Pilgrimage to Rome 2011, Day II - the Pope is on Holidays

Day two starts at dawn, sore footed from the long walk the day before we all made our way down to breakfast and then Mass in the convent chapel. Like every day of our pilgrimage Fr. Jim Larkin said Mass and members of the Sodality acted as servers.

The plan for our second day was to go to the general audience with the Pope and then carefully examine St. Peter's looking for old sodalists - but with the Pope away in Germany we got the morning off and it consisted mainly of coffee drinking and chatting. The afternoon, however, was spent as planned fine combing St. Peter's Church for sodalists. Unrelated to the sodality, but since I myself am Swedish always my number one stop when in St. Peter's, is the tomb of Queen Christina of Sweden (picture 2); the daughter of the protestant warfaring King Gustavus II Adolphus, took over the Swedish throne after him when he was killed in battle (by two sodalists, by the way) in Lützen in 1632. Christina abdicated the Swedish throne in 1654 in order to become a catholic and move to Rome. Moving on from there to the altar of Blessed John Paul II, also a sodalist, and then on to several of the Benedicts, Clements, Innocents and Pii.

Another thing to do in Rome is, of course, shopping. While some tourists may be primarily interested in walking down the shopping streets like il Corso the pilgrim looking to throw some cash around has, apart from the millions of little souvenir shops that sell rosary beads, medallions, icons and little bottles of Holy Water, there are other shops that sell vestments, monstrances and beautiful candle holders.