I arrived back home from the March for Life around 10:30pm last night. Everyone was asleep in the house so I laid down on the couch to watch TV. After about .5 seconds I was dead asleep...it was that kind of trip, tiring but amazing.
Nearly 100 students and adults left Trinity on Thursday around 10:30am. We drove straight through (well, almost, we stopped twice for food and one of our buses got pulled over for speeding in Worcester) to our host schools and arrived around 9pm. We dropped the girls off first at Elizabeth Seton High School in Bladensburg, MD and then the boys at DeMatha Catholic High School about ten minutes away in Hyattsville, MD. We got pizza for everyone and the boys burned off energy and played basketball until about 11:30pm. After a quick sleep and some food provided by the school we were all out the door at 6:45am the next day. We headed to the University of Maryland for the best part of the trip - the Youth Rally and Mass at the Comcast Center. There are two rallies held since there are so many young people who attend. The main one is held at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC but the tickets were all gone by the time I ordered them so we got tickets to the Comcast Center.
We arrived around 7:30am and there was about 90 minutes of talks, music, etc. They do a great job keeping a very sleepy group of teenagers engaged. The Mass began at 9:00am and was celebrated by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston. The homily was preached by Father Dave Wells of the Archdiocese of Washington. He gave a very stirring homily and spoke of his adopted niece who was very close to be aborted by her birth parents 11 years ago. That little girl was at the Mass and got a huge ovation from the crowd. We heard a number of stories like that at the rally and one of the students from our group told me that the event was very close to home for her as she too is adopted and was almost aborted.
The Comcast Center is quite a ways away from the National Mall where the March for Life was being held so we had to take buses to the nearest Metro stop and then the Metro down to the Mall. It took about 2-3 hours for us to do this as we had to wait to be told to leave the Comcast Center (we were the last section!) and then wait in lines to get into the Metro. It wasn't bad really, it beat sitting outside in the cold for the same time. We got to the Mall around 2:30pm and jumped right into the March. We were hoping to meet up with a group made up of Lasallian schools but it was so insanely mobbed (there were 500,000 people there) and we got there too late. Once the March started we all got separated and we all met at Union Station at 5:30pm. I was so impressed with our students - there was a lot of sitting around and waiting and they were in such good spirits and hardly complained.
From Washington we made our way to Lincroft, NJ to spend the night at Christian Brothers Academy. The weather was pretty bad and there was some traffic leaving DC so we didn't arrive until 11:30pm or so. The Director of Campus Ministry, Tim Sewnig, met us and got us settled in. The poor guy ended up sleeping in his office that night as he had a basketball game (he's the freshman coach) at 11am on Saturday and he lives an hour away. The school has two gyms so the boys slept in one and the girls in the other. We were off again at 8am (it was nice to sleep in!) the next day for New York City. We got there around 9:30am or so and we broke off into groups until 3:45pm. My group wanted to hang around Times Square and go into stores and take pictures with random tourists. There were about 18 of us (mostly crazy junior boys) which made for an interesting afternoon! I broke away at one point and got them (well for me too really) Krispy Kreme donuts. If you've never had them then, well, you've never lived. We were back on the buses at 4pm and after a stop for dinner, arrived at Trinity at 9:30pm. It was so nice coming back from the march at a normal time this year.
It was quite a whirlwind trip but as always, a powerful one. It's so wonderful that the vast majority of people on the march are high school and college students who are helping to change hearts and minds on the issue of life. I am so grateful to all the parents and teachers who helped me, including Mr. Sheehan '79 our our math department and Ms. Foley of our theology department. Ms. Foley pulled double duty as one of our students had to take an SAT Subject Test yesterday so she signed up to take it at a high school in Middletown, New Jersey. Ms. Foley accompanied her to the school and then on a train to meet us in New York City. Ms. Foley was chatting with a family at the school and after the test they ended up giving Ms. Foley and the student a ride to the train station and bought them bagels and coffee!
Kasie Bourque '14 and others took tons of pictures so we should have a video up soon. Stay tuned.
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