Revving up for faith

A Group of devout Catholic men set out from Sydney on their motorcycles to honour St Joseph. They stopped at any church in country NSW named after the great saint and patron of the universal church, for prayers, adoration and where possible – a celebration of the Eucharist. 

They started off from St Joseph’s Kingswood in Sydney and went west to Lithgow, and Bathurst before heading to St Joseph’s in Orange for an overnight stop. 

Next morning they headed south for a swing through the northern part of the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, including staying for the evening in Goulburn itself before ending back in Sydney with prayer and reflection at St Joseph’s Enfield. 

It was their fourth annual pilgrimage that had its roots in St Francis’s 2021 Year of St Joseph. Sydneysiders Branko Poljak and Jim Jankiewicz came up with the idea back then as a way of combining their passions for motorcycling with their love of the faith.

“We called on a few fellow rider friends, and the pilgrimage was born,” Mr Poljak would later write. “It was exciting and something different, and each of us came away touched by it.”

Though a regular group of riders in the past, this year they wanted to reach out to men of faith along the way and they included cars in the pilgrimage for the first time.  

They were also open to other forms of locomotion and one pilgrim travelled by light aircraft for the Goulburn leg!

In Goulburn, they gathered for adoration and the Rosary at the St Joseph’s statue at the Old Cathedral before participating in the Saturday Vigil Mass celebrated by the Archdiocese’s Fr Tony Percy.  

During the Orange stopover about 50 of the local faithful put on a BBQ and an evening encounter and Mass for the pilgrims. 

“It was an absolutely magnificent experience,” Mr Jankiewicz told the Catholic Voice. 

For Mr Jankiewicz the Orange welcome was especially poignant. A new arrival in Australia in the mid-1960s the city was where he had a pivotal encounter with a “soulful” man called Pop who shepherded him into the Catholic faith as an adult convert. 

During adoration at this year’s pilgrimage in Orange he experienced another powerful moment, as if it was “my second baptism”, he said. 

“Other people have had similar encounters in different ways”, he added.

He quoted from Psalm 133 (New Jerusalem Bible): “How good, how delightful it is to live as brothers all together!”

“We really experience that in those situations,” Mr Jankiewicz said.