Students, missionaries make Spring Break pilgrimage to Assisi, Rome, Vatican City for Jubilee year
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A long-deceased priest of this diocese often reminded his parishioners to “pray and play your way to heaven.”
No better advice could be given to participants in a Spring Break Jubilee Year of Hope pilgrimage to Rome and Vatican City.
“It’s been a very holy experience but also very fun,” said Emma Bruegenhemke, a University of Missouri senior from Flint Hill in the St. Louis archdiocese.
Miss Bruegenhemke and 13 other college students from the St. Thomas More Newman Center in Columbia and the Rolla Catholic Newman Center; three Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) missionaries; Angelle Hall, director of Campus Ministry at the Columbia Newman Center; and Father Daniel Merz spent Spring Break on pilgrimage in and around the Eternal City.
Members of the group gave daily reports from the pilgrimage over social media at facebook.com/diojeffcity/reels.
Fr. Merz, pastor of St. Thomas More Newman Center Parish and Sacred Heart Parish, both in Columbia, explained to the group that time to pray and time to play are both a foretaste of heaven.
The conviviality among the pilgrims made this clear.
“We have such a great time together on the bus, going from place to place,” Miss Bruegenhemke stated in a March 28 phone interview from Rome. “You’d think we would be getting sick of each other, but we still really want to be with each other and pray together.”
The Newman pilgrims had spent a day and night in Assisi, breathing in the inspiration of St. Francis and his confreres, visiting spectacular churches and the places where St. Francis, St. Clare and Blessed Carlo Acutis are buried.
“We were so struck by the beauty of everything there,” said Miss Bruegenhemke. “The next day on the bus ride to Orvieto, we were all in a great mood, very joyful.”
Suddenly, for no reason, two of the men in their group broke out into an impromptu staging of a scene with the sisters from “The Parent Trap.”
“We were all laughing like children,” Miss Bruegenhemke stated.
A year of favor
Worldwide Jubilee celebrations in the Church, in modern times held usually every 25 years, hearken back to the early history of God’s chosen people.
In keeping with the Law of Moses, the Israelites of antiquity celebrated a jubilee year every 50 years.
They let their fields lie fallow for a year, having saved up enough to eat during the previous year.
They celebrated a year of thanksgiving, renewal, liberation of captives and freedom from debt.
Jesus presented himself as the fulfillment of a new jubilee when he told the assembly at the synagogue these words from the Book of Isaiah — “The Spirit of God is upon me, for he has anointed me to announce a year of favor for the Lord and a day of vindication by our God, to comfort all who mourn” — which were being fulfilled in their hearing.
Pope Boniface VIII called the Catholic Church to celebrate her first holy year in 1300. Since then, holy years have been times for repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, special blessings, prayers, pilgrimages and commitment to Christ.
Pope Francis called for this year’s Jubilee observance — a quarter-century past the Church’s Great Jubilee 2000 celebration of the beginning of the third millennium of Christianity — to be a “pilgrimage of hope.”
Christians must “abound in hope” to be credible witnesses of God’s love, the pope wrote in a document formally proclaiming the current Holy Year.
Miss Bruegenhemke said she couldn’t imagine a better way to spend her last Spring Break before graduating than on pilgrimage to the heart of the Church.
“It’s been really beautiful,” she said. “It’s the four pillars of jubilee: Slaves are set free, everyone gets to go home, all debts are forgiven, and everyone gets to rest and play.”
Jubilee pilgrims have been flocking to Rome this year, where St. Peter and St. Paul gave their lives, along with several generations of Christians whose blood helped germinate the seeds of the Church.
“It’s overwhelming the comfort and love that Jesus Christ has for us, to give us the Church, and the sacrifices of those who came before me, and how privileged I am to be Catholic and to be a pilgrim here,” Miss Bruegenhemke stated.
Joy and tears occasionally overlapped.
Upon arriving, the pilgrims went straight to the Basilica of St. Mary Major — one of the four major basilicas in Rome — to step through the jubilee holy door there and participate at Mass.
“And at first, you’re exhausted from all the traveling, and you can’t really believe that you’re here yet,” said Miss Bruegenhemke.
The simplest report upon entering, “This is a beautiful church,” became a continual unfolding of more and more treasures each day.
“As we walked around, devotion to our Blessed Mother started to move something in me that I couldn’t give a name to,” she said.
Fr. Merz offered Mass with the pilgrims in one of the basilica’s side chapels known as the Chapel of the Crucifixion.
The Gospel reading was Jesus’s Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), one of Fr. Merz’s favorite passages.
He preached about how Rome, “this city, was built out of love for us, out of witness, out of love for God.”
“A lot of us started crying,” said Miss Bruegenhemke. “I just wept the entire Mass.”
A few days later, the pilgrims ascended the steps next to the Santa Scala, the 28 steps that were moved from Jerusalem to Rome, that Jesus walked up after being scourged and crowned with thorns, when Pontius Pilate said, “Ecce Homo!” — “Behold the man!”
Up they went, on their knees.
“It’s so powerful to pray through that and to do so together,” said Miss Bruegenhemke.
They gradually went about settling into a new time zone, six hours later than back home, as well as a new and intriguing culture.
“It’s been so good to be here with one another, to pray with one another, to sing praise together and visit these beautiful churches,” said Miss Bruegenhemke.
“It’s exciting to be Catholic here,” she stated. “Not that it wasn’t exciting back home. But we all truly feel so home here.”
She recalled seeing a beautiful mosaic of the Blessed Mother on the side of a building.
“Especially for us as Catholics, Mary is our mother, so it’s so fun to walk down the street and right next to this gelato store, to see this picture of the Blessed Mother and Jesus, and to say, ‘That’s my mom!’” she said.
Altogether, the pilgrimage to Rome was a springboard to a yearlong observance of the Jubilee of Hope — at school, at home and wherever else Miss Bruegenhemke lives out her mission.
“We’re meant to live it out each day,” she stated. “In that way, we will continue to be on pilgrimage throughout the rest of this Jubilee year.”
Taking it all in
Miss Bruegenhemke described the Newman pilgrims as “very child-like” — much like what Jesus said people must become like in order to enter the Kingdom of God.
“Not childish, but child-like,” she emphasized. “It’s been so wonderful to be a child in the Eternal City, in God’s Kingdom here on earth.”
As much as they were enjoying their time in Rome, the Newman pilgrims realized that an important part of a pilgrimage is to return home, changed.
“We have such wonderful people here,” said Miss Bruegenhemke. “We talk a lot about how exciting it will be to get back and see other people and find out what they did on their Spring Break.”
In the meantime, she planned on spending the rest of the pilgrimage “just being here, soaking up the prayer time that I have with Jesus, soaking up the community before I graduate.”
She pointed out that the same Jesus is present in the tabernacle of St. Peter’s Basilica as in every tabernacle in the world.
“It’s really so wonderful,” she stated. “When I can’t remember things when I get back home, he will, and he can remind me.”
For everyone making pilgrimages for the Jubilee Year of Hope, Miss Bruegenhemke suggests cultivating a spirit of joy and gratitude.
“Know that as much as you desire God, it’s not even a fraction of how much he desires you,” she said.
“So, whether your pilgrimage is in your living room, to your parish, to the Cathedral or to Rome, he wants to encounter you and give you the hope you desire, and he wants to give you peace and set you free.”
After graduating, said Miss Bruegenhemke plans to spend two years mentoring college students as a FOCUS missionary on a college campus somewhere in the United States.
“And I was crying that God would call me on mission for the next two years, and I have a great desire to lead people back home to the Church,” she said.
She asked for prayers for herself and her fellow Newman pilgrims as they continue listening for what God has to say to them.
“What’s clear here, walking in the steps of so many who laid their lives down for God, is that he wants us to give him everything,” she stated.
“A lot of us are in the process of discerning, ‘Lord how do you want me to live for you? How do you want me to die for you?’” she said.
“So, I would ask people to pray for us to have clarity for what the Lord is asking of us, and confidence to live it out.”
