“We have been waiting for you for five years. We missed you, we are happy that you are here today”. Stanislaw Dziwisz, Cardinal Emeritus of Krakow and secretary of Pope John Paul II for the entire duration of his papacy, thus welcomed the almost seven hundred young people of CL who arrived in the Polish town to begin a week of pilgrimage on foot to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. But why such an unexpected welcome? He explained the first reason: during his stay in Rome the Cardinal had the opportunity to get to know and had come to esteem the experience of Communion and Liberation through the affection that John Paul II had for Fr. Luigi Giussani. But there is more. He continued: “I welcome you as friends, and it is not an empty word. We treat each other as friends, because we are friends.” The Archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski, joined in his welcome the following day: “We are walking together towards a goal. We are friends. We have called each other brother and sister, without distinction, because we are the Church and we belong to one Father.” Then there was a third reason why the Cardinal was so unexpectedly waiting for us. “We pray and give thanks for the gift that you are also for the Church of Krakow.” This last reason seemed incomprehensible to me at first. In what way should I be a gift for the Polish Church?



When we started walking I understood with amazement what he meant. Throughout the pilgrimage children, elderly people, workers would come out of their houses to greet us or just look at us with amazed eyes, as if a very personal gift had arrived at their door. When a nurse brought all the elderly people in wheelchairs out of a small nursing home so they could see us, I must say that I saw a foretaste of Heaven in their eyes. I felt great, great because I was somehow capable of giving that smile. Great, great, for belonging to a friendship that makes me a gift to the world. Before leaving Krakow, Fr. Francesco Ferrari, who led the pilgrimage, spoke to us of the purpose of the days we would spend together: “Our life’s goal is a great goal. ‘The Almighty has done great things in me.’ Our life’s goal is holiness. The saint is the happy, fulfilled person.”

Now that we are returning, I ask myself: what has made me and the people around me truly happy these days? First of all, I have seen people fulfilled in the joyful gestures of charity they performed. One morning, leaving my tent at five thirty, I saw a girl in the distance who was bending down to collect the rubbish from the night before, without complaining to those who had left it lying around. I thought that she must be happy, truly happy. One evening, a girl with a degree in medicine was helping out to treat those in need. She found that a group of young people had made her dinner. They had noticed that she always ate late because she had to start cooking after helping out in the infirmary.

Charity was also evident in those who contributed to the pilgrimage by carrying out very tiring tasks with generosity. Giovanni from the Bovisa CLU comments: “I served the pilgrimage by helping my friends load and unload backpacks from trucks. I know most of them well, in their merits and limitations. In these days they have been overcome by something else: working at dawn with joy, sacrificing themselves without gain, obeying to the instructions of those in charge. These facts contrasted with the nature of the people in front of me. Something happened that changed their hearts. In the face of this conversion, a prayer arose in me, asking to be open to give my life. In these days I have seen that those who have been open are already experiencing the hundredfold, joy, peace.”



The moment when the mystery of charity and joy were revealed in their greatest clarity was during the most difficult moment of the pilgrimage. Towards the end of the third stage, a storm broke out. It was so strong that it made it impossible to set up the tents once we had all arrived at the base camp, soaked from head to toe. No one yet knew what we could do to spend the night dry. A friend from GS said to me: "We sought shelter under the trees when I heard an Alpine song rising from the woods. I approached. I was impressed by what I saw: some young people were singing songs in such a serious, simple and joyful way that it was impossible for me to detach myself. If at that moment there had been the possibility of going to a warm place where I could finally change and dry myself, I would not have gone. And I am absolutely sure of this. Because what moved those young people to sing in the downpour, or to take the girls indoors, or to recite vespers in the rain is worth much more to me than comfort and solving problems.”

How often, instead, do I think that it is more important to solve problems once they arise, or that the task of life is to always do everything as close to perfection as possible in order to reduce the possibility of problems arising. And yet, I have seen faces full of peace and capable of forgiving limits, problems, in the certainty of a persuasive embrace. The Polish families then welcomed almost three hundred people, mostly girls, even making long journeys to come and pick them up. A church united even in the most concrete needs. Emma from GS Brianza says: “At a certain point I realized I did not have a sleeping bag, that all my clothes were soaked and that I needed help, so I humbly asked the people from the Polytechnic University and they promptly told me that there was a girl and a family who were coming from Krakow especially to get us.”



It is a way of being together that already carries within itself the goal, that realization we were talking about. Yet it does not stop us, it makes us continue to desire, to walk, because that goal is a relationship with Someone who never stops calling us to Himself. The certainty of being on a good path, and the adequacy of the present with regard to the ultimate questions of life were testified to us during the assembly by Martina from the Architecture CLU: “I was in a tent with a friend who returned home on the fourth day of walking, after receiving news of her father’s death. The morning her mother called her, I hugged her and then we started getting ready, closing our tent. We did the same things we did every day without experiencing the scandal that we were doing something that had nothing to do with his death. I wanted nothing more than to do what we were doing, and I also saw in her how doing those things was appropriate. I had the clear perception that her pain, the news she had received, was all in our being together in those days, in the things we had to do, in the prayers, in the songs. She even wanted to stay until we arrived at the Sanctuary, but then she decided that it was better to go back.”



Pilar from the CLU in Argentina also testified to the discovery of a Paradise that already begins here and that motivates the desire to continue walking: “We were walking. We were in the middle of a forest, in silence. At that moment I said to myself: this is life. Walking accompanied towards Him who always awaits me. A journey in which the taste of Paradise is already there because it begins here." Accompanying us on the journey and waiting for us was a clear face: "During the journey, my gaze began to fix on the banner depicting Our Lady of Czestochowa, always raised in front of us pilgrims, almost as a tenacious reminder of our destination. Thus the desire that was in me at the start – that my life not be mediocre or anonymous but great and unique – became a question to Her: ‘Mary, may my life not be one centimeter smaller than yours’.”

When we arrived in Czestochowa, seven hundred of us knelt in silence in front of the Sanctuary. Then we sang Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. There I understood with my heart, with my eyes, and with my body what the greatness of Mary is, her holiness: her yes. Not the abolition of fear or limits, but the recognition of a love so great in one's life that one always courageously said yes to Him, to live for His glory, even without understanding. The friendship between us in these days has been a support in pronouncing our yes. First of all because this companionship makes us a continuous proposal that is clear, orderly, oriented towards the ideal. Stefano, a GS student from Brianza, says: “It is impressive to think of the numbers of occasions and proposals that were made to us by Fra, and I was even more struck by how these moments were lived. In every moment in which fatigue and tiredness could have prevailed, there was instead a spontaneous participation in the proposals.”



During the journey, we were offered moments of silence, in which it was possible for me to regain awareness of myself, to put myself in front of my humanity, to the point of asking for help, opening myself to the relationship with the great interlocutor of the love story that is my life. There were also moments of prayer, in which the relationship with this interlocutor was lived in unity with the Church, which chooses the most appropriate words for me to do so. And there were moments among us of simple support in our fatigue. The songs accompanied us every day because, as Marta who served the journey with her voice told me, “song has the ability to reveal the unity of life and the unity between us, to express every nuance of existence in beauty and non-loneliness, from prayer, to celebration, to the cry of pain, to thanksgiving.”

Read also - Czestochowa: The burst of freedom

On the last night I had dinner with some girls from GS. Sofia shared with her friends her fear that the beauty she saw in high school, which she defined as an ‘everything’ encountered here on earth, would end once high school was over, once she lost sight of certain faces, the medium of that “everything”. A friend of hers, Carlotta, replied: “I was also afraid of leaving high school, but in these days I realized that what I saw there does not end, it is present not only in the faces of my friends but in everyone around me, it is a Presence among us.” When I arrived in front of the Black Madonna I thought, deep down, the same thing: among us there is an objective Presence, which has chosen to be among us. It was not generated by us and does not even depend on our enthusiasm in recognizing it, but it depends – sweetness of sweetnesses – on the “Yes” of each of us. The Presence of God among us derives from the “Yes” of Mary two thousand years ago. I need God but God, loving me, asks for me, needs me, wants my "Yes". I asked Mary to support my "Yes" throughout my life, with her same simplicity.