UNDERSTANDING THIS PILGRIMAGE

Yes: a walking pilgrimage is a journey made on foot to a holy place, in which the days of walking are themselves part of the prayer and not only the way of getting there. The best known is the Camino de Santiago, the network of routes across Spain to the tomb venerated as that of the Apostle St. James, but Catholics also walk to Rome on the Via Francigena, to Chartres, to Jasna Góra in Poland and to shrines at home. The Catechism says pilgrimages "evoke our earthly journey toward heaven"; walking makes that literal, and the road ends in a church, at Mass, before Jesus Christ. Nobody can promise what the road will change in you. It gives you days in which to pray.

What a walking pilgrimage is: a people on the way

Walking to a holy place is older than the Church. Israel went up to Jerusalem on foot for the great feasts, singing the Psalms of Ascent (Psalms 120-134), and Mary and Joseph made that journey every year for Passover, taking Jesus with them when He was twelve (Luke 2:41-42). Jesus calls Himself "the way" (John 14:6), the first Christians were known as followers of "the Way" (Acts 9:2), and on the day of the Resurrection He walked beside two disciples on the road to Emmaus and was known to them in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:13-35). That last scene is the pattern of every walking pilgrimage: a road, a conversation with Christ, and the Eucharist at the end of it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the meaning in one line: "Pilgrimages evoke our earthly journey toward heaven and are traditionally very special occasions for renewal in prayer" (2691). The Holy See's Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy calls pilgrimage the most significant of the expressions of popular piety tied to holy places, and recalls the medieval journeys to the Holy Land and to the tombs of the Apostles and martyrs. Until quite recently most of that travelling was done on foot. For most pilgrims the walk was not an optional extra. It was the pilgrimage.

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking in the Cathedral of Santiago in 2010, drew the line between this and a walking holiday: "To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history." It means, he said, "to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself." A pilgrimage on foot is a devotion, freely chosen. No Catholic is obliged to make one. But it is a devotion with deep roots in Scripture and in the practice of the saints.

The Camino de Santiago, and why it is first

The Camino is the model because it has never stopped being what it was. The Cathedral of Santiago counts the city with Jerusalem and Rome as one of the three great pilgrimage cities of Christianity. Pilgrims have walked to the tomb venerated as the Apostle's since the ninth century, and the cathedral that receives them still does so as a church: with a Pilgrim's Mass, priests to hear Confessions, a crypt where the relics are venerated beneath the high altar, and the old custom of climbing behind the altar to embrace the statue of St. James. Whether St. James is really buried there is a fair question with its own answer, linked on this page.

The cathedral's own paperwork says the same thing. The pilgrim credential is issued for those who walk "with a Christian sentiment, even if it is only with an attitude of search," and the Compostela, the cathedral's Latin certificate, is given to those who arrive for religious or spiritual reasons after at least the last 100 km on foot. The certificate is a record. It is not the purpose. An indulgence is something else again: the Catechism defines it as the remission of temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven (1471), and the indulgence answers linked on this page set out what the Church asks.

Many who walk today would not call themselves religious. Hundreds of thousands arrive in Santiago each year, and by the Pilgrim's Office's own figures, as the press has reported them, well under half give a purely religious motive. That is not a reason for a Catholic to stay away. It is a description of the road as it has always been, shared with people who are searching, and a reason to walk it deliberately as a pilgrim: with Mass where it is offered, Confession before the end, and an intention carried the whole way.

Beyond the Camino: other roads Catholics walk

The Camino is one road among several. The Via Francigena brings walkers to Rome and the tomb of St. Peter, and pilgrims who have travelled at least 100 km on foot to Rome can ask St. Peter's Basilica for the Testimonium, Rome's counterpart to the Compostela. In France, pilgrims walk from Paris to the cathedral of Chartres at Pentecost. In Poland, organized groups from towns and cities across the country walk each summer to the icon of Our Lady at Jasna Góra, a custom centuries old; the Warsaw pilgrimage has set out every year since 1711. In Spain the Ignatian Way retraces the journey of St. Ignatius from Loyola to Manresa, and in Italy the Way of St. Francis leads into Assisi.

There are also walking pilgrimages closer to home. In the United States there are established walks to shrines in Kansas and Wisconsin, among others, and our answer on walking pilgrimages in the United States describes them. A walking pilgrimage does not need an ocean crossing. It needs a holy place, a road, and the decision to pray your way along it.

Some walks are short and steep and belong more to penance than to distance: the hills of Medjugorje, Croagh Patrick in Ireland, the last mile into a shrine. They are treated under Penitential Pilgrimage, and they are worth knowing about if a week of walking is not possible for you.