Note: Dedicated to my friend Timothy Herman and his lovely family

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There are so many things to love about Switzerland and admire about the Swiss people that it’s difficult to focus on just one thing as you end up feeling that that you are doing the country and its people a disservice. That’s just how rich of a place it is, and I use the word “rich” not in the financial sense, but rather to describe its shared wealth in terms of social and cultural development. One of the many things to admire about the country is how you can get anywhere by train. Every city, town, and village is connected by the Swiss train system. The trains are always on time, always clean and comfortable, and the natural beauty of the country makes any journey much more than just tolerable.

I lived in Switzerland for a year some 20 years ago, and I immediately threw myself into the local cultures and learning about them as much as I could over the course of several dozen weekends. The train system made my task much easier to accomplish, as I was able to head out to all points in this small country with ease and be back in time to do what I was employed to do for the time I was there.

I based myself in the town of Solothurn, the capital of the canton of the same name. Considered Switzerland’s most beautiful baroque town, it sits at the foot of the Jura Alps (not to be confused with the Swiss Alps to the south), and has an incredibly beautiful walled town that sits along the Aare River, wonderfully-preserved due to both the efforts of the local administrations throughout the years, and especially to centuries of official Swiss neutrality. The canton of Solothurn is a Catholic one, which gives it a lot of its specific character in a country where Catholicism competed with various strands of Protestantism, particularly Calvinism.

The town of Solothurn is 42 km to the north of the Swiss capital, Bern. Bern’s old town is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been. Surrounded on three sides by the Aare River (the same one that runs through Solothurn), it is UNESCO-protected and reminds one of a fairy tale. As a person who grew up in North America, seeing well-preserved old buildings and structures such as those found in Bern’s old town never, ever got old. I would routinely jump on a train in Solothurn and make the short trip to Bern on Saturdays at least once a month while I was in Switzerland.

It was the first Saturday in April of 2005 that I decided to take another trip to Bern, but this time I decided that I would do something different this time. Instead of taking the train back, I would leave for Bern earlier than usual and then walk all the way back to Solothurn. The weather forecast promised a “mostly sunny” day with warm temperatures. “Why not?”, I thought to myself. 40 kilometres may seem like a long hike, but in excellent conditions such as those that presented themselves on that spring day, it would be an excellent way to get a better feel for the countryside between the Swiss capital and the little baroque town where I then resided.

40 kilometres is a long way to walk! “It’s worth it, anyway”, I thought to myself somewhere around kilometre 16. I was getting a sense of the lay of the land via foot, something that you cannot get by train voyage. At a certain point beyond the suburbs of Bern, I was able to identify how these towns and villages fed into the Swiss capital logistically and economically in times past, as the spread of the city (and the modern structures that accompanied them) had not yet permeated this far.

Bern is not just the capital of Switzerland, it is also the capital of the canton that shares the same name. Unlike Solothurn, Canton Bern is Protestant. This means that it has certain characteristics in terms of culture and governance that separate it from Switzerland’s Catholic cantons. As the country is very decentralized, these local customs and laws make the country all the more unique….and interesting.

I calculated that I would be back home around 8pm that night, just in time to get ready for a party later that evening that I was invited to. It must have been around 6:30pm when I approached Biberist, a town just inside of Solothurn Canton. Church bells were ringing, and they were ringing for some time. I did not hear any church bells ringing while walking through Canton Bern. The bells did not stop ringing. I was used to church bells ringing at several points through the day in Solothurn, but this time was different as the ringing continued without end. “What’s going on here? It’s not a special Saint’s Day”, I wondered to myself.

It took me a few minutes, but then I realized that this meant that Pope John Paul II had died. The entire world knew that he was not long for this world, and that he could pass at any moment. For me and many like me, he was the only Pontiff that we really knew. I was too young to remember the two who preceded him, so Pope John Paul II was a permanent fixture in my life up until that point, much like Queen Elizabeth II was for many of us up until recently, or like Donald Trump is for us Gen Xers to this day. This was a moment of significance for me, as this would be the first time that I would get to experience what it meant for a new Pope to take the seat at St. Peter’s.

There was so much to think about, and the weight of the significance of the passing of such an important Pope was immense. John Paul II represented a challenge to the Eastern Bloc, and to the communist system that ruled it. The symbolism of electing the first non-Italian Pontiff in centuries was huge. The fact that it was a Pole made that symbolism even bigger, its importance impossible to deny. For those of us Catholics who lived in (or came from) communist countries, this was “our guy”. He was a direct challenge to the monopoly on power held by communists in Central and Eastern Europe, one who threatened not just their rule, but the materialist philosophy underpinning it.

Over the years, many people have asked me to write about faith, particularly my faith as a Catholic. I have always politely demurred from doing this, as I am not exactly the most spiritual of people. In fact, I often jokingly describe myself as “religious, not spiritual”, the inverse of the Eat. Pray. Love. type of female who will claim to be “spiritual, not religious”. There are so many people out there who are better qualified to write or speak on this subject than I am for the simple reason that they have something that I have lacked all these years; a greater sense of, or relation to, the spiritual.

There are many people out there who have received a calling, or who have experienced something spiritually transcendent. I am not one of those people. I do know people like this, and I have encountered actual, serious people who are pious. They are either built different from me, or have experienced something that I have never experienced, or am yet to experience. I am Catholic due to the culture that I was raised in. I am baptized and confirmed. I have received the Sacraments. Just as importantly, at least to myself, Catholicism makes sense to me. This sounds like an attempt at rationalization, and I will accept that criticism. But as I grow older and continue to familiarize myself with Catholic thinking of the past, I keep finding myself in agreement with people like St. Thomas Aquinas or Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903).