Holy Spirit parishioners ‘experience’ three pilgrimages during jubilee year

Father Michael O’Mara, pastor of Holy Spirit Parish in Indianapolis, celebrates Mass on June 24 in a chapel in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome for participants in a pilgrimage to Italy and Poland sponsored by the Indianapolis East Deanery faith community. Holy Spirit sponsored three pilgrimages during the Church’s Jubilee Year of Hope. (Submitted photo)

By Sean Gallagher

The Church’s current Jubilee Year of Hope is scheduled to come to an end on Jan. 6 when the feast of the Epiphany will be celebrated in Rome.

Although it’s ending and another ordinary jubilee year won’t take place until 2050, many members of Holy Spirit Parish in Indianapolis hope to continue to experience the effects of this jubilee year and share it with others for years to come.

The Indianapolis East Deanery faith community sponsored three pilgrimages during the course of the jubilee year. More than 30 people traveled to Spain, France and Italy on Feb. 3-17. A group of 17 people, made up largely of young adult Catholics, visited Italy and Poland from June 22-July 5.

And a group of more than 60 people visited on Sept. 6 the Shrine of St. Theodora Guérin, Indiana’s first saint, on the campus of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in St. Mary-of-the-Woods.

Father Michael O’Mara, Holy Spirit’s pastor, accompanied all three groups. For him, taking part in the pilgrimages put him in close touch with “the real mission of our Church, which is to proclaim Christ, to complete his mission here on Earth.”

“As a priest, I experienced great joy in sharing this with whatever age group we were walking with,” Father O’Mara said. “It was just such a joy.”

‘I’ve never felt that much calm and peace’

Barb Williams took part in all three of the pilgrimages sponsored by Holy Spirit. As she prepared for the first one in February, she just “looked on it as a vacation” and was excited “to get to visit all of these places” like St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican and all of its grandeur.

But she soon learned that she had signed up for a pilgrimage, not a vacation. Grand historic sites didn’t move her heart. It was places marked more by peace.

“When we got to Lourdes, it was just calm, just peaceful,” Williams said. “I’ve never felt that much calm and peace.

“If you go over and treat it as a vacation, you come back and you just show pictures. But if you come back as a pilgrim, [you’re changed].”

In Assisi, Williams was given a simple wooden cross that she continues to wear in her day-to-day life back in Indianapolis.

“I would never have worn this before,” she remarked. “Since I’ve been back and worn it and people have commented on it, I tell them about it. Before, I would not have done that. So, I did bring back more faith than I went with, definitely.”

When the February pilgrimage group made its way to Rome, they prepared to visit the city’s four major basilicas and walk through each’s jubilee doors, a spiritual practice during jubilee years that gives a plenary indulgence to those who do it.

One of the conditions to receive the indulgence is to take part in the sacrament of reconciliation.

“We had reconciliation in the back of the bus,” Williams recalled. “All the people in the back of the bus had to go to the front. And Father Michael sat in the very back and we took turns going to reconciliation. It was great.”

While in Rome, the group visited the “Scala Santa,” a set of stairs across the street from the Basilica of St. John Lateran which are believed to have been the stairs Christ climbed on his way to meet Pontius Pilate on the day of his crucifixion.

Those who visit the site have traditionally for centuries prayerfully climbed the stairs on their knees, something that Father O’Mara and other pilgrims from Holy Spirit did.

“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s painful by the time you get to the top. But, as Pope Benedict XVI said, ‘We are not made for comfort. We are made for greatness.’ ”

‘Listen with your heart’

All of the parish’s pilgrimages were also multicultural experiences with some pilgrims being Hispanic and having Spanish as their first language and others having English as their first language.

Holy Spirit parishioner Kathy Lamb Kozenski took part in the February pilgrimage. She said it required “intentionality” for all the pilgrims to be open to the experiences they were all sharing together.

“You had to actually listen more intentionally, because there were several people who weren’t comfortably fluent in English,” Lamb Kozenski said. “That was a big factor. Other people weren’t fluent or comfortably fluent in Spanish. But we all were kind and looked out for each other. We were respectful.

“You had to pause to listen. You listen with your heart more by watching the person, looking at their facial reactions and body language.”

Jared Aguado-Bermudez, 19, was a part of the pilgrimage in June and July. Raised in a Hispanic family that primarily spoke Spanish, he said he’s more comfortable praying in that language.

But like Lamb Kozenski, he felt comfortable traveling on his pilgrimage with people from other cultures who prayed in other languages.

“You don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but because you know your prayers, you know what they’re feeling,” said Aguado-Bermudez, a Holy Spirit parishioner. “When you hear the Our Father or the Hail Mary in Italian, you don’t know what exactly each word means, but you can follow along.”

Visiting Wadowice, the Polish hometown of St. John Paul II, was special for the young adult who was born the year after the Polish pontiff died.

“My parents talked about him when I was growing up,” Aguado-Bermudez said. “A few days after he died, my mom found out that she was pregnant with me. So, when I was in the second grade in Sunday school, I had to dress up as a saint. I was dressed up as Pope John Paul II. At the time, I wasn’t sure who he was.”

Visiting where the pope grew up helped the young adult value him more.

“When I got to his house, I read about what he had done and how he had spread the faith around the world,” Aguado-Bermudez said. “He helped bring people together.”

‘Intentionally walking toward God’

Many people from Holy Spirit and some beyond the parish were brought together in the three pilgrimages the parish sponsored during the jubilee year.

Holy Spirit parishioner Monica Kohlman was born in Bali in Indonesia, a place with a very different culture from the United States and the countries of Latin America where other of her fellow parishioners come from.

That ultimately doesn’t matter for Kohlman.

“We come from different backgrounds and different languages, yet we are one,” she said.

Kohlman experiences that unity not simply with the diverse people in her parish community. It also extends to people who lived before her.

That was at the forefront of her heart and mind when she took part in Holy Spirit’s Sept. 6 pilgrimage to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, where the Sisters of Providence were founded in 1842 when Mother Theodore Guérin and five other religious sisters arrived there from France.

“When I was on those grounds, my body walking there represented my soul,” Kohlman said. “I was intentionally walking toward God. When you are there, you can feel the many generations of women there who did that. They had perseverance and strength. It just puts humility into your life. What am I doing complaining?”

While Father O’Mara was glad to accompany two pilgrimage groups to Europe, he said there was an important meaning in the parish sponsoring a journey within the archdiocese.

“Even in Indiana, we’ve had extraordinary people walk the Earth here, and there are more coming,” he said.

Kohlman said she hopes her participation in the pilgrimage to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods will help her grow in holiness in a new way.

“Holiness is actually a day-to-day life,” she said. “We don’t have to do extraordinary things in daily life. It’s also a communal thing. It’s just not me personally, but how I react toward and treat others.”

Those who took part in Holy Spirit’s pilgrimages hope to share the fruits they received with other members of the faith community. After each pilgrimage, there were events where pilgrims were able to share their experiences with the broader parish community.

“We got together and we all told our stories,” Father O’Mara said. “Everybody took one of the sites that we visited and shared their experience of that site.”

Father O’Mara compared the pilgrimages to “a retreat experience.”

“Twenty or 30 people go on a retreat,” he said. “But what they do with it and the stories they tell afterward is how retreats continue to have an impact, not just on individuals, but on other people.

“I think all of us who were on the pilgrimages have told countless stories. I hear people say over and over again, ‘I want to do that. I want to have an experience like that.’ ” †