KVSS radio has posted a long interview with Yours Truly, anticipating our big pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi in May 2007. The St. Paul Center has posted a day-by-day itinerary for the trip. Do consider joining me and my friends Scott and Kimberly Hahn. It’s a life-changing experience, spiritually transforming, to walk in the footsteps of the apostles and martyrs, the Fathers and the saints. It’s also a learning experience, to walk amid the monuments of millennia of western culture — to meditate, up close, on Michelangelo’s Sistine frescos; to celebrate the Eucharist in the Basilica of St. Clement, built from the home of a first-century pope, built over the ruins of a pagan Mithraeum. That’s our history, our ancestry, our life story. It’s our cultural genome mapped out before our eyes. Let’s see it together.

We’ve lined up great guides, devout and expert, to walk us through the sanctuaries and ruins. Scott and Kimberly and I will lead learning sessions in the mornings and evenings, and sometimes at the historic sites as well. Through the meanderings of the day, we’ll offer further observations. And we’ll all have our meals together. It’s a time to establish lasting friendships over good food. I’ve never, ever had a bad meal in Italy.