After eight days of intense touring of Germany and following all the sites of Martin Luther and the “Protestant Devolution” we finally said our goodbyes, shared our comments about the trip and headed home.
The trip was also kind of like EWTN’s show The Journey Home with lots of conversion and vocation stories along the way including our local guide Klara who was an atheist in Czechoslovakia and has recently become a Catholic.
But it was also a beautiful tour of Germany which is full of history, rustic castles, idyllic rivers and villages, old churches and excellent food and drink.
We learned a lot and even though I knew much about Martin Luther and the whole Protestant situation I think I doubled my knowledge by visiting all the sites and sharing the information among the group and especially with Ken Hensley’s excellent teaching.
More than half of the people on this trip it traveled with us before and again we bonded into a very close group of friends. There was no wrangling or discontentment among the group at all. It was smooth and harmonious and full of personal and spiritual growth and development.
Everyone’s faith was deepened in the conviction that the Catholic Church contains the fullness of the truth and is, in fact, the church that Jesus founded 2000 years ago and that Martin Luther introduced a great rupture into that unity which has brought chaos into the modern Western world.
We especially enjoyed celebrating Mass with these holy priests in cities that have become radically Lutheran. We again proclaimed the truth of the Catholic faith in the cities that have been deprived in many ways through their protest and separation from the unity of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church.
I think we were the only Catholic group to take a trip like this on the 500 anniversary of the “Protestant Reformation”. I’m certainly glad that we planned and executed this trip and it was a marvelous experience for all of us. We expect to do this trip again in about five years.