Mags Gargan“Receive Mercy, Share Mercy, and Celebrate Mercy” was the threefold theme of a pilgrimage organised by Valleymount Parish, Co. Wicklow, to mark the Year of Mercy.
Stopping at Mount Argus Church, the Wicklow parishioners were treated to a talk on St Charles of Mount Argus by Fr Frank Keevins. After adoration, Confession, and being blessed with a relic of St Charles, the pilgrims continued on to the Missionaries of Charity on Dublin’s South Circular Road.
Soup and sandwiches were served to the pilgrims who heard a talk on the life of Mother Teresa and the work of the sisters among Dublin’s poor and who donated boxes containing useful items the sisters will distribute to the city’s homeless.
Finally the pilgrims reached St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral and passed through the Holy Door, after which the Eucharist was celebrated in St Kevin’s Oratory. Canon Damien O’Reilly gave the pilgrims a brief history of the Pro-Cathedral and displayed vestments worn and chalices used at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress and by Pope St John Paul II when he visited Ireland in 1979.