Rome and the Grace of Walking Together

The Jubilee of Movements became more than an event for our Irish community; it became a lived lesson in the Church itself. Walking, waiting, praying, sharing meals, we are reminded that communion is not an idea but a form of life.
Miguel Byrne

In Rome, the Jubilee of the movements was not experienced as a series of events, but as a single act of belonging. From the first step at Santa Maria Maggiore, the Irish community lived the days together: walking, waiting, eating, praying, and making room for one another. Even the small things, slowing down for ice cream, keeping pace with those who were tired, refusing to let anyone be left behind, became part of the meaning. What was happening was not just organisation; it was a visible sign that the Church is a body, and that communion is not an idea but a form of life.

That was precisely the point Pope Leo XIV was making in Rome. In his address to the moderators of lay associations, ecclesial movements and new communities on 6 June 2025, he insisted that “no one is Christian alone,” and that Christian life is lived “with others, in a group and in community.” He also reminded the movements that their gifts are meant to serve the Church, not stand beside it, and that they are to be “a leaven of unity, communion, and fraternity” in a world marked by discord and violence.

This was not abstract for us. It was visible in the very fact of the Jubilee: many movements, many histories, many charisms, yet one people. The Vatican itself described the Jubilee of Movements as a sign of “unity and the variety of gifts of the Spirit in the Church,” and noted that the Pentecost Vigil would be the spiritual heart of the event. In St Peter’s Square, that unity was not forced or flattened. It was simply there, breathed into being by the Spirit. Pope Leo gave this experience its deepest meaning in the Vigil of Pentecost on 7 June. He said that at Pentecost: Mary, the Apostles and the disciples received “a Spirit of unity,” which grounded all their diversity in the one Lord Jesus Christ. He went on to say that synodality is the Church’s name for this life “with” others: a journey, a road, a movement that does not isolate us but unites us to humanity “like the yeast in a mass of dough.” He asked the Church to become a training ground of fraternity, not merely a meeting place.

That is why the days in Rome felt so human. They were full of beauty, but even more full of companionship. One contributor wrote that what began as “another engagement” became a real pilgrimage, and that through the gestures, testimonies and shared life of those days she rediscovered the desire to go deeper in her relationship with Christ and the sense that CL in Ireland is a concrete companionship for the journey of life. She was especially struck, on arriving in St Peter’s Square, by the experience of feeling united to thousands of strangers and by the thought that Christ continues to act in that unity of bodies.
Another contributor wrote of the same days in a different key. He described how saying yes to the pilgrimage was rooted in a long history of belonging to CL, and how Rome’s churches reminded him of the faith of generations of Christians who had been moved by Christ in the same way. He also saw how the pilgrimage opened unexpected friendships and providential encounters, showing once again that a simple yes can produce surprises that are not our own, but the work of the Mystery.

Sister Martha Driscoll’s witness at Tre Fontane gave the journey a face. Her story was compelling precisely because it was so direct and so human: a Catholic upbringing, rebellion, searching, disappointment, a long journey through culture, suffering and questioning, and then the discovery that Christ is found within the Church. What marked many people most was her insistence that obedience is not a burden but “the name of love in this world,” and that real communion is not isolation but people living together in a mutual offering of their wills. She spoke, too, of the Church as a “school of love,” which is exactly the kind of phrase that stays with you because it names something we recognise before we can explain it.



Pope Leo’s homily on Pentecost Sunday carried the same truth further. He said that the Spirit breaks open borders, that the Church is truly herself when diversity is grounded in Christ, and that the world will know peace when we stop acting like predators and begin walking as pilgrims. Evangelisation, he said, is not a conquest but grace that radiates from lives transformed by the Kingdom of God. Again, the theme is simple: the Spirit makes many into one, not by erasing difference, but by giving it a common centre.

That is the deepest lesson of Rome. The movements do not exist in order to be admired as separate worlds. Their charisms are real, beautiful, and different, but they only become themselves when they are lived inside the one Church and for the sake of the one Church. This is what we saw, what we heard, and what we touched with our own lives: one body, one path, one Lord. The Jubilee did not merely tell us that. It let us taste it.