What seemed like a dream... came true

There are pilgrimages measured in kilometres and others measured in years, in lives, in people who became what they would never have been had they not dared to come. These are the ones we want to tell you about, because the next pilgrimage has your name on it.

It all began in Rio de Janeiro, in 2013. There were twenty-two of us, sixteen from the parish, and some only thirteen years old. No experience, no structure and no money: none of what the world calls the right conditions, and the only thing God always asks for, empty hands and an enormous longing to go and meet the Pope.

That is how it all began: Abraham was told to leave his land and was given no map, Mary was asked for a yes and was not told the ending, some fishermen were told “come” and left their nets on the sand. All we had was a few months of preparation and the suspicion that the madness was possible. And so it was: we went, and we came back different people.

Then came: Lourdes 2015, Kraków 2016, Work Camp 2017, Meritxell 2018, the Holy Land 2019, El Collell 2020, El Pilar 2021, Częstochowa 2022, Lisbon 2023, Covadonga 2024, Rome 2025 and Lisieux 2026.

Pilgrimages that many young people have been part of. None of them was a sightseeing trip. From each one we took away something we still carry with us: a freezing dawn, a confession we never expected to make, a conversation by the roadside that broke us open inside, a silence before the Blessed Sacrament that still lingers.

This is the humble secret of going on pilgrimage: you think you are going to see a shrine and you discover you have gone to see yourself before God; you set out looking for a place and it turns out it was Someone who was looking for you. We learnt to walk by pulling each other along, waiting for the little ones, carrying other people’s rucksacks and letting others —which is far harder— carry ours. Years of songs sung under our breath and rosaries prayed on aching feet. We want to keep walking, with you.

We have never gone alone, and we say so because it is only fair. Behind every pilgrim there is a family doing sums at the kitchen table, a parishioner who paid for a raffle ticket with no thought of winning the prize, an elderly lady who could no longer travel and prayed every afternoon for some young people whose names she barely knew: she never boarded a plane, but she reached Rio before we did. Every step has rested on those hands and those knees, and that is why no one has been lost along the way.

Some young people put down roots and are still the heart of this family; others passed through on tiptoe, shared a rucksack and some laughter, and life took them down another path. It doesn’t matter: the seed doesn’t keep count of where it falls, and all of them, those who stayed and those who left, are in God’s heart. That is why preparing for Korea excites us so much: it won’t only be those who get on the plane who travel. They opened the way for us and now it is your turn to keep opening it.

What’s more, there is a gratitude we cannot keep quiet about. How many times we arrived tired and dirty in a village where we knew no one and found the lights on, the floor ready, hot food and a smile at the door. How many priests, how many religious sisters, how many anonymous lay people opened their homes to us without asking anything in return; people who spent a single night in our lives, whom we have never seen again and who are also in God’s heart. They welcomed us like that because they did not see us: they saw Christ, and they loved us as if it were Jesus knocking at their door. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”: we have seen it come true in nameless villages, at eleven at night, with a bowl of soup. We will never forget it.

And there is one thing that leaves us lost for words: on every pilgrimage God’s grace has overflowed what was planned, always, without a single exception. We kept the accounts and He kept the way. Sometimes we found Him in moments full of light, but most of the time He appeared where one least looks for Him: in the step weighed down with tiredness, in the blister, in the path that weighs heavy, in the night when you can’t go on and discover you are still walking. As at Emmaus, He was walking beside us from the start and we only recognised Him in the breaking of the bread, when our hearts were burning without knowing why. That is why we say, without exaggerating, that the pilgrimages have been springs of living water, and it is from that spring that we want you to drink.

And now, Korea. It is far away, it is expensive and the figures are dizzying; we won’t pretend otherwise. But look where the Lord is calling us: to a land where the faith was not brought by missionaries, but sought out by lay people who read some books and crossed a border to ask for baptism; a land later watered with the blood of its martyrs, many of them young, who chose to lose everything rather than lose Him.

There, faith began as it always begins: with a few who dared. A dream is sustained just as the 2013 one was, by working, asking, organising and insisting when the numbers don’t add up; that too seemed impossible, and those thirteen-year-olds ended up in Copacabana. What makes a project great is not the budget, but the love with which it is undertaken: a great love turns a raffle into an offering, a charity breakfast into a shared work and a distracted teenager into a man capable of giving everything. It doesn’t matter how many of us get on that plane; what matters is that no one will go alone.

So take the plunge. You don’t need to be sure, because we weren’t either; nor to be able to pay for it today, because in 2013 we couldn’t either; nor to be better than you are, because God does not call the prepared, He prepares those He calls. All you need is to say yes. And then help us with time, with your hands, with ideas, with whatever you have, and above all with prayer, which is what really moves pilgrimages: that trip to Rio wasn’t paid for by the accounts, it was paid for by the knees of many people who prayed for us without ever having set foot in Brazil.

A few years from now, someone will write something like this. They will say they went to Korea when they were almost a child, that there they came face to face with the Lord and that everything else was born from that. That young person is already among us. That young person is you.