Ohio, South Carolina, Washington...

...a travelogue is not neccesarily interesting, and people who use their blogs to publicise their general activities are not perhaps the best bloggers. So Auntie will spare you her "yesterday I flew on to Newtown..." chatter. There are big issues being debated in America: I will long remember this January 2012 visit.

South Carolina is fortunate in having a fine priest, Fr Dwight Longenecker, among the local clergy and you can read his blog here. A couple of buses packed with young people went from Greenville, S. Carolina, to Washington for the March for Life and it was great to be able to travel with them. On the March (vast crowds, lots of rain, squelchy underfoot as we listened to speeches on the Washington Mall and the thousands of feet inevitably churned the lawns into mud) I saw a banner saying "Thank you, Pope Benedict XXVI for Anglicananorum Ceotibus" and it amused me. How many of Washington's politicians, I wondered, would know what the banner was saying? Are they fluent in Latin? And would the message, in any case, encourage them to help overturn Roe v. Wade? But I squelched over to investigate, and the banner was also carrying a pro-life message and was being held high by a cheery group of new members of the Ordinariate glowing with goodwill and joy. It was great to march alongside and swap news and share enthusiasm.

America is in the middle of a great heart-searching about aborting its unborn children, a heart-searching that has yet to take place in Europe.The modern-day United States of America, with all its very obvious faults, is a country where millions believe in God and pray to him daily.It is a country with a future.

After our section of the March had reached its destination at the Capitol building, I watched as the thousands and thousand and thousands behind us more marched too. Then I squelched mud into the carpet of the hotel, enjoyed a chat with some of the EWTN team covering the March, drank some hot chocolate, slept for a while and then headed for home, treading mud into the aeroplane and later, much later, into the London streets, and so home.