A joint celebration of the Austrian bishops, currently meeting in their autumn plenary assembly, was held in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on 4 November. The mass was also celebrated to mark the Katholikentag of the Catholics of Central Europe MEKT). In the view of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, president of the Episcopal Conference, Austrian Catholics and those of the other seven countries participating in the initiative, “are together on the road” to the realization of this event organized jointly by the Austrian Episcopal Conference and the Episcopal Conferences of the other seven countries. In his homily, Kassian Lauterer, abbot of Mehrerau, stressed that participation in MEKT represents a “transnational pilgrimage” in which it will be possible to “to learn from each other”. “We want he said to give to Europe a sign of the fact that the Christian tradition continues to be effective”. Referring to the culminating event of the Central European Katholikentag, the “pilgrimage of peoples” to the Marian sanctuary of Mariazell on 21-23 May 2004, Lauterer referred to what he called the “geography of faith”, in other words, the network of places of Marian pilgrimage of which John Paul II has also spoken and to the appeal made by theologian Urs von Balthasar for a “Marian and maternal” Church.
