family life was impressed upon me when Miriam simply celebrated her 16th birthday amongst her extended family in the town where she, too, had grown up; any American girl celebrating her “sweet sixteen” would normally want a party with a host of her friends, unburdened by as few “un-cool” relatives as possible, and most definitely would not want to spend any part of it driving to the airport to pick up a priest from a foreign country!

This was no return to Eden, however. I also saw how difficult unity can be to achieve and how easily it can get lost in a sinful world. There were minor conflicts in our small groups over where to go, what to do, and how to find edible “real American” food! Several times, I felt embarrassed by the boisterous singing by our group, wondering if other pilgrims might be put off by us “loud Americans”; and on one occasion I did my best to apologize to the wait staff at our hotel for one young man who was so loud and obnoxious that the waitress thought he was choking or having a seizure at the dinner table! And unity seemed almost oblivious to those frustrated pilgrims we saw pulling others off of the shuttle from the Marienfeld to make space for themselves after the closing Eucharist. After being formed into the mystical body of Christ sacramentally through the sharing of the one loaf, they had such selfish disregard for human dignity, as if Christ’s body had a cancer attacking itself.

With a day to reflect on all that had transpired, our group visited the cathedral in Brussels. It was there that I was moved to a new devotion to Saint Matthias, that one of the Twelve who replaced Judas. When in Houston, I noticed how much shortshrift the Twelve receive in church architecture, particularly the person of Matthias. Specifically, the church of Saint Therese of Lisieux by Memorial Park in Houston had twelve stainedglass windows depicting the “Twelve.” However, was Matthias represented? No, rather, it was the Eleven and Saint Paul. The cathedral in Brussels, however, showed me that this theological oddity goes back centuries—for there, in larger-than-life statues, were twelve of the apostles—also, the Eleven and Saint Paul. Saint Matthias, about whom we know very little save that he followed Jesus from the very beginning and witnessed the resurrected Christ, has seemed to fade into the obscurity from whence he came.

Father Christopher bumps into the youth of Saint Paul’s Church from Houston, Texas

So, on the plane ride back, I was struck by a desire to “try out” a new devotion to Saint Matthias; his absence in church architecture bespeaks of our loss of the symbol of the Eleven wanting to continue in that unity that Jesus brought to them in his ministry. As the plane landed in Boston, I could look out and see the blue sky dotted with clouds. The dark cloud of mourning the death of Edmund Söder under which I began this journey seemed to turn up a silver lining that was more silver and blue— for the clouds formed such an orderly checkered pattern against the blue sky of the summer evening that I thought I was seeing the Bavarian flag!! This flag, as Michael told me, symbolized the best weather for Bavarians—blue sky dotted with white clouds. And the skyline over Boston seemed to be “waving a flag” of reminiscence to let me know that I was bringing back more from Germany than I had taken with me. Allow me to simply close in prayer now as I did then:

Saint Matthias, pray for us, that we may be one, as our God is one, as you and the Eleven and the whole communion of saints are one. “Vielen Dank für den weißen und blauen Himmel, Edmund.” (Many thanks for the white and blue sky, Edmund.)

Oh, as to my initial musings— what is a pilgrimage all about—all I can conclude is this: the point of a pilgrimage is simply to take one.