Our Trip To Rome! by Gianna

Ciao a tutti! (Hi everyone!) Hopefully, everybody has been well during the absence of my eloquent writings. In this blogpost I’m going to be talking about our recent trip to Italy. Now, before you get all excited to learn about what we did, the people we met, the places we visited, and so on, I’ll kindly ask you to read the fine print.

 

Ahem. As we all know, a blogpost can only hold so much information. As we all assume, a trip to Italy holds much information. This is all to say that in this blogpost, I will mainly be focusing on our time in Rome. BUT, there’s a bit of fine print in that too. For now I will be touching on the highlights of our time in St. Peter's Square (in Vatican City). But if you are receiving our quarterly newsletter, you’ll get to hear some more about our time in Rome/Italy. 

Ok, now that you’ve read that, for those who don’t know the purpose of our time in Italy, you’re going to be very confused in this blogpost. Just kidding. I’ll tell you. We were there for a Missionary Summit for the Jubilee Year, i.e., (from Google) "A gathering within a Christian context focused on the Church global mission to evangelize and make disciples," if that makes sense. We were with about 81 of our other fellow missionaries from Family Missions Company, and we spent most of our time in Rome with them. 

Now I must say before we ended up going to Rome, we were dealing with a lot of challenges, including mold and water in our house and belongings, transitions, and mitigating everyday problems that missionaries stumble upon in their lives. Going to Rome was definitely a nice break from Costa Rica and it refreshed us and gave us new strength to serve our mission better. 

So first, we had Mass and an audience with the Pope! I’ll tell you about the audience first. 

So, it turns out that one of our missionaries who was with us (and actually organized the trip) used to be a tour guide in Rome! She explained that it was best for all of us to get to Saint Peter's at 6:00 a.m, even though the audience wasn’t till 10am. So we got up at the crack of dawn and headed over to Saint Peter's Square with all the other missionaries. We had about an hour+ line, and then waited for about 4 hours for Pope Pope Leo XIV to come out. Despite the long wait, it was a wonderful experience! The Pope gave a speech and then drove around in the back of a pickup truck. :~)

Now the Mass. Wow, that was full of surprises. Since it was a Mass with the Pope, we ended up getting there around 7 hours early. First, our group accidentally got separated, and we were split into two groups on either side of Saint Peter‘s Square. Then one of our missionaries who was in our group got a message that some of our FMC missionary families in the other group were being called up on the stage to be seated at the chairs that were 20 feet from where the pope was going to say Mass. We were all like "What!?"

Some of the people in our group tried to go ask the guards if they could sit up there and explaned to  them that some of their family members were sitting up there, but they were denied. Eventually we got a text from one of our friends who were sitting up there and she said that we should go ask the men in tuxedos who were up at the front because she said that she had talked to one of them and they said that they were wanting families to come sit up there. 

So we took our group up to talk to the men in tuxedos at the front. They said "Yeah sure," and eventually let our whole group up (apparantly because we had a lot of families with kids). So long story short we were able to sit 20 feet from where the Pope was saying Mass and that was so amazing! We prayed for you all while we were there and offered the Mass up for you. The Lord must’ve been really with us that day because that was just a crazyily unlikely experience!

Another amazing part was being able to hang out with our missionary friends from all over the world. It was so nice to be able to talk to people who spoke English! We made a lot of nice memories with all of the 81 other missionaries and will miss being with them.

Thanks so much for reading this. Stay posted for our future blogposts and Winter Newsletter early in 2026 - we are excited to share some of the ways God interceded on our Italy pilgrimage! Hoping God blesses each of you in a special way today,

Che la pace di Cristo ti accompagni ovunque tu vada,

May the peace of Christ be with you wherever you may go 

(Italian) 

Gianna,

(A scholarly wordsmith) ;=)

The Swiss Alps, on the plane ride to Italy

The Pope at the Audience

Pope in Popemobile

Some of us FMC missionaries before the Papal Mass

Pope Leo XIV during Mass