Humble FrancisChurch Pilgrims en Route
Hippies are so cute, right? Just don’t look too closely.
Hippies are also perfect for FrancisChurch. They love nature, have poor humble carbon footprints, and they hate those stuffy rules! CNN reports:
The freewheeling Volkswagen bus, painted a Caribbean turquoise, rolls down Guatemala’s CA-9 highway. Hot wind blows in and out of every open window, and the noise from the rear engine is loud. But no one seems to mind.
Sandwiched between four kids in the back, I can’t help but think these travelers’ attitude might be mistaken for flower power. But this is no magic bus on a hippie trip. This family is on a mission rooted in their Catholic faith.
Catire Walker, 41, and his wife, Noël Zemborain, 39, packed their children, camping gear and a few belongings in March and left their home in Buenos Aires on a daunting 13,000-mile journey through 13 countries.
Their family and friends called them crazy. Maybe they were. But they figured it was about time that they did something crazy. About time that they devoted more time to what mattered most: family.
There final destination is Philadelphia to see the Pope.
Pope Francis, who has made family one of his hot button issues, is visiting the United States for the first time later this month. The Walkers plan to attend the 2015 World Meeting of Families, a central event of the papal visit. The VW bus is plastered with a sticker emblazoned with the event’s logo. Everywhere the family goes, the curious stop and ask.
These people aren’t crazy. This is a marketing stunt and Mrs. Hippie is a marketing professional. That VW is over forty years old. It only means something to old liberals and collectors.
Faith, for the Walkers, has never been about church and its rituals but about the everyday occurrences of life. In Francis, they finally saw a pope who understood ordinary people like them, a pope who talked about things no pope had discussed openly before.
They may be ordinary people but they’re not Catholics! They don’t believe in anything. They like Francis because he doesn’t remind them of the Church.
Besides, they felt immensely proud that Francis was a fellow Argentine. They had followed Jorge Bergoglio closely when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires and had even seen him up close right after he was named Pope.
They were in Rome on a business trip and stood among the crowd at the Vatican. When Francis drove by in the Pope Mobile, Catire screamed “Jorge!” and held up their youngest child, Carmin, then only 10 months old. One of the security guards carried the baby past the barricade and lifted her up so Francis could kiss her.
What kind of poor hippies can afford to take their entire family of six to Rome on business, yet still find it in their hearts to beg their way north for five months?
The Walkers don’t know how far they will get today or where they will sleep tonight. This is how it has been in their months of travel on a tight budget. They raised a few dollars through a crowdsourcing site but mostly, they depend on the kindness of strangers, many of whom open up their homes and become lifelong friends.
The journey has been humbling, Noël tells me.
“We have learned how to ask for help,” she says. “We have learned how to be grateful, how to live with very little. And just to let go and not to try and always control everything.”
They’ve also learned how to be cogs in the left-wing FrancisHype machine, sort of like hippie-capitalists.