Classes have been continuing strongly in Austria: mid-terms are this week, and so studies are getting much more intense. That doesn’t mean we don’t have amazing travel times too, though.
Two weeks ago, the school set up a bus ride to Prague (Praha), and I hopped on-board. My friends and I went on a bus tour throughout much of Prague, ending up at the castle. After seeing the castle, the residence of the president of the Czech Republic, we journeyed around the town, seeing St. Nicholas Church, a gorgeous baroque church, and the Church of Our Lady Victorious, where the Infant of Prague is located. We also ate at a café that entirely played Beatles music (I seem to have a habit of finding European restaurants that play music in English). After wandering throughout much more of Prague, we ended up eating at an Italian restaurant (not Czech, I know). Then we headed back to campus for a Sunday and another week of classes.
At the end of the week was the pilgrimage to Poland. Poland was amazing. Although I’d been there before, and I’d previously seen Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was still an amazing trip. On the long way there, we watched the 2005 miniseries Karol: A Man Who Became Popeto prepare us to see John Paul II’s home country. The bus ride ended at 5:45 in the morning in Częstochowa, where we sprinted up the icy hill of Jasna Góra to see the unveiling of the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa, complete with trumpet blasts. Jasna Góra is an absolutely beautiful shrine that, in addition to containing the icon, it has a set of the Stations of the Cross, by Polish artist Jerzy Duda-Gracz, that show Christ suffering alongside the modern Polish people. They are striking and powerful in their portrayal of His suffering. One example is in the Station of the Crucifixion, where all the Polish saints, including St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Hedwig (Jadwiga), and Venerable (soon to be Blessed) John Paul II, stand alongside Christ on the Cross. The next Station depicts Our Lady of Częstochowa holding Christ’s body, with His head taking the place of where the Infant is in the original icon. These Stations are just stunning: they probably rank as my favorite Stations of the Cross that I’ve ever seen. After viewing these Stations, some other students and I offered our petitions to Our Lady of Częstochowa, which involved moving around the entire shrine to reach the wall behind the icon. Did I mention that this is entirely done on one’s knees? It’s definitely a prayerful act, and penitential too. Following an English Mass and a little more free time (where yet another Mass was held: Masses are literally constant in Jasna Góra), we headed off to see Auschwitz and Birkenau (the second part of Auschwitz).
The following day involved a tour of Kraków, along with free time to explore all the many shops, cafés, churches, museums, and open-air shopping. My favorite part of Kraków on this visit was my favorite part from the last visit as well: the Wawel Cathedral. I sometimes jokingly refer to it as the “ADD Cathedral,” because there was a total of five or six different architectural styles used in the building of this cathedral as it was added on to throughout the centuries. From the outside, it very much looks like an odd conglomeration of different styles without any particular order. The inside of the cathedral is beautiful though, full of chapels to different Polish devotions, including Our Lady of Częstochowa and the Divine Mercy, tombs of royalty, tapestries, and relics, including the relics of the 11th-century saint Stanisław (Stanislaus) and the 14th-century saint Jadwiga (Hedwig). John Paul II loved this cathedral: he actually celebrated his first Mass as a priest there. Exploration of Kraków included eating at a café, seeing remnants of the medieval fortifications, and finding a bakery whose owners share the last name of one of my friends.
We left Kraków in the middle of the day to head to the Shrine of Divine Mercy, where the relics of St. Faustina Kowalska are located. The Shrine is very interestingly shaped: some people say it resembles a spaceship. The convent chapel, where St. Faustina’s relics are housed, was a much more traditional shape: it included the original Divine Mercy image. There we prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet in Polish, with some bits of English and French interspersed as well. We heard a talk on St. Faustina and Divine Mercy from a sister there, and we celebrated Mass in the Basilica. Shortly thereafter, we returned to Kraków. A group of us went out to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a nice restaurant, where the food included Borscht (beetroot soup) and fruit pierogies served with sweetened sour cream.
The final day in Poland began with a Latin Novus Ordo Mass at Wawel Cathedral in front of the relics of St. Stanisław (which I was a big fan of, since that might be my favorite cathedral I’ve ever been to). A group of us then went to Nowa Huta, a town on the outskirts of Kraków founded to be a communist utopia. They had a long struggle to eventually get a church in the town, including many lives lost defending a six-foot-tall wooden cross marking consecrated land. Another aspect of Nowa Huta is that the workers at the steel mill there made a giant cross at the mill after hours (illegally, of course), and they used it when Karol Wojtyła, then bishop of Kraków, would celebrate Christmas Eve Mass every year. Now there are two churches in Nowa Huta, one at the spot of the wooden cross, and one built on a cornerstone from St. Peter’s Basilica, blessed by Pope Paul VI, that Karol Wojtyła brought from Rome specifically to be a cornerstone. After seeing these two churches, we returned to Kraków for about an hour before heading to Wadowice, the hometown of John Paul II.
This small town was a great place to visit. We saw the baptismal font where Karol Wojtyła was baptized and the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help where he first heard the call to the priesthood. We also saw a museum featuring many photographs and artifacts from John Paul II’s early life. At a souvenir shop in town, my friends and I met a Polish woman who lived in Chicago for a few years…and coincidentally, she knew the bakery owned by the grandparents of one of my friends! Talk about coincidences!
After only a few hours in Wadowice, we headed off on our long journey back the Kartause, listening to many people recount amazing experiences from over the weekend. Overall, the weekend in Poland was an absolutely amazing weekend, one that I would consider the highlight of the Austria experience so far.
This past week has been all studying as we prepare for mid-terms next week and then the 10-day pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi after that. I’ll write another post when we return from that pilgrimage. Until next time, God bless! Auf wiedersehen!
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