When the Pilgrim Trails Return

Last updated on: June 9, 2022 at 12:39 am by Philip Jenkins

When the Pilgrim Trails Return 2022-05-24T11:35:32-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I have an observation, and a question. Pilgrimage is enjoying an astonishing revival in the contemporary West, including in countries that we think of as very secular – especially in Europe. But as far as I can tell, the phenomenon is nothing like as booming in the US. Why might that be? And why, specifically, does the United States have no great pilgrimage centers on European lines, comparable to Lourdes or Fátima or Compostela?

I stress from the outset that I am talking here about Christian pilgrimage. Most other religions have their own traditions, particularly these days in Europe, not to mention the lively theme of New Age pilgrimage, but those are stories for a different time.

By most measures, the United States has long been a much more religious society than most of Europe. Church attendance figures are much higher, and religious institutions occupy a far greater role in public life. That phenomenon might now be changing, with the rapid rise of the Nones, but let that comment stand for right now. It is Europe, though, that over the past thirty years or so has witnessed a massive revival in pilgrimage. Historic pilgrim shrines like Compostela have experienced huge growth in numbers, and whole new centers like Medjugorje have appeared. Lourdes, which drew about a million visitors each year in the 1950s, now records closer to six million annually, and 50,000 might pass through even on a quiet day. Each year, Poland’s Jasna Góra, in Czestochowa, attracts four or five million who come to see a miraculous picture of the Virgin, supposedly drawn from life by St. Luke the Evangelist. Each year, around 15 percent of Poles make a pilgrimage to some site. Four million believers visit the site of Mary’s apparition at Portugal’s Fátima. Below the level of such celebrity sites, dozens of lesser centers thrive. Europe as a whole has probably five hundred images of the Black Virgin, and many are venerated at active pilgrimage sites, like Bavaria’s Altötting and Spain’s Montserrat.

Apart from the actual destinations, pilgrim trails and pathways are now widely recognized and actively promoted by tourist authorities as well as churches, and that is as true of Protestant areas as well as Catholic and Orthodox. Before the Reformation, everyone knew the routes that led to centers like Compostela, roads marked by hostels and inns, where believers could obtain souvenirs and pilgrim passports. Largely in the present century, the identification and revival of such long-forgotten pilgrim trails has been a major endeavor for religious believers no less than secular tourist authorities. Pilgrimage tourism has become very big business.

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Partly, the revival grows out of the renewed interest in Compostela, and the elaborate trail systems of St. James’s Way, traversing southern France and northern Spain. Today, that route has been extended into Switzerland and even the northern Netherlands. Newly inspired pilgrims then demanded the restoration of other ancient trails, such as the 1,300 mile Via Francigena leading from Canterbury to Rome. That in turn provoked local initiatives in most European countries, where tourist maps now abound with serpentine trails spanning hundreds of miles. In Great Britain, St. Cuthbert’s Way unites the shrines of medieval northern England. You can walk across North Wales, taking the healing waters at St Winefride’s Holy Well, and continuing to the holy island sanctuary at Bardsey. Cornwall’s Saints’ Way was recognized anew only in the late 1980s.

New examples surface every couple of years. One recent British Isles example is the Way of St Aidan and St David. This “will link St David’s Cathedral, in Pembrokeshire [Wales], with Ferns Abbey, Co. Wexford, in southern Ireland, and will involve pilgrims in a sea crossing between Rosslare and Fishguard.” In my old stamping ground of South Wales, the St. Thomas Way links Hereford and Swansea. There are many, many other local examples. The faster the church attendance figures drop, the more rapidly have shiny new markers appeared along the restored pilgrim trails.

One unlikely example of such a revival comes from Protestant Norway. Although Norwegians are commonly baptized into the Lutheran national church, religious attendance and participation have declined sharply, and the country looks like a classic example of Scandinavian secularism. But it was not always so, and the medieval church had its beloved saints, above all Olaf, a fierce warrior who perished in battle in 1030. The cathedral of Nidaros was built over his remains, in what became the modern city of Trondheim. In its day, Nidaros was a far northern counterpart to Santiago, that other center for the veneration of a mighty Christian warrior, James the Moor-Slayer. As at Santiago itself, a wide-ranging network of roads once led pilgrims to Nidaros. Those pathways fell out of use at the Reformation, but just since the late 1990s, they have once more been marked out, and they are much used. The main branch of St. Olav’s Way – the pilgrimsleden – runs some four hundred miles from Oslo, but you can join it from other centers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The whole network includes three thousand miles of Scandinavian trails. Also within the past decade or so, state-supported pilgrim centers and hostels have reappeared along the way.

It is legitimate to ask whether modern travelers along St Olav’s Way are pilgrims in any meaningful sense, or if they are simply hikers and outdoor explorers with a taste for a spectacular and varied northern landscape. Certainly, the official publicity associated with the route speaks to secular audiences as well as religious, but it duly stresses the “inner journey” and “mental transformation” that visitors can expect. As any reader of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales knows, travellers along the pilgrim ways have always been fired by a diversity of motives, sacred and profane, worthy and otherwise. When was there ever a sharp division between tourism and religious seeking?

Anyone even slightly aware of religious matters can point to a dozen European shrines and churches that attract large numbers of pilgrims. But what about the United States, home to perhaps seventy million Catholics? Could anyone not deeply steeped in Catholic culture point to a celebrated U.S. shrine like those of Europe or Brazil? And most of those so learned tend to the older and more traditional side of the church spectrum. Could most younger Catholics come up with such names? I can point to many local and regional American shrines, perhaps forty or fifty in all, and some enormously popular. For South-Western Catholics, for instance, few places compete in holiness with the Santuario at Chimayo in New Mexico. Maryland has the national shrine of the Virgin Mary, at Emmitsburg, near to the home of St. Elizabeth Seton. New York state has the national shrine of the astonishing Mohawk saint, Kateri Tekawitha – but again, how many ordinary believers could tell you where it was?

Particular churches, cathedrals, and religious houses have established shrines and encouraged pilgrimages, but with no disrespect to such places, few indeed have any reputation far beyond their own states, or indeed their immediate localities. Many are strictly targeted at particular ethnic communities, as with the Polish-oriented shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. An unscientific observation suggests that the visitors to such local shrines are not large in number, and they tend to an older demographic. The main exception is Emmitsburg, which draws heavily from the various newer ethnic communities concentrated in such numbers on the East Coast. In recent years, for instance, Vietnamese Catholics have turned out to Emmitsburg in their thousands to celebrate the Virgin of La Vang. But these are, as I say, exceptions. In commercial terms, the appeal is strictly directed to a niche market.

I repeat my original question. Why has the U.S. never created a legendary national shrine to compete with European or Latin American centers? More tellingly, why has the U.S. not enjoyed the kind of sweeping popular revival of pilgrim travel that has been such a prominent part of European religious life just since the 1990s? Where are all the trails, seeking to link such places, like those that now cross-cross secular Europe? Or, dare we hope that we are simply witnessing a time lag, and American pilgrim trails might soon be as jammed as their European counterparts?

I am taking some material here from an article I published in Christian Century, under the title “Restored Pilgrim Paths,” September 2, 2015.

Philip Jenkins

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