September 27, 2025
— Our Lady of Medjugorje
Waldo was in his 90s, and several of his family members had hesitations when he announced one Sunday after Mass that he was going on a “pilgrimage” with the parish priest to several shrines in Pennsylvania.
“Don’t you have shrines closer to home that you can visit?” someone asked. And “Should a man your age be leaving home and riding across the Northeast in a tour bus?”
Waldo didn’t care. He was going. He had a lifelong devotion to the Blessed Mother and was filled with joy that he was able to make a pilgrimage to her shrine if only in a neighboring state … because he had never gotten to Lourdes, Fatima or Knock.
The pilgrimage was everything he’d hoped it would be. He could have been visiting the gothic cathedrals of Europe, that’s how excited he was. He prayed the rosary with the parishioners, he laughed, he bought souvenirs.
Two days after he got home, he complained of indigestion, but by the time the EMTs got to his house, he had died. As his neighbor offhandedly remarked, “That’s what all that religion will get you.”
But his neighbor didn’t know the whole story and was looking at the events through cynical secular eyes. The true story was much more miraculous.
The day after Waldo returned was pretty momentous. There was a family wedding of his great-niece, and for the first time in a long time he got to see all his family together — and that would probably never happen again anytime soon. He talked, he laughed, he danced. He told them he loved them, and said good night. And that night he died.
His pilgrimage friends had a unique interpretation. They were sure the Blessed Mother came to his bedside and personally took him on his final pilgrimage … to Heaven.
©J Pisani
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