Roots & Routes: Pilgrims 2026

Roots & Routes – Roots on the Path

A European journey interweaving identity, migration and Scalabrinian spirituality

Bern: where peoples’ paths meet

Bern is a city that does not raise its voice, but speaks with depth. Its orderly streets, ancient arcades, and the river that embraces the old town seem to tell a story of stability. Yet behind this apparent calm, Bern is a surprising crossroads: languages that intertwine, cultures that brush against each other, stories that come from afar and seek a new beginning.

In this collected and bright capital city, human mobility is not a marginal phenomenon: it is part of the everyday landscape. Students, workers, families in search of a future, refugees who carry wounds and hopes in their hearts. Bern has become a laboratory of coexistence, a place where the world meets and reinvents itself.

The Scalabrinian presence: a silent and faithful port

In the midst of this continuous movement, Scalabrinian missionaries and Scalabrinian secular missionaries are a discreet but essential presence. They do not arrive as officials or as observers: they arrive as fellow travelers. They enter the stories of migrant people with a light step, with listening, with a closeness that neither judges nor demands.

Their mission in Bern is made up of simple, everyday gestures: an open door, a word in the native language, help in finding their way around documents and offices, a celebration that makes even those who have left everything behind feel “at home.” It is a presence that does not impose itself, but accompanies. That does not solve everything, but walks alongside.

They are living bridges: between cultures, between generations, between those who arrive and those who welcome. And in their style we recognize the heart of St. Scalabrini: to see in migrants not a problem, but a face; not a mass, but a person; not a phenomenon, but a sacred story.

Why Bern is a valuable stop for young Pilgrims

For young people participating in the PILGRIMS program, Bern becomes a symbolic place: a European city that shows how migration is not just a topic to be discussed, but a reality to be encountered. Here one can experience firsthand what Scalabrini sensed already in his time: that human mobility is a call to fraternity, an invitation to build bridges, an opportunity to rediscover the Gospel in real life.

In Bern, young people find not only a city to visit, but a story to listen to. Not just missionaries to get to know, but witnesses to be provoked by. Not just a European context, but a laboratory of the future.

It is a step that speaks to the heart, because it shows that the Scalabrinian mission is not a memory of the past, but a living, concrete, daily presence. A mission that continues, step by step, together with the migrants of today.