Parish Pilgrimage to Cracow

Our parish Pilgrimage to Cracow, 49-strong including Monsignor McIntyre and Fr McGachey, arrived at Cracow airport and 10.00 am after a very early start in Baillieston. Our guide Anna Collier met us and on the bus to the Hotel gave us the first of many highly informative talks on Cracow and its history. 

A tour of the vast Main Square with its churches and enormous Cloth Hall covered Marketplace followed in the afternoon, and we visited the university quarter nearby. Some of  buildings of the university date back to its origins in the 14^th century, and there are memories of scholars like Copernicus and the occasion in 1941 when the staff were arrested en masse by the occupying Nazi authorities.  We were privileged to have our Mass and evening prayer in St Mary’s Basilica in the Main Square (Rynek Glowny) before returning to our hotel for an excellent supper. Next day included our most memorable visit, to the Auswitz and Birkenau  concentration camps with their sad evidence of the organized extermination of millions of Jews and others during the Second World War.  The gas-chambers,  the thousands of personal items of those murdered, added up to a grim but unmissable experience of the evil that is in man; our guide limited her tours to one or two days a week because of the personal stress involved.  

Earlier we had enjoyed one of Poland’s major tourist attractions – the 700-year old  Salt  Mines at Wielicza  with its many halls, chapels and other features hewn out of the salt deep underground.  We had a group photograph taken in one of the great halls and had Mass in one of the chapels. 

On another day we went to Pope John Paul’s birthplace at Wadowice, having Mass in the church where he was baptised and following the endless queue passing through the tiny rooms of his family home. We visited the magnificent National shrine at Kalvaria Zebrzydowska, and the Divine Mercy Shrine at Lagiewniki which ahs relives of St Faustina and a soaring modern basilica dominated by a statueof the late Pope. 

Cracow was of course Poland’s capital until the royal family moved to Warsaw in the 17^th century, and the great fortress of Wagel and its Cathedral stood as symbols of Polish nationhood even in the long centuries when the country was divided up and occupied by its Baltic neighbours, Russia, and Austria. We visited this citadel on our last day. 

Each day we had Mass together, and Prayer of the Church in the finely-decorated Franciscan church close to where Pope John Paul II lived as Archbishop. It was with a sense of truly having been on pilgrimage, in a city where ancient religious tradition was very much alive, that we returned to Baillieston in the small hours of Sunday 27^th April.