A group of young people left Troyes, France, and will be cycling an average of 56 miles a day, until they reach Celorico de Basto, to participate in the Days in the Dioceses. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Comité Organizador Arciprestal – Celorico de Basto
Lisbon, Portugal, Jul 24, 2023 / 08:15 am (CNA).
Three pilgrims have already left Kraków, Poland, and another 17 have left Troyes, France, to head to Portugal, where they will participate in World Youth Day 2023 from Aug. 1–6 in Lisbon.
Why did they leave so early? Because they’ve chosen to go by bicycle.
The trio of “cyclists” who left Poland consists of Father Marcin Napora and two young laypeople, Bartłomiej Michlec and Marcin Kidon. In all, they will travel approximately 3,800 kilometers (2,361 miles), on a journey that should last about 22 days, traveling an average of 180 kilometers (112 miles) each day.
Along the way, the group will be hosted by local families and expects to have times of prayer and to attend Mass with the communities they pass through.
One of their objectives for their cycling pilgrimage to WYD2023 is to “call attention to new priestly and religious vocations.”
“We also want to experience different situations to form and develop our character, and thus get closer to God,” Father Marcin Napora told CNA before their departure.
The pilgrimage of the three cyclists began on July 8 with a Mass celebrated by the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Krakow, Robert Chrząszcz.
“Let this be an opportunity to bear witness to Christ, a new form of evangelization that perhaps appeals more to young people. … Certainly, this is the moment when the Church uses you to go out into the world,” the bishop said.
The three pilgrims are expected to join, in Lisbon, the remaining 2,000 participants in the WYD from the Archdiocese of Kraków on July 31.
The trio of cyclists from Poland, made up of Father Marcin Napora (front) and young laypeople Bartłomiej Michlec and Marcin Kidon. Photo courtesy of Archdiocese of Krakow
‘A sporting and spiritual challenge’
The 17 young people who left Troyes, France, on July 16 will arrive earlier: The distance is shorter (900 kilometers, or 560 miles), and the group expects to arrive in time to participate in the Days in the Dioceses, the gathering of young people from all over the world that precedes WYD Lisbon 2023, which will be held in 17 dioceses across Portugal.
This group is made up of several young people from that French diocese, including a priest, a deacon and his wife, as well as a Colombian seminarian, four young Polish people who met during WYD in Krakow in 2016, and a young man from Hong Kong.
Over 10 days, they will cycle an average of 90 kilometers (56 miles), and will be welcomed every night in parishes, monasteries, and with families, sharing meals and enjoying conviviality and prayer until they reach Celorico de Basto, a village in the Archdiocese of Braga, Portugal, where they will join another 54 young people from the same diocese and 595 who will come from Toledo, Spain.
Marie-Liesse, one of the French pilgrims, said that “this trip is an opportunity to meet people and experience hospitality in France, Spain, and Portugal. It is a true pilgrimage that we experience by bicycle, and at the same time [is] a sporting and spiritual challenge.”
She also pointed out that going to WYD like this is a way of “getting to know the group better, the people we find on the way, but also to get to know ourselves in the face of difficulties, physical suffering, and loneliness on the bicycle… It is a way of preparing for WYD, meeting Portuguese communities, young people from all over the world — and the pope.”
Moment of delivery of the bicycles built in the GAFe Bike Lab to the WYD Lisbon 2023 Foundation. Photo courtesy of E-conversas
An original and sustainable gift
Bicycles are playing another role in WYD this year. When the pope arrives at the WYD headquarters in Lisbon, he will be presented with two bicycles built from scrap metal by high school students from a small Portuguese town of Gafanha da Nazaré, located 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Lisbon.
Building them was the major project this year at the high school, where the GAFe Bike Lab operates — a workshop dedicated to refurbishing bicycles and donating them to disadvantaged students.
António Rodrigues, a teacher of physics and chemistry responsible for the workshop, explained that giving the bicycles to the pope was born from a dream of “continuing the tradition of cycling,” still common in their town, and “promoting sustainability.”
When the students first learned about the challenge, they were excited and at the same time confused. “But … the pope doesn’t ride a bicycle?” they wondered.
But Rodrigues, who’s been commuting to school by bicycle for 30 years, explained it was “symbolic” and “for awareness.” Other teachers surmised that the pope would take the bicycles with him and lend them to priests and nuns to use around the Vatican “at full speed.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Bishop José Ignacio Munilla speaks at the International Eucharistic Congress taking place in Quito, Ecuador, Sept. 8–15, 2024. / Credit: Eduardo Berdejo/EWTN News
Quito, Ecuador, Sep 13, 2024 / 15:15 pm (CNA).
One of Spain’s most prominent prel… […]
Jack Traynor (next to child on first row) as a pilgrim to Lourdes in 1925, two years after his healing. / Credit: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
In the book he recounts how, during a 10-hour train ride to Lourdes on Friday, Sept. 10, 1937, Royal Navy seaman Jack Traynor told him firsthand how he was healed in 1923 at the Lourdes Shrine from the crippling wounds he had suffered from his participation in World War I.
Over a century later, on Dec. 8 of this year, the archbishop of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Malcolm McMahon, announced that Traynor’s healing has been recognized as the 71st miracle attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
O’Connor described Traynor as a “heavy-set man, 5’5”, with a strong, ruddy face” who, according to his biography, “should have been, if he were alive, paralyzed, epileptic, covered in sores, shrunken, with a wrinkled and useless right arm and a gaping hole in his skull.”
Traynor was, in the missionary’s view, a man “with his manly faith and piety,” unassuming, “but obviously a fearless, militant Catholic.” Despite having received only a primary education, he had “a clear mind enriched by faith and preserved by great honesty of life.”
This enabled him to tell “with simplicity, sobriety, exactness” how he was healed at the place where the Immaculate Conception appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.
O’Connor wrote down the account and sent it to Traynor, who revised it and added new details. He read the official report of the doctors who examined him and searched the newspaper archives of the time to corroborate the account.
Front page of the December 1926 Journal de la Grotte, reporting on the miraculous cure of Jack Traynor. Credit: Lourdes Shrine
How Traynor came to be considered incurable
Traynor was born in Liverpool, according to some sources, in 1883. His mother was an Irish Catholic who died when Traynor was still young. “But his faith, his devotion to the Mass and holy Communion — he went daily when very few others did — and his trust in the Virgin remained with him as a fruitful memory and example,” O’Connor recalled.
Mobilized at the outbreak of World War I, he was hit by shrapnel, which left him unconscious for five weeks. Sent in 1915 to the expeditionary force to Egypt and the Dardanelles Strait, between Turkey and Greece, he took part in the landing at Gallipoli.
Jack Traynor. Credit: Courtesy of Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes
During a bayonet charge on May 8, he was hit with 14 machine gun bullets in the head, chest, and arm. Sent to Alexandria, Egypt, he was operated on three times in the following months to try to stitch together the nerves in his right arm. They offered him amputation, but he refused. The epileptic seizures began, and there was a fourth operation, also unsuccessful, in 1916.
He was discharged with a 100% pension “for permanent and total disability,” the missionary priest related, and in 1920 he underwent surgery on his skull to try to cure the epilepsy. From that operation he was left with an open hole “about two centimeters wide” that was covered with a silver plate.
By then he was suffering three seizures a day and his legs were partially paralyzed. Back in Liverpool he was given a wheelchair and had to be helped out of bed.
Eight years had passed since the landing at Gallipoli. Traynor was treated by 10 doctors who could only attest “that he was completely and incurably incapacitated.”
Unable to walk, with epileptic seizures, a useless arm, three open wounds, “he was truly a human wreck. Someone arranged for him to be admitted to the Mossley Hill Hospital for Incurables on July 24, 1923. But by that date Jack Traynor was already in Lourdes,” O’Connor recounted.
Traynor tells about his pilgrimage to Lourdes
According to the first-person account originally written by O’Connor and corrected and adapted by Traynor, the veteran sailor had always felt great devotion to Mary that he got from his mother.
“I felt that if the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes were in England, I would go there often. But it seemed to me a distant place that I could never reach,” Traynor said.
When he heard that a pilgrimage was being organized to the shrine, he decided to do everything he could to go. He used money set aside “for some special emergency” and they even sold belongings. “My wife even pawned her own jewelry.”
The Lourdes Grotto in France. Credit: Courtney Mares/CNA
When they learned of his determination, many tried to dissuade him: “You’ll die on the way, you’ll be a problem and a pain for everyone,” a priest told him.
“Everyone, except my wife and one or two relatives, told me I was crazy,” he recalled.
The experience of the trip was “very hard,” confessed Traynor, who felt very ill on the way. So much so that they tried to get him off three times to take him to a hospital in France, but at the place where they stopped there was no hospital.
On arrival at Lourdes, there was ‘no hope’ for Traynor
On Sunday, July 22, 1923, they arrived at the Lourdes Shrine in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. There he was cared for by two Protestant sisters who knew him from Liverpool and who happened to be there providentially.
The pilgrimage of more than 1,200 people was led by the archbishop of Liverpool, Frederick William Keating.
On arrival, Traynor felt “desperately ill,” to the point that “a woman took it upon herself to write to my wife telling her that there was no hope for me and that I would be buried at Lourdes.”
Despite this, “I managed to get lowered into the baths nine times in the water from the spring in the grotto and they took me to the different devotions that the sick could join in.”
On the second day, he suffered a strong epileptic seizure. The volunteers refused to put him in the pools in this state, but his insistence could not be overcome. “Since then I have not had another epileptic seizure,” he recalled.
Paralyzed legs healed
On Tuesday, July 24, Traynor was examined for the first time by doctors at the shrine, who testified to what had happened during the trip to Lourdes and detailed his ailments.
On Wednesday, July 25, “he seemed to be as bad as ever” and, thinking about the return trip planned for Friday, July 27, he bought some religious souvenirs for his wife and children with the last shillings he had left.
He returned to the baths. “When I was in the bath, my paralyzed legs shook violently,” he related, causing alarm among the volunteers who attended to the pilgrims at the shrine, believing it was another epileptic seizure. “I struggled to stand up, feeling that I could do so easily,” he explained.
Arm healed as Blessed Sacrament passes by
He was again placed in his wheelchair and taken to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament. The archbishop of Reims, Cardinal Louis Henri Joseph Luçon, carried the monstrance.
“He blessed the two who were in front of me, came up to me, made the sign of the cross with the monstrance, and moved on to the next one. He just passed when I realized that a great change had taken place in me. My right arm, which had been dead since 1915, shook violently. I tore off its bandages and crossed myself, for the first time in years,” Traynor himself testified.
“As far as I can remember, I felt no sudden pain and certainly I did not have a vision. I simply realized that something momentous had happened,” Traynor recounted.
Back at the asylum, the former hospital that today houses the offices of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes, he proved that he could walk seven steps. The doctors examined him again and concluded in their report that “he had recovered the voluntary use of his legs” and that “the patient can walk with difficulty.”
Traynor makes it to the grotto
That night, he could hardly sleep. As there was already a certain commotion around him, several volunteers stood guard at his door. Early in the morning, it seemed that he would fall asleep again, but “with a last breath, I opened my eyes and jumped out of bed. First I knelt on the floor to finish the rosary I had been saying, then I ran to the door.”
Making his way, he arrived barefoot and in his pajamas at the grotto of Massabielle, where the volunteers followed him: “When they reached the grotto, I was on my knees, still in my nightclothes, praying to the Virgin and thanking her. I only knew that I had to thank her and that the grotto was the right place to do so.”
He prayed for 20 minutes. When he got up, a crowd surrounded him, and they made way to let him return to the asylum.
A sacrifice made for the Virgin in gratitude
“At the end of the Rosary Square stands the statue of Our Lady Crowned. My mother had always taught me that when you ask the Virgin for a favor or want to show her some special veneration, you have to make a sacrifice. I had no money to offer, having spent my last shillings on rosaries and medals for my wife and children, but kneeling there before the Virgin, I made the only sacrifice I could think of. I decided to give up smoking,” Traynor explained with tremendous simplicity.
“During all this time, although I knew I had received a great favor from Our Lady, I didn’t clearly remember all the illness I previously had,” he noted in his account.
As he finished getting himself ready, a priest, Father Gray, who knew nothing of his cure, asked for someone to serve Mass for him, which Traynor did: “I didn’t think it strange that I could do it, after eight years of not being able to get up or walk,” he said.
Traynor received word that the priest who had strongly opposed his joining the pilgrimage wanted to see him at his hotel, located in the town of Lourdes, outside the shrine. He asked him if he was well. “I told him I was well, thank you, and that I hoped he was too. He burst into tears.”
Early on Friday, July 27, the doctors examined Traynor again. They found that he was able to walk perfectly, that his right arm and legs had fully recovered. The opening in his skull resulting from the operation had been considerably reduced, and he had not suffered any further epileptic seizures. His sores had also healed by the time he returned from the grotto, when he had removed his bandages the previous day.
Weeping ‘like two children’ with Archbishop Keating
At nine o’clock in the morning the train back to Liverpool was ready to leave the Lourdes station, situated in the upper part of the town. He had been given a seat in first class, which, despite his protests, he had to accept.
Halfway through the journey, Keating came to see him in his passenger car. “I knelt down for his blessing. He raised me up saying, ‘Jack, I think I should have your blessing.’ I didn’t understand why he was saying that. Then he raised me up and we both sat on the bed. Looking at me, he said, ‘Jack, do you realize how ill you have been and that you have been miraculously cured by the Blessed Virgin?’”
“Then,” Traynor continued, “it all came back to me, the memory of my years of illness and the sufferings on the trip to Lourdes and how ill I had been at Lourdes. I began to cry, and so did the archbishop, and we both sat there crying like two children. After talking to him for a while, I calmed down. I now fully understood what had happened.”
A telegram to his wife: ‘I am better’
Since news of the events had already reached Liverpool, Traynor was advised to write a telegram to his wife. “I didn’t want to make a fuss with a telegram, so I sent her this message: ‘I am better — Jack,’” he explained.
This message and the letter announcing that her husband was going to die in Lourdes were all the information his wife had, as she had not seen the newspapers. She assumed that he had recovered from his serious condition but that he was still in his “ruinous” state.
The reception in Liverpool was the culmination. The archbishop had to address the crowd to disperse at the mere sight of Traynor getting off the train. “But when I appeared on the platform, there was a stampede” and the police had to intervene. “We returned home and I cannot describe the joy of my wife and children,” he said in his account.
A daughter named Bernadette
Taynor concluded his account by explaining that in the following years he worked transporting coal, lifting 200-pound sacks without difficulty. Thanks to providence, he was able to provide well for his family.
Three of his children were born after his cure in 1923. A girl was named Bernadette, in honor of the visionary of Lourdes.
He also related the conversion of the two Protestant sisters who cared for him, along with his family and the Anglican pastor of his community.
From then on, Jack volunteered to go to Lourdes on a regular basis until he died in 1943, on the eve of the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.
Paradoxically, and despite the factual evidence of his recovery, the Ministry of War Pensions never revoked the disability pension that was granted to him for life.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Jan 28, 2021 / 06:30 am (CNA).- A Vatican cardinal has expressed “astonishment” at a statement by a group of Protestant and Catholic theologians in Germany.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promo… […]
1 Comment
Sustainability is the need of the hour worldwide. The GAFe Bike Lab is showing the way.
Sustainability is the need of the hour worldwide. The GAFe Bike Lab is showing the way.