The German dioceses will go on a pilgrimage in the Holy Land from March 2008 to November 2009. On the occasion of the plenary meeting held in early Lent 2007, the German bishops had made an appeal to the devotees, encouraging them to go to the Holy Land. In response to such appeal, the German Pilgrimage Office drew up a schedule of travels. The destinations of such pilgrimages include Galilee, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth, where the largest Catholic community in the Holy Land lives. The first ones to go from 1 to 8 March 2008 will be 400 devotees from the Bavarian dioceses, led by card. Friedrich Wetter. In 2007, in Nazareth it was precisely card. Wetter, with the bishops mgr. Wilhelm Schraml (Passau) and mgr. Gerhard Ludwig Müller (Regensburg), who laid the first stone of a Franciscan parish centre funded by one million euros raised by the three dioceses. According to the director of the Pilgrimage Office of Munich, Bernhard Meyer, there’s been an upsurge in the number of bookings. After the Bavarian devotees, between 31 October and 7 November it will be the turn of the pilgrims of the dioceses of the ecclesiastic province of the Upper Rhine, in March 2009 those from the ecclesiastic province of the Lower Rhine, while between October and November 2009 they will come from the ecclesiastic province of Hamburg, Central Germany and Berlin.
