This week, 100-plus Jubilee pilgrims from the Archdiocese of Toronto return to their home lives after seven faith filled days accompanying Cardinal Frank Leo to Rome.

Before the sojourners set off from Pearson International Airport on a Nov. 10 night flight, the Cardinal said they could be assured of at least one thing: that their time in “the heart” of the Catholic Church would open them to changes of heart within themselves.

In his departing words before the flight back to Toronto, Cardinal Leo noted he observed in individuals, and within the group generally, what he prayed for when the Archdiocese undertook the onerous work of organizing the pilgrimage months ago: greater fidelity to Christ.

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Mission, we might say, accomplished. 

Readers will find in our pages diary style accounts from the Register’s Quinton Amundson to prove the case. Quinton went step for step among the pilgrims during what Leo described as “lots of walking, lots of eating, little sleep” over the days in Rome and environs. Samples of what our reporter heard:

“It felt like I was in heaven on Earth. I didn't want to leave these magical places,” said Elizabeth Cherian.

“Our friend Deacon Tony had said, ‘you'll come back a new person.’ I felt it,” said Wilfrid Guthrie.

“Awesome. Everything worked as it was supposed to,” said Margaret Mckenna-Tomei.

For those of us following the pilgrimage vicariously through Quinton’s daily web updates – and perhaps crossing our fingers for an opportunity to partake in future – the voyage called to mind another primary truth. Whether we as Catholics are in Rome the geographical “city of saints and martyrs,” as Cardinal Leo phrased it, or in the spiritual Rome of obedience, prayer and presence at Mass, our whole being must strive, first, last, and always, to fidelity in Christ.

Cardinal Leo to the pilgrims: “Make room for God and put God first.”

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It is easy, it is human, for God to be crowded out even by the comparable minutiae of getting on public transit or navigating overcrowded arterial roads, never mind by the clamour of our social, cultural and particularly political lives. Worse, we too often treat our Holy Mother the Church as a means for living out such distractions, for indulging the way they obstruct the gaze of Christ.

In a column for OSV News, writer Michael Heinlein warns perceptively where such fixations can lead.

“Six months into his papacy, as Pope Leo's activities have increased, so has the scrutiny observing his every move. We parse every word, every audience, every movement, and in so doing, we betray our fractured existence. The temptation to filter this information through a political framework, as if that's the definition of our lives, grows daily too.”

Heinlein notes Pope Leo’s calls for civility risk being lost when otherwise faithful Catholics are too busy “constructing proofs that demonstrate that Leo is on his or her "side" -- a position defined all too often by politics or ideology rather than truth. (Leo, though, has been careful not to pick a "side." His fidelity has been to the Gospel, which can be fully embraced by neither side nor party.)”

The opposite of pilgrim hearts open to Christ-centred change are the trivial pursuits of minds approximating guesses as to what texts, paragraphs, sentence fragments say about the Church as a purely political entity.

Heinlein puts it this way: “Too many Catholics seem eager to jump in ‘the quicksand of approximation’ and define Pope Leo according to whatever judgements they made about his predecessor."

He calls attention to “a recent audience talk given by Leo (on) the medieval intellectual generalist Nicholas of Cusa. Leo explained Nicholas had hope amid so much fear on the part of his contemporaries who armed themselves for battle amid great uncertainties and opposition. ‘He believed in humanity,’ Leo said, adding Nicholas ‘understood there are opposites to be held together, that God is a mystery in which what is in tension finds unity.’

For all the diversity of the 100-plus pilgrims from 40 parishes throughout the Archdiocese led by to Rome by our own Cardinal Leo, unity was there in the acts of witnessing the art and artefacts of the Roman Catholic Church through which they deepened the indivisible fact of Christ.

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“Maybe, if we were back home, we wouldn't have had that opportunity,” Cardinal Leo acknowledged.

Which is true, but still no reason why all of us at home shouldn’t always seek such opportunity out.