Below is the beginning of the transcription of our adventures in Europe; they are about three weeks removed now, but I entertain the vain hope that some of you might find them interesting. 

Memoirs of WYD ’05

Wed., Aug. 10

We awoke at a fairly decent hour for Mass in the college chapel with Fr. Brennan, celebrating, appropriately enough, the feast of St. Lawrence. After a quick breakfast, we got our stuff and assembled in the lobby, where Msgr. Wojcicki blessed us before we boarded the buses. Fr. Butler having gone ahead with the younger group, we were led by Fr. Gerald Blessing, as well as by Deacon Dunlap. Met all the OYM people at the airport, then waited in a long line to check in. I grabbed my last meal in the U.S. at the Burger King in the terminal, just as I had when going to Oxford four years ago.

Our first plane, headed to Dulles, was a small jet, three seats across, which was almost entirely seminarians. We arrived in Dulles somewhat late, due to a delay in taking off, and hence we found ourselves needing to hurry to catch our flight to Frankfurt. We took a shuttle to the other terminal, then hoofed it at great speed to our gate, where we soon boarded our 747. There were numerous delays in getting away, so that we took off about an hour late. Finally we were airborne, myself sitting on the right side of the plane between Greg Hitschler and a young Coptic man from Florida who was traveling to school in Egypt for a year. The dinner fare was not bad, all things considered, although the films consisted of Fever Pitch (amusing in some ways, but devoid of moral consciousness in its story-line, like most romantic comedies) and Beauty Shop (which I didn’t bother watching). Eventually I fell asleep, in what was to be a very short night.

Thurs., Aug. 11

I awoke this morning having slept a few uncomfortable hours with my head down on my tray-table. The sky was already filled with the dawning light, and I thus had the pleasant illusion of having had a night’s sleep, though it had really only been a few hours; it was only about midnight in St. Louis as we landed in Frankfurt. We went through all the usual procedures, and I had the pleasure of having my passport stamped for the first time in four years. We were greeted and assisted by several German WYD (or WJT) volunteers, who showed us the way to the other terminal, where we would meet our buses. We discovered rather quickly that the German weather was pleasantly much cooler than in St. Louis, to the point of having to put my sweater on. Eventually all of us were gathered, and we boarded our buses and set off a little to the west of Frankfurt to Rudesheim, a pleasant town on the Rhine in a heavy wine-growing area.

In Rudesheim, we met the members of the seminary group who had arrived on the earlier flight and had already spent several hours there. All of us gathered in the parish church of St. Jakobus, where we had Mass. The Church was a very old structure, home to a representation of Christ’s agony which had apparently been popular in the Middle Ages, when Rudesheim was a common meeting point for pilgrims on the way to places like Santiago de Compostela. Its interior, however, was quite bare and characteristic of abstract 1950’s Catholic art and stained glass--owing to the fact that much of Rudesheim was destroyed by Allied bombings in 1944. The kindly parish priest told us a brief history of the Church, and when he referred to the war, he told us that despite attempts by some American tourists to apologize for the bombings, he would hear none of it, but was quite grateful to the Americans for doing what needed to be done to save Germany itself in those terrible times.

After Mass, which sticks in my mind mainly because Deacon Aaron Nord and I had a bit of a job afterwards to clean up some of the Precious Blood which had spilled on the stone floor, we met up at the dock, where we boarded a boat for a Rhine river cruise. The boat was quite crowded, with just about every inch of the deck occupied with chairs, many of them filled with seminarians catching up on sleep. Somewhat tired though I was, I was determined to stay awake and get myself onto the local time. In any case, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the idyllic-looking castles that rose up on either side at every bend in the river, and was happy to assuage my hunger with a bockwurst (as with most German sausages, served on a piece of bread that was only about a third of its length) and to toast my fellow seminarians with a first German beer. The whole thing was rather deja vu, in that I had spent the first day of my Austrian travels five years ago on a similar cruise through wine-growing territory, but that time on Europe’s other great river, the Danube. I was glad to find the Rhine equally enchanting.

We disembarked at St. Goarshausen, where we met out buses, which had come up from Rudesheim in the meantime. We then set out on the final stage of this first day’s journey, heading for Holland. We continued parallel to the Rhine for a great while, and Aaron Nord and I amused ourselves discussing the possible historic uses of the various castles we saw, and the ethical implications of the tolls (i.e., "protection money") collected by medieval barons which had been their primary purpose. The bus ride seemed interminable to some, and we may have got lost at least once. We stopped once and set out in search of somewhere to find dinner, only to be surprised to find the remains of the famous Remagen bridge, which the Americans had captured intact in 1944, and used for ten days until the Germans finally bombed it to pieces. Eventually, after several more hours of driving, we found ourselves across the border into "Niederland"and before long we were in Sittard, where our host families met us. John Mayo and myself were welcomed by a young couple who spoke very good English; they had come to help drive our luggage, but we were in fact staying with the lady’s mother, Leah Lemans, a widow lady who lives on a potato farm. Mevrouw (Mrs.) Lemans understood well enough what we said to her in English, but said little to us herself; however, she said volumes with her hospitality from the outset. After a late dinner which she offered us, John and I were glad to retire, after a seemingly endless day.

Friday, August 12

I was supposed to have woken up when John Mayo knocked on my door at about 7:30, but I seemed to sleep right through that and had to be awoken about an hour later. We caught a hurried breakfast together with Mrs. Lemans’ two older sons, who lived nearby and were getting ready for another day of harvesting potatoes. We were then driven by our hostess into Sittard, to a location near the Precious Blood convent there which would be our meeting point for many events. After a morning session of catechesis mixed with group discussions and praise & worship, we set out after lunch on walking tours of old downtown Sittard. It is a city in the province of Limbourg, the far southeast corner of Holland, which seems from what I can tell to be an historically Catholic region. On our brief tour we saw several very remarkable churches all within a few blocks. First was St. Michael’s, a Baroque church built by the Dominicans who came to combat Protestant influences after the Reformation. A little ways down was the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a colorful neo-Gothic church built in the late 1800’s near an Ursuline convent, in thanksgiving to Mary for saving the life of a girl in the convent school who had swallowed a needle (I found it hard to believe I was reading the Latin inscription correctly on that, but it was later confirmed by the guide). Finally, there was the old medieval church of St. Peter’s, a late Gothic building filled with both Gothic and Baroque furnishings. It was somehow a surprise for me to find that there were parts of the Netherlands, which I’d always imagined as Protestant, that had such an historically Catholic character. At the same time, it was puzzling to realize that, despite the great historic monuments which the Church possessed there, so few of the people of today come to worship there. Some Americans whom I talked to suggested that European secularism is in part a reaction to religious wars and other ills that arose from the many centuries of Church-state cooperation. But I don’t think that can be the whole of it; the most radical secularization in Holland took hold in the mid to late twentieth century, long after the age of the Wars of Religion. Part of me wonders whether, even in the most Christian of centuries, the majority of Christians weren’t simply following the prevailing cultural norms, with no more deeply held faith than the average modern person. Did medieval Christendom result in many people living their lives with only a veneer of Christianity, and no deep-seated reality? And yet I can’t bring myself to think that the all-persavive nature of Christianity in medieval society didn’t really at least ensure that when it counted, most everyone was thinking of Christ and of what really mattered. A final note on the churches of Sittard: I found a remarkable number of statues of the South American St. Rose of Lima, because she is, oddly enough, a patroness of the city. This is due to her intercession which was sought, at the suggestion of the Dominicans, in a 17th century plague.

After our tours concluded, we headed off across town to the fairly modern parish church of St. Paul, where we met a group of Dutch Life Teen youth, and had Mass with Bishop Everard de Jong, the auxiliary bishop of Roermond. The bishop made some jokes about Americans which many in our group apparently took the wrong way, but he struck me as a very zealous and talented young bishop intent on preaching the truth of the Gospel without compromise to a society that would rather not hear it. I was struck by various details of the liturgy that reflected very traditional practices, from the veil which covered the ciborium in the tabernacle to the bishop saying "Procedamus in pace"; such things challenged my general perception of the Dutch church as being ultra-liberal, something I would continue to see in the upcoming days. After Mass, we had some social time, then returned to the church for a presentation on how Life Teen had been begun in Holland, thanks in large part to a Carmelite sister and other people from St. Louis.

(to be continued...)