World Youth Day Witness!

Hello World! This page was created to share the experiences of a small band of pilgrims that endured an intense week of heat, huge crowds, lots of walking and heat. Did I mention it was hot?

We were able to share our stories with many of our parishioners, but wanted to bring our journey of faith to a much larger audience.

After World Youth Day I was interviewed, along with a diocesan seminarian, on the Salt + Light Television show Perspectives about how we can keep the energy of WYD alive. Part of what we talked about were things such as this page! Have a look at the video below:

I would like to give a very special thanks to Rachel Nazareth and friar Eric de la Peña whose hard work made all of this possible. And, of course, to the parishioners of St. Bonaventure Parish in Toronto: thank you for your time, donations and prayers!

MJ Santa Ana

Estimado amigos en Cristo / Chers amis en Christ / Dear friends in Christ,

My name is M.J. Santa Ana, a parishioner here at St. Bonaventure and a 2011 World Youth Day pilgrim. I’m very grateful for this opportunity to share my World Youth Day experiences and I thank you for taking the time to read this reflection. When I submitted the paperwork to join St. Bonaventure’s delegation in December of last year, I had an idea this would be something special and an opportunity to grow in faith. World Youth Day was that and much more – it was a life-changing experience that impacted me on many levels. That is what I will be sharing with you – how this remarkable experience impacted me in terms of my individual faith growth and in terms of the fellowship of Christian community both around me and in relation to the world.

Kathy Fangon

World Youth Day was an amazing experience! It exceeded my expectations completely. It was an enriching and fulfilling journey that has allowed me to become more connected with God and more connected with myself. One aspect of World Youth Day that affected me the most was the amount of people there. It was amazing to see millions of people from all over the world together in one place, all for the same reason. Looking into the crowd, and listening to everyone cheer together was a memorable phenomenon.

Judy D’Mello

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” –Matthew 18:20

This biblical quote I feel sums up what our WYD experience was. In every moment, the good, bad and the ugly, the Lord was with us guiding us and strengthening us to get through that moment or that trial.

Tresanne Fernandes

My trip to Madrid was an amazing experience. There were lots of good times and bad times but our group held together through it all, and we were full of joy no matter what we were facing. Whenever you leave home for a vacation, there are always unexpected and surprising things but for us, it just seemed like every time we turned around there was something else we had to deal with. We were sick, lost things, we had to wait for food and walk and walk to find food, events were packed so we couldn’t even get in to some of them, and there were cold showers with hardly any pressure. But our group was always joyful, we helped each other through everything and just kept going, taking it as an exciting adventure. It was a lack of food, sleep, hot showers and relaxation…..it was definitely not a retreat; it was a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage was not what I thought it would be. What I thought could go wrong ended up going worse but I also took more from it than I ever imagined I would.

Rachel Nazareth

To say that World Youth Day turned out exactly the way I pictured it would certainly not be accurate.  I had organized and prepared us, our group had met a number of times, we had fundraised, paid for our plane tickets, we had prayed together on numerous occasions and we certainly went in with a positive and open mind set.  Now I could tell you hundreds of little stories of the hilarious challenges that we faced, the cold showers that made us shriek, the lack of mirrors in the washrooms that took away my vanity quite quickly, the heat that made you really respect the Spanish, the challenges of navigating a large city and keeping a group together, and hydrated, at all times; but these stories are just stories that made our experience memorable.

Aaron Fernandes

World Youth Day was a dramatic experience of wild ups and downs.  We cheered in huge Catholic concerts and played basketball with enthusiastic Turkish pilgrims.  We also endured intense heat and lived in a high school where the bathrooms had no mirrors and the only source of drinking water was the sinks of those bathrooms.  Somehow though, our leaders got us through it all happy and in one piece.  We learned to listen to them well… Sadly their most recent instruction was to keep this reflection short, so I can’t tell you about each and every one of the wonderful things I took away from the World Youth Day experience.  I will instead speak to just two.

friar Dan

My first reaction to WYD 2011 has to be the comfort and ease, the peace and good will that prevailed among our own group of 15 pilgrims. We got along extremely well together. We enjoyed being with one another, despite varying ages, ethnicities and interests. We truly formed a community in Jesus’ name. I think that was just fantastic; and I would travel with you “guys” again!