De La Mennais Brothers: Making Jesus Christ better known and loved by young people

As I’m sure most of you will know, World Youth Day, the international Catholic youth festival held twice every five years, took place in Poland this summer. Here’s a sample of the Facebook posts that I wrote during the event, to give you a flavour of what we got up to. July 20th Met up with the 120 French and Spanish young people, accompanied by our team of young adult group leaders and Brothers. I hadn't finished eating and I was already being interviewed by Polish tv!! And now, we are in a local stadium doing The Birdie Song in Polish!!! Happy days :-) ... followed by some crazy zumba and Uptown Funk!! 2 local Polish priests got in on the act!! A beautiful mass in Kluczbork with our Polish hosts, the music led by a talented group of local young musicians. July 21st It's a small world. One of the Polish priests I spoke with last night is a missionary in Togo. He's brought to World Youth Day in Poland two young Togolese men from his parish in... Kara!!! = just next to the p...

It is now 3 weeks since we got back from World Youth Day in Spain and I think I have just about recovered! It was a tremendous experience, made all the more special because our group were so wonderful. It consisted of 18 young people, two brothers including myself and brother Francis and a good friend and youth worker from Liverpool. The youngsters included pupils from our school here in Southampton, former pupils of mine from our school in Liverpool where I worked until two years ago and young people from Lymington in the New Forest. It was wonderful to see the different members of the group get on so well. Firm friendships friendships were made that I think will endure. Indeed some of the Southampton pupils have been to visit the Lymington members since we got back. The actual trip itself consisted of a week spend in Bilbao (N.W. Spain - Basque region) as guests of the Bilbao diocese and a week in Madrid where the other 1.5 million or so pilgrims congregated. In both cases we staye...