Basilian Men in Formation Encounter Pope Francis During his Trip to Colombia

Pope Francis’s four day visit to Colombia from September 6-10 included a stop in Medellín, where the Basilian house of formation is located. On Saturday, September 9, over 1.3 million people flocked to Olaya Herrera airport, which was transformed for the celebration of daily mass. Among them was the Basilian community in Medellín, which includes two priests, five scholastics, and three postulants. The scholastics and postulants took part in the celebration by serving as Eucharistic ministers at the mass.

To participate in the mass in this way, the Basilian men in formation took part in training sessions in May and also passed an intensive screening process for security. The day of, they woke up at 3 a.m. to attend the 10:30 a.m. mass and had to wait outdoors in the rain. However, when the mass began, the skies cleared as had been characteristic during the other outdoor Papal masses during this visit to Colombia.

That afternoon, the Pope met specifically with priests, men and women religious, consecration persons, seminarians and their families at a gathering in the La Macarena indoor stadium.

Through these encounters with Pope Francis, “the scholastics and postulants experienced a renewed sense of what it means to be ‘Church’ and that the impact of Pope Francis was more a matter of his person making sacramentally present the reality of Christ through the power of his episcopal ordination and his Petrine ministry than it was simply a matter of his own ‘personality’,” said Father Robert Barringer, CSB, director of scholastics in Medellín.