This past weekend (1/12), I traveled to New York City to take part in a conference sponsored by Communion and Liberation, known as the New York Encounter.

This annual gathering, in many ways, reflects the annual meeting held by Communion and Liberation in Rimini, Italy called "Il Meeting" where over one million people come together for a cultural and religious experience. There were about 15,000 people gathered for this meeting in New York.

The New York Encounter is always a very uplifting experience and I was so pleased to see we had such a large group of people from Boston who were able to attend.

The theme of this year's gathering was "An 'Impossible' Unity", striving for unity among people in the world that is so divided.

I was able to visit some of the exhibits that they had during the conference.

I was particularly taken by their wonderful exhibit on Dorothy Day, who was an extraordinary person who brought together intellectuals and street people, and rich and poor. She was an extraordinary figure in American Catholicism, so much so that the Holy Father spoke about her in his address to Congress during his 2015 Apostolic Visit.

Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa became fast friends, and I hadn't known before that Dorothy Day actually went to Calcutta and visited with Mother Teresa and her sisters there.

I had met Dorothy Day when I was in Washington at the Catholic worker house there, and she has always been a great inspiration to me. So, I was very pleased to see they had organized this exhibit to help young people be exposed to the witness of her life and her writings.

On Sunday morning (1/14) I celebrated the Mass for them together with Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States; Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the former nuncio to the United Nations in Geneva; as well as Bishop Steve Raica of Gaylord, Michigan.