Unforgettable Memories of the Holy Land
by Fr. Roger Landry - May 8, 2009
Over the next week, as Pope Benedict is in the Holy Land visiting the principal sites of our redemption, any of us who have had the privilege of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land will likely be recalling our unforgettable memories of those same sacred sites.
I've had the privilege three times of going to the Holy Land. My first trip was in 1993, fresh after graduating from college, and the summer before I would enter seminary. I went with an international group of friends: Mario from Bolivia, Andrés from Colombia and Jos from Belgium. We got a 4-cylinder rental car and pushed it to its limits as we crisscrossed the Holy Land trying to fit everything from the Old Testament and New into ten days. It was so moving to be in the actual places that Christ was conceived, born, lived, walked on ground and on water, preached, healed, celebrated the Last Supper, carried the Cross, died, rose and appeared.
A few memories stick out from that initial peregrination. The first was getting locked into the Upper Room. We were praying in the place that Christ gave us his body and blood for the first time when the Muslim door man decided to lock the steel gate and go for lunch without telling any of those inside. It was apparently a trick he would use to extort some extra money from the incarcerated. We tried to make the most of it, saying to ourselves, there were plenty of worse places for a Christian to be imprisoned! After a hour, local Christians outside the locked gate, discovering that their brothers in faith were locked inside, told us that they were going to find the doorman. About 15 minutes later, they returned, literally dragging the porter with them, who very deferentially and with supervised contrition, opened the door for us for free. It was a real introduction to some of the tensions in the eternal city as well as to how beautifully and seriously the beleaguered Christians in the Holy Land take their Christian fraternity.
When we were in Jerusalem, I would get up each morning before 5 am and go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to attend the Latin Rite Masses celebrated at the empty tomb within the Basilica. Every morning they would celebrate the Mass of Easter in Latin so that Catholics from various countries could all equally participate. One morning, there was a Chinese bishop celebrating the Mass with a group of about 20 Chinese pilgrims, most of whom were crying joyful tears throughout the entire Mass. When it came to the time of the prayers of the faithful, a concelebrating priest presented the intercessions in Chinese. After he was done, the bishop added a last intention in English. To this day, I still wonder whether he actually said it in English or whether he was momentarily given the gift of tongues so that I could hear him speaking my own language. The prayer I'll never forget: "For all our brothers and sisters who have been put to death in our country for the Gospel, that they may experience the full joy of the resurrection." I learned after Mass that these Catholics were all from the underground Church in China, which has been brutally persecuted ever since the Maoist revolution. I had a deep sense that I was praying Mass with a bishop and faithful who, upon returning to China, could likely end up imprisoned or killed for our faith. By the end of the Mass, I was weeping along with these heroic Chinese spiritual siblings.
Another memory was of an American Jesuit priest we met upon checking into the Casa Nova in Jerusalem. He told us that he had just said farewell to a group he had brought and was basically free for the next week to accompany us if we wanted a priest to celebrate Mass for us. We happily took him up on his offer. He was a Scripture scholar and obviously knew the Holy Land very well. He booked and celebrated Mass for us in several places in Jerusalem and then took us to Bethlehem, where he showed us around and even secured for us great deals at one of the Christian shops whose owners he had befriended. We were moved by his genuine Christian generosity and goodness. The last day before we were leaving, he celebrated Mass for us in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. As we were walking out of the sacristy with him, we bumped into an American pilgrimage group that, upon noticing him, went crazy with excitement, shouting his name, coming over for photos with him, a few even asking for his autograph. The four of us looked at each other, bewildered, since all our priest friend had told us about himself was that he was a Jesuit Scripture scholar at Loyola University. So I approached one of the men in the pilgrimage group and asked, "Can you tell me, sir, is that priest famous?" "You better believe it," the man replied. "That's Fr. Mitch Pacwa from EWTN!" It turns out that Fr. Pacwa had just completed filming the series on the Rosary at the Holy Land sites before he met us and had spent much of his "vacation" week ministering to the four of us. He told us at dinner that evening that he was a little bit embarrassed that his "cover" had been blown, because he had so much enjoyed simply being our unpaid "chaplain" the previous week. His behavior taught me a lot about the priesthood that summer before entering seminary.
My second pilgrimage in the Holy Land came six years later, while I was a transitional deacon. Fifty priests and seminarians from the North American College went on the biennial Holy Land pilgrimage led by Gregorian professor Fr. "Aboona" Dick Mackowski. Every Holy Week and Easter Week, this Jesuit professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute would lead Americans studying in Rome on a pilgrimage somewhere, to the Holy Land, to the Christian sites in Turkey, or to the ancient discoveries in Egypt. I remember two things most from that pilgrimage: the great homilies given by the young American priests in the class ahead of me at various sites of the Lord; and serving as deacon at the Easter Vigil in Jerusalem led by the-then Nuncio to Israel. I had been asked to sing the Gospel of St. Mark's account of the Resurrection. After the Vigil Mass was over, the Nuncio told me that he had "never heard a rendition of the Gospel quite like the one I had done," which, in classic Vatican diplomatic parlance, I didn't quite know how to take! Archbishop Pietro Sambi is now papal nuncio to the United States.
My last trip was a few months after my priestly ordination with two of my classmates. The real highlights came thanks to the elderly Franciscan friar at the Mass booking office, who, upon discovering we were all "sacerdotini" or "baby priests," booked us to celebrate three Masses at the Tomb of Christ, and one in Bethlehem, at the Upper Room on Thursday, at Calvary on Friday, at the Grotto of the Annunciation on Saturday, and at the Mount of the Beatitudes on Sunday. When I was celebrating Mass in the tomb from which the Lord had been raised from the dead, I was so overwhelmed that I committed the only intentional liturgical "abuse" of my priesthood. After consecrating the Lord's body, I said to my two classmates, "Do you realize we've just put the Risen Body of the Lord back into the empty tomb?"
Next week, Pope Benedict will be bringing the same Risen Lord Jesus to sites all over land Jesus made holy. May the Prince of Peace and his earthly Vicar bring true peace to that land so desperate for it!
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
