Articles

Day 6 – The Papal Mass

Family Life is Unpredictable

The last day of the World Meeting of Families promised another awesome event with the Pope, this time with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the centerpiece. For many, the opportunity to attend mass celebrated by the Pope is a once in a lifetime experience. The whole family was looking forward to this final day of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, but when we awoke on Sunday morning, one ...

Day 5

A Slow Start

The whole family slept in until around 11am, we were so worn out by the events of the week and the events today didn’t start until the afternoon.  It was nice to sleep in because we had to ride our bikes into Philadelphia to get to the events with the Pope.  We eventually made it onto our bikes and headed out to Philadelphia ...

Day 4

Making New Friends

The fifth day of our pilgrimage and the fourth day of the World Meeting of Families has come to a close.  Each day was filled with blessings (for a recap, see the daily articles), all according to God’s providence.  On Friday, the last day of the #WMF2015, we were so tired and the vendor area was closed down by the Secret Service for security reasons, and we barely made it to morning mass and we sat very ...

Day 3

Inspired to Serve

The World Meeting of Families must be working because we were inspired to be a family of service on the 3rd day of the meeting.  My 15 year old son has been quietly collecting extra snacks that he thought would be appreciated by the homeless we have been seeing in downtown Philadelphia.  We took it to the next level when prompted by ...

Day 2

Settling into our Groove

Our second day of the conference and the first full day was a lot of fun.  We found our groove and discovered a part of why we are here.  We decided to keep the kids with us for morning daily mass and drop them off at the Youth Conference afterwards.  We decided to forgo the keynote and instead spend some time walking through the vendor area.  Our kids had a great time at the Youth Congress and ...

Day 1

A Catholic Conference

In my professional career, I attend lots of conferences.  I have attended conferences that had over 100,000 attendees, Networld/Interop was held in Las Vegas because it was the only city in the United States that had enough hotel rooms to house everyone, it also has not just one but many large convention centers that can hold that many attendees.  The show room floors had lots of vendors vying for your ...

An Arduous Journey

Initially when we planned to attend the World Meeting of Families, we intended to take our time
getting up to Pennsylvania, but then we were asked to speak at a parish event in the Austin area related to the World Meeting of Families.  How could we resist?  So we said yes, then the date got changed from Friday evening to Saturday ...