By Katie Vasquez
Right now Peter’s Way Tours is busy planning their most important trip for 2025.
“We started almost a year ago on booking pilgrimages for the Jubilee,” Peter Bahou, founder and president of Peter’s Way Tours, tells Currents News. “The Jubilee is once every 25 years.”
In preparation for the momentous occasion, Peter’s Way has nearly 140 people in the Diocese of Brooklyn planning to head to Rome for the Jubilee year. It’s a time when people of faith are encouraged to embark on pilgrimages, repent their sins, and focus on their spiritual life.
“It’s a time of conversion. It’s a time of getting closer to the Lord,” Father Robert Adamo, pastor of St Ephrem Church in Brooklyn, explains. His parishioners in Dyker Heights are excited to fly to Rome next year. Fr. Adamo will be taking nearly two dozen parishioners, and the anticipation is already building.
“[They’re] taking the brochures, they’re reading about it, [about] the different places we’re going,” says Fr. Adamo, “So, yes, there is a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of excitement about it.”
While there are a multitude of events for everyone in the church including clergy, young people, armed forces, artists and so much more, St Ephrem is choosing to go during Lent, a time when Fr. Adamo believes people are seeking a connection with Christ.
“It is a time when people generally feel it is a time they want to do more spiritually,” he explains.
Bahou, founder of Peter’s Way Tours, says the thousands of other pilgrims traveling across the globe to Rome have made the planning difficult. “We are doing very well for the Jubilee. However,” he notes, “we received many other requests which we cannot accommodate. Hotels, especially during the peak season in Rome, are taken, sold out. But it’s going to be a tremendous year for the Jubilee” nonetheless, he believes.
Fr. Adamo says the trip is well worth it for the rewards they’ll receive: “If we do reconciliation and prayer and going through the Holy doors, there’s indulgences… spiritual gifts that we gain in this time of Jubilee.”
Immaculate Conception Church in Astoria, Queens is also planning to send a group in June, 2025, and 80 young people from the Diocese of Brooklyn will head to Rome in July.
If you would like to join one of the groups going to Rome, head to https://www.petersway.com/.