At 6:30 AM, the Hong Kong deaf group was gathered in the hotel lobby when the breakfast room opened up so that we could get an early start to the Vatican.
The President Hotel is very conveniently located next to the Manzoni Metro (subway) station and that made travel to most parts of the city quite easy. Here the group descends into the subway system.
Deaf groups from approximately 20 countries met near the entrance to St. Peter's Square to attend the weekly papal audience. Today was the last audience before the pope begins his summer vacation at Castel Gandolfo.
Fr. Cyril Axelrod came to Hong Kong to work with Chinese deaf people and lived with Fr. Charlie Dittmeier at the Maryknoll Bishop Ford Center. Now he is both deaf and blind and living in a deaf-blind center in London, but he came for this pilgrimage and here was reacquainted with one of the deaf women from Hong Kong.
The deaf groups arrived early in St. Peter's Square to get good seats close to the pope, but he did not arrive until 10:30 AM so there was a long time to wait under a very hot sun.
A recent addition to St. Peter's Square are large video screens to allow the tens of thousands of pilgrims to see clearly what the pope is doing. Today a small insert was added to the screen to show a sign language interpreter for our deaf group.
Each of the 20 or so countries that sent a deaf group had their own sign language interpreters who were prominently visible throughout the crowd. About 1200 deaf people and their families attended this pilgrimage.
After the papal gathering ended about noon, the Hong Kong group ate pizza again near the Vatican so they would be close to the buses leaving from there to go to the afternoon's conference center.
Charlie Dittmeier ran into many old friends from the years when he worked with the deaf community in the United States. here he is with Fr. Tony Shuerger, Terry Metaener, and Fr. Joe Mulcrone who first had the idea for this world pilgrimage.
In the afternoon, all the deaf groups gathered at the Divine Amore conference center outside of Rome. This is the Hong Kong group all dressed in T-shirts made for this trip.
Terry Metaener spoke of her experiences growing up as a Catholic deaf person in the United States. Five other deaf people from other countries also spoke. At any given time, there were seventeen sign language interpreters signing for their own groups plus six to eight voice interpreters working in translation booths.
Finally about 8:00 PM at night, we arrived back in St. Peter's Square and prepared to go to supper at the end of a long day.
