Libby locals travel to Europe for World Youth Day

Three locals this summer joined in a religious pilgrimage of 1.6 million young adults to a historical European city to watch Pope Francis speak. 

Josh McGough, Jessica Backen and Mandy Bell of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Libby took the plunge of $4,000 each to join a group of 65 Montanans on the two week Catholic pilgrimage that happens once every three years.

From July 18 to Aug. 1, the three Libby locals traveled to Kraków, Poland to participate in World Youth Day which included seeing Pope Francis and many other religious icons speak, visits to Czestochowa, Auschwitz/Birkenau and Wawel Castle in Poland, the grave of Pope John Paul II and many historic landmarks.

“It made my ideology broader,” McGough said. “How I think of people, how I think of worldview, and how I think of politics even.”

While bringing them closer to God, Bell and McGough said the humbling and spiritual pilgrimage opened their eyes to the world outside of Northwest Montana by introducing them to people from all over the world and a culture and place nearly a 1,000 years older than the U.S.

“We visited a little chapel that was built in the second century,” McGough recalled. “I’ve never been to a place that was older than 200 years, and then to be in a place that was built in the second century, it was kind of amazing.”

A crowd of over a million people gathered to hear Pope Francis speak. Bell said Francis spoke in Italian, Spanish, English and Polish, but luckily, the group was able to understand every word through speakers broadcasting in English.

“Probably the most profound thing to me was how many people were there,” Bell said. “When you looked around 360 degrees, there was people for as far as you could see.”

The event to celebrate World Youth Day with a week of festivities was not entirely festive. Bell said the attendees were physically, mentally and spiritually challenged.

“A pilgrimage isn’t supposed to be a vacation,” Bell said. “A pilgrimage is supposed to be a sacrifice.”

The group was tasked with reflecting inwardly about their ideologies, and outwardly to the poverty and atrocities in the world.

The group stayed about an hour from Auschwitz, the most infamous concentration camp during the Holocaust. Bell and McGough said taking a tour of the camp was emotionally heavy, to say the least. Thankfully, they said they had a rare moment during the journey to rest and join in prayer.

“In a way, it was horrifying that human beings could do that to one another,” McGough said. “It just hurt, it was painful to hear.”

While near Auschwitz, Bell said that Francis and many speakers touched on Syria and its refugees.

“They wanted to make sure people were aware that persecutions were happening ... and bringing it back to that persecution that happened then and the persecution that is happening today,” Bell said.

This point was tied into the overall main message Francis and the rest of the speakers were trying to get across, which Bell said was that they had a responsibility to go and make the world a better place through helping the less fortunate.

“In the U.S., we have so much,” Bell said. “We are so blessed with material things and we forget sometimes that there are people right outside our doors that need our help.”

The physically-demanding journey required the group to walk for miles in the hot sun every day with off-and-on rain. Bell, McGough and Backen stayed in dormitories in Kraków with three people to a bedroom and 12 people to a shower.

Despite the emotionally-heavy moments and physical drain of the pilgrimage, McGough and Bell said one of the highlights of the journey was the ability to appreciate other cultures and ethnicities outside their own. The group carried pins with the U.S. and Montana flags, which they would trade with people from all over the word for other culturally-specific goods such as a flag pin from China or a scarf from Kenya.

McGough, who admittedly never thought he would get the chance to travel outside of the U.S., said he keeps in contact with friends he met from India, New Zealand, Ireland and Australia.

“When I was little I thought I would never get the chance to hear the pope speak, even travel out of the country,” McGough said.

The next World Youth Day will take place in Panama in 2019.