Flight status...

After leaving Rue de Bac, I went back to the airport to see if i could confirm my ticket back to the US. They confirmed me (if you are reading this Fr. Marino now is a good time to look away...) on a flight for Monday the 26th. YUP! You read correctly - 1 week from now!!! The airport is still closed. They say tomorrow. They have been saying tomorrow every day! Leaving a week from now is the only way not to have to dish out any more money. And, praying to God that the airport opens and that it does not close again.

Plan #2 - I'm trying to get a flight out of Madrid for this week using my miles. Right now everything is booked out of Madrid... and to make things worse all the trains are on strike! So, getting to Madrid will be a challenge. I'll have to go on a public bus...maybe 3 days on a bus???

Please pray!

I'll post again soon!

We arrived in Paris

Warsaw to Paris- After 2 days of being on a bus we charted, we arrived in Paris late last night. Below are some pics of bathroom stops - plus allow the kids to stretch and play.

Shrine of Our Lady of Banneux

We drove through Belgium to get to France and stopped in Banneux at the Shrine of Our Lady of Banneux. I had the privilege of celebrating mass in the chapel next to the apparitions.

In the winter of 1933, a young girl named Mariette reported that the Virgin Mary appeared to her on eight separate occasions. Mariette was 11 years old and came from a poor, lapsed-Catholic family. The Virgin spoke only briefly during her apparitions, but encouraged the girl to pray and led her to a spring with healing powers.

After the apparitions, many healing miracles associated with the spring at Banneux were reported. The site of the apparitions at Banneux was officially approved by the Catholic Church in 1949.

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

Woke up early this morning and went to the Chapel of

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.

The story begins on the night of July 18-19, 1830. A child (perhaps her guardian angel) awakened Sister (now Saint) Catherine Labouré, a novice in the community of the Daughters of Charity in Paris, and summoned her to the chapel. There she met with the Virgin Mary and spoke with her for several hours. During the conversation Mary said to her, “My child, I am going to give you a mission.”

The Blessed Mother spoke to Catherine: “Have a medal struck upon this model. Those who wear it will receive great graces, especially if they wear it around the neck.” Catherine explained the entire series of apparitions to her confessor, and she worked through him to carry out Mary’s instructions. She did not reveal that she received the Medal until soon before her death 47 years later.

Flight cancelled!!

Flights in and out of Europe are cancelled!

We arranged for a bus company to drive all of us to Paris. It will take us 2 days to get to Paris!

Once in Paris we still have no clue when we will be able to get back home!

Pray for our safe return home!

So... that means that i will be offline for two days! I'll post again from Paris on Sunday night.

I count on your prayers!

Love,

FrV

Our Lady of Czestochowa

On our trip back to Warsaw we stopped at the Basilica of Our Lady of Czestochowa. What impressed me the most was to see all the young people there at the shrine.

The legend says that after Jesus' crucifixion, when the Virgin Mary moved to St. John's home, she took with her some personal articles, among them a table made by our Redeemer in St. Joseph's workshop. The story continues and says that when the pious women of Jerusalem asked St. Luke to do a painting of the Mother of God, he used this table to paint the image. The image remained in Jerusalem for a time, until the Romans began to destroy the city. Divine providence guided the image to Constantinople, where it was carefully protected by the Christians there. By 802, the image appeared in White Russia. During a war in the middle of the fourteenth century, the image was struck by an enemy arrow. Prince Wladyslaw, in order to prevent the destruction of the image, decided to transport it to the land of his birth. While traveling through Poland, with the image in a horse drawn carriage, the horses refused to go any further when they reached the town of Czestachowa. The prince went up to the chapel on top of the hill Jasna Gora to pray, since he saw the horses' refusal to go on as a divine message. In a dream, Our Lady appeared to him, and told him she wanted the image to be venerated there in Czestochowa. This was in the year 1382. The prince ordered the building a a bigger and more elaborate Church, along with a monastery. Pilgrims began traveling from all over to venerate the image. She has been in Czestochowa since this time, and has become a national treasure of the Polish people, who venerate her as the Queen of Poland. The present Basilica in which the image resides was built in 1902.

Krakow

We spent the day in Krakow today. Among the many site

s we visited, we started the day with holy mass inside Wawel Cathedral. The 14th-century Wawel Cathedral, located inside Wawel Castle in Krakow, is the spiritual center of the Polish state. The burial place of nearly all Polish kings and national heroes, it was also the cathedral of Pope John Paul II before he left for the Vatican.

Father Karol Wojtyl, later to become Pope John Paul II, said his first Mass in the crypt of Wawel Cathedral on November 3, 1946. Seventeen years later, he took over the cathedral as Archbishop of Krakow. Fifteen years after that, he led the entire Roman Catholic world as Pope.

I know there must be a sister under all that rain gear??? Sr. Ana Pia acting silly... its been so rainy and cold!

I'll post more pics tomorrow morning when i wake up. Its been a long day and the internet is really slow tonight. Its taking a long time just to upload one picture. Sorry gang.

Stay strong...stay faithful. lets meet here tomorrow.

My 8th grade class

My dear 8th graders at St. Michael's Catholic School: I have been thinking about you guys all day. I look forward to sharing with you all that I saw and heard at Auschwitz.

A friendly reminder: Make sure you are reading...

Test on the Sunflower - next week - Wednesday the 21st.

Don't disappoint me. If you have a question or difficulty, please see Ms. Hernandez!

If you have not started reading...you have some catching up to do! Go through it slowly.

Be very attentive to detail.

See you soon. God Bless you!

Auschwitz

‘Arbeit macht frei’. ‘Work makes you free’.

This slogan written on top of the gates gave false hope to all who entered these gates. Our tour guide told us that once the Jews entered these gates they would ask about how to gain freedom and a guard was famous for saying that the only way they would see freedom would be through a chimney stack!!! How horrendous!

Today was a very sad and difficult day! The idea that human beings could do this much harm to innocent people is hard to comprehend!!! You can study it and read about it, but coming here and experiencing it firsthand is another reality all together!

It was a gloomy, cold, and rainy day.

Driving towards Auschwitz I could see the train line from the bus window. It was unreal to think it was that track, right beside me, that had taken all those those people to their death. They knew nothing of the hell they where about to suffer, the experimentation and starvation they would have to endure before their life ended.

The majority of the people on the train were Jews. They thought they where headed to a new and improved life.

many had packed all their treasured belongings because they thought they were being relocated. Over a million people never made it out alive.

Death was the only way to escape the atrocities of camp life.

Walking around Auschwitz had a surreal feel. It was untouched and seemed like a ghost town: you could almost imagine the prisoners walking beside you in their bare feet and rags for clothes.

It was so cold and unsheltered, to try and imagine what it was like for them was impossible. It is incredible to me that anyone could have suffered such an experience.

Block 11 in Auschwitz is one of the most disturbing and evil places on this earth. You can’t and don’t want to begin to think of the types of experimentation that went on in that building. It is unfathomable. The torture chambers and standing cells seem so far from humanity it is hard to believe any survived. That kind of willpower shows the strength and courage of these people, which should be commended forever and never forgotten.

Seeing rooms filled with the prisoners’ possessions was an extremely difficult thing to do: suitcases with names and addresses, shoes and glasses. The worst was seeing all the hair. It was from the prisoners who had died after being in the gas chambers and it had been shaven after death and kept to make carpets. The gas had stripped the hair of color leaving you to imagine what it must have done to the people themselves, the immense pain they must have felt before their death.

Auschwitz II

We also went to Birkenau. Birkenau was the extermination camp. Prisoners were taken there to be killed right away. These were the young, the sick, the disabled...all those who were not strong enough to work were eliminated quickly! Its a large vast area.

The way they housed the people and the living conditions are unimaginable. People from all walks of life were taken here and killed... lawyers, doctors, teachers, priest, nuns, housewives, children, all lead to their death.

How could this have happened... why does it continue to happen??? it happens when God is removed, where death is celebrated over life, where hate triumphs over love.

One thing we know for sure...the love of Jesus Christ conquers all!

PS> Ivette, I brought you with us today at the camp.

by request by SrPF...more pics

Mother giving a brief talk and instructions before going into the camp.

Here you see all of us going into one of the many buildings.

This pic above shows the prison cells. How crazy is that ...a prison within a prison!

Maximilian Kolbe

(above is a picture of St. Maximilian Kobe's torture cell- the candle was placed there by

Pope John Paul II)

He suffered many years of darkness... now he shines for eternity!

Maximilian Kolbe

17 February 1941 Maximilian Kobe was arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and on May 28 he was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670.

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts (the man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine). One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. He encouraged others that they would soon be with Mary in Heaven. Each time the guards checked on him he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. When the remaining men had died and Kolbe was the last remaining he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid straight into the heart. Some who were present at the injection say that he raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection. His remains were cremated on the Assumption of Mary(August, 15).

He was canonized by the Church as Saint Maximilian Kolbe on 10 October 1982 by Pope John Paul II, and declared a martyr of charity.

Wadowice

Today we visited Pope John Paul II's home town. The place where he was born and raised. We visited the house of the Wojtyla family, now a museum, and the church where he was baptized and grows up in the faith during his childhood.

This cabinet contains the cassocks he wore.

The first as a priest. The second as bishop, the third as cardinal and the last one as Pope. You can see the wear on these cassocks...very impressive.

In this picture above, little Juan Pablo is touching the baptismal font where Pope John Paul II was baptized.

A picture with some of the kids outside the church.

Many people have left candles and flowers outside many churches. They are still very affected by the recent events- the death of their president.

Mother gave a beautiful reflection in the street between JPII birthplace and the church he was baptized.

Her talk was on: Family home and school of Love and Responsibility...the heart of the civilization of Love.

Very powerful and insightful!

Wadowice 2

Some more pics from today...

Here you see Liz and Domingo sharing a prayer with the group.

while they wait for lunch... some of the kids show Fr. Israel how to build a toy.

Here you can see a memorial set up for the President and First Lady.

Day of Prayer

Above is a picture of the shrine. We were not able to see it yesterday because of all the people.

Today was a much better weather day. cold- no rain- sunny!

We went back to the shrine of the Divine Mercy today. Because there were so many people yesterday we were not able to see everything at the shrine. Its a truly beautiful and peaceful place. We were able to see and go through with detail St. Faustina's life. It was a very prayerful day.

They have a beautiful statue of St. Michael the Archangel.

I prayed for the parish and school family here.

It's a wood building on the convent grounds they use for talks and presentations... very nice and cozy!

All the walls are full of prayer intentions and rosaries.

Except the wall behind me...that's the stage.

Tomorrow we travel to the city of Wadowice where Karol Wojtyla was born and raised.

Tomorrow promises to be a great day...stay tuned!

and still more pics from DMS...

Mother gave a beautiful reflection on the mercy of God.

Sister AnaPia helping out with translation for the people who do not understand espanol.

Divine Mercy Sunday

Thousands and thousands of people came out to the Shrine of Divine Mercy. WOW! It was so impressive to see so many people. It was a sea of humanity! There were so many priest here hearing confessions as well. The priests from our group offered to hear confessions, but after an hour we left because there were so few English or Spanish penitents.

It was amazing to see the young pretty sisters in the order that St. Faustina was a member of. They still wear the exact same habit...they look so beautiful.

Right before 3:00pm we entered the chapel and prayed the chaplet of Divine Mercy.

Mother Adela, Fr. Joe and myself were given the honor to sit in the sanctuary up close to the image of the Divine Mercy...right above the remains (relics) of St. Faustina. great experience...the chapel was packed!