THE JOURNEY
The Hermitages of Central Italy: Subiaco, the Carceri, La Verna and Camaldoli
- Where
- Italy
- Length
- About eight to ten days
- Status
- Under consideration
This journey would link the caves and cells where three saints went to be alone with God: St. Benedict's cave at Subiaco, the hermitage of St. Francis in the gorge above Assisi, the mountain of La Verna, and St. Romuald's Camaldoli in the forest of the Casentino in Tuscany. The order runs from the hermit site nearest Rome, through Assisi, to the most secluded place last, so that the quiet deepens as the road goes on and the journey ends by staying, not by moving. It would keep to as few bases as the roads allow, with one main visit in a day, one full day of silence at a hermitage, and a closing stay of several nights beside a living monastic community, if that community can receive the group.
The route, and why each place belongs
- 1
Subiaco: the Monastery of St. Benedict (Sacro Speco)
Why it belongs
The monastery is built around the cave where, according to St. Gregory the Great as retold by Benedict XVI, the young Benedict lived completely alone for three years. Benedict XVI called those years a time of solitude with God, and they came before any Rule or community.
What you would do there
The pilgrim would go to the cave itself and be given time to stay there in silence, not only to pass through. It would be a fitting place to begin the first slow reading of a Gospel passage, such as St. Mark's account of the Lord rising before dawn and going off to a deserted place to pray.
- 2
Assisi: the Eremo delle Carceri on Mount Subasio
Why it belongs
St. Francis came again and again to this hermitage in a wooded gorge above Assisi to pray. Friars still live there, and visitors keep silence.
What you would do there
The full day of silence could be kept here, with unhurried hours among the trees and the caves that local Franciscan tradition identifies with Francis and his companions. Assisi would be the base for several nights, leaving a further day free for a quiet hour at the tombs of St. Francis and St. Clare.
- 3
The Sanctuary of La Verna
Why it belongs
Francis withdrew to this mountain in the summer of 1224, and it remains a place of pilgrimage that is itself a hermitage site. St. John Paul II said on the mountain in 1993 that here the Poor Man of Assisi received the stigmata, as a seal of his constant and passionate search for God.
What you would do there
The day would be given to the sanctuary alone, with time to pray in silence on the mountain where Francis prayed, and to join the prayer of the Franciscan community where the sanctuary welcomes pilgrims to it.
- 4
Camaldoli: the monastery and the Sacred Hermitage
Why it belongs
St. Romuald came to this forest around 1012, and his foundation still joins a monastery to a hermitage of individual cells, which stand about three kilometres apart. It is the place on this route where the hermit life is still lived, and where the community's guesthouse receives those who wish to share the monks' prayer.
What you would do there
The journey would end with its longest stay: several nights in or beside the monastery guesthouse, on the conditions the community sets and only if it can receive the group, following the monks' hours of prayer in their church. A visit to the Sacred Hermitage, where visitors may see the cell of St. Romuald, would be the only outing; the remaining days would be left to the psalms, the forest and silence.
Prayer and the sacraments
Mass would be the center of each day where the schedule permits, with its own silences kept, and clergy arrangements are confirmed for each departure. Around it the days could hold a protected hour of silent prayer, one Gospel passage read slowly as lectio divina, and the Liturgy of the Hours joined wherever a community welcomes guests to it. Confession would be offered where confessors are available.
Pilgrim’s Time
Pilgrim's Time is where much of the silence would be kept. On this journey it could be a whole afternoon at a hermitage with nothing scheduled after it, an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, a walk without conversation, or an evening without a phone. Conversation would have its own time, at table and on the road, so that the silence can have its own.
Pilgrim Pace
Hermits chose remote ground. The Carceri lies in a steep gorge on Mount Subasio, La Verna and Camaldoli are mountain sites, Assisi is a hill town of steep streets and steps, and there would be road transfers between the bases. Long periods of sitting or kneeling are a demand of their own, and monastery guesthouses are often simple buildings; ask about gradients, steps and seating before committing.
How Pilgrim Pace worksIf you can stay longer
Pilgrims who have not seen Rome could add some days among the great basilicas before Subiaco. Those who find they want several days of unbroken silence with a director could follow the journey with a retreat at a monastery or retreat house that receives guests for that purpose.
Other ways to make this pilgrimage
- Carmel in Castile: Ávila, Alba de Tormes and Segovia. A Spanish journey could follow St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross through the towns where they lived, wrote and are entombed, with two bases at most, a protected hour of silent prayer each day and their own texts read in the places they describe.
- A quieter way through Rome and Assisi. The Rome and Assisi Classic is a general itinerary and not a silent one, but it keeps two bases and leaves an afternoon in Assisi free, which a pilgrim could use for the Carceri hermitage or a quiet hour at the tombs.
- Mount Carmel within a Holy Land journey. A Holy Land pilgrimage could add Mount Carmel, the mountain of Elijah where the Carmelite order began, and unhurried days in Galilee, subject to conditions in the region at the time.
No dated departures are currently announced. This is a journey Bold Pilgrim is considering, described so you can picture it. Dates, priest, Gateway Airport and price are published on a departure itself, and only when confirmed.
UNDERSTANDING THIS PILGRIMAGE
A silence and contemplation pilgrimage, also called a contemplative pilgrimage, takes a person worn out by noise to the places where the Church learned to be quiet with God, such as Carmelite Ávila, the hermitages of St. Francis and St. Benedict, and monasteries that still keep the hours of prayer, and it is made slowly enough that the pilgrim can actually pray there. No experience of silent prayer is needed to begin. It borrows the stillness of a retreat but remains a pilgrimage: you travel to holy places with the Church, and the silence is kept for the sake of listening to Jesus Christ, not for its own sake.
What this pilgrimage is: a pilgrimage, not a retreat
A pilgrimage and a retreat are close relatives and worth telling apart. On a retreat you go to one house and stay there, usually in silence and often with a director or a series of talks; the withdrawal is the point. On a pilgrimage you travel to a holy place, the road and the arrival are both part of the prayer, and you go with the Church to where a saint lived or the Lord acted. A writer in a seminary's journal, who expected the one and was given the other, put it simply: a retreat involves sitting or kneeling, and a pilgrimage involves walking.
A silence and contemplation pilgrimage sits between them on purpose. It keeps the destination, the saints and the shared road of a pilgrimage, and borrows from the retreat its slowness and its protected quiet. If what you need is several days of unbroken silence in one place with a spiritual director, make a retreat; many monasteries and retreat houses receive guests for exactly that, and the Church's letter on meditation says that a Christian needs certain periods of retreat into solitude. If you want to pray where Teresa prayed, or climb to the cave where Francis slept, and to have time to be quiet once you are there, this is the pilgrimage.
Why someone is drawn to it
Few people come to this kind of pilgrimage out of curiosity. Most come tired. Some are tired of noise in the plain sense: the phone, the feed, the office, a house that is never quiet. Speaking in a Charterhouse in 2011, Benedict XVI observed that some people are no longer able to remain for long in silence and solitude, and warned that in a life filled at every moment with sound and images the virtual risks predominating over the real. Many pilgrims recognize themselves in that description and want to find out whether they can still be still.
Others come because their prayer has outgrown its old form. They have said their prayers faithfully for decades, sense that they are being asked to say less and listen more, and do not know how. Others are carrying a decision, a grief or a long weariness from ministry or caregiving, and need room more than they need input. And some have made the great pilgrimages, loved them, and came home wishing there had been one hour at the grotto or the tomb with nothing scheduled after it.
It is fair to say why someone might hesitate, too. Silence can be uncomfortable, especially at first; what noise has kept at a distance tends to arrive when the noise stops. That is one reason the tradition surrounds silence with structure: the Mass, the psalms, a page of the Gospel, a set time, a place where other people are praying. Nobody is asked to sit alone facing a blank wall.
The Catholic foundation: silence in order to listen
Christian silence is not an achievement and it is not an escape. It is what a person does in order to listen to Someone. The Gospels show Jesus doing it: Mark records that He rose very early, before dawn, and went off to a deserted place to pray. Benedict XVI, near the end of his catecheses on the prayer of Jesus in 2012, pointed to the Lord "withdrawing to lonely places, away from the crowds" at the decisive moments of His mission, and drew the conclusion for us: "Inward and outward silence are necessary if we are to be able to hear this word."
The Catechism gives contemplative prayer a section of its own and opens it with St. Teresa of Ávila, for whom it is nothing else than a close sharing between friends, time taken frequently to be alone with the One who we know loves us. It goes on to call this prayer a gift that can only be accepted in humility, a gaze of faith fixed on Jesus, a hearing of the Word of God, and silence. It quotes the peasant of Ars who explained what he did before the tabernacle: "I look at him and he looks at me."
Two things follow for a pilgrim. First, place matters. The Catechism says that the choice of a favorable place is not a matter of indifference for true prayer, and among such places it names monasteries, which offer the solitude that more intense personal prayer needs, together with pilgrimages and shrines. Second, none of this is reserved to monks and nuns. St. John Paul II wrote at the opening of this millennium that it would be wrong to think ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer, and he pointed the whole Church to the teaching of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila.
The Church is equally clear about what this silence is not. Her 1989 letter on Christian meditation describes prayer as "a personal, intimate and profound dialogue between man and God", says that it does not rest on technique, and observes that the emptiness God asks of us is the renunciation of selfishness, not a blank mind. A pilgrimage of silence is a pilgrimage toward a Person. The quiet is there so that Jesus Christ can be heard.
The traditions that kept the silence
The Church did not learn silence from a single school. The Catechism traces it to the desert fathers and to the hermits, monks and nuns who have given their time to the praise of God and to intercession for His people. St. Benedict lived three years alone in a cave at Subiaco before he wrote a Rule; Benedict XVI called those years a time of solitude with God. Around 1012 St. Romuald came to the forest of the Casentino in Tuscany, where Camaldoli still joins a monastery to a hermitage of small cells. In 1084 St. Bruno and six companions asked the Bishop of Grenoble for a place of solitude and began the Grande Chartreuse, mother house of the Carthusians. Benedict XVI summed up their life for the monks of Serra San Bruno in Bruno's own phrase: to leave what is fleeting and to grasp what is eternal.
Carmel is the tradition most people have in mind when they speak of contemplative prayer. Benedict XVI recalled that the slopes of Mount Carmel are dotted with caves once used by hermits, that the most famous of these men of God was the prophet Elijah, and that the Carmelite order arose under his inspiration. It was Elijah who, on Horeb, met the Lord not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in what one translation renders as "a light silent sound". In sixteenth-century Castile St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross reformed that order and wrote books on prayer that the Church has never stopped recommending. Both are Doctors of the Church.
St. Francis belongs here as well. He returned throughout his life to the Carceri, a hermitage in a wooded gorge on Mount Subasio above Assisi, and in the summer of 1224 he withdrew to the mountain of La Verna. St. John Paul II, speaking on that mountain in 1993, said that it was there that the Poor Man of Assisi received the stigmata, as a seal of his constant and passionate search for God. The Franciscan family keeps the feast of the Stigmata on September 17.
One correction is worth making early. The orders best known for silence do not take a vow of silence. The Trappists say so themselves: their vows are stability, obedience and conversion of manners, and silence is a discipline kept for the sake of prayer, with speech permitted when work, community life or spiritual guidance needs it. The Carthusians, whose life is more solitary still, name the same three vows, and their own account of the life includes a weekly walk on which the fathers converse freely.
Questions pilgrims ask
What is a contemplative pilgrimage?
A contemplative pilgrimage, which Bold Pilgrim calls a silence and contemplation pilgrimage, is a journey to places formed by the Church's contemplative traditions, made slowly enough to pray there. It might take in Carmelite Ávila and Segovia, the hermitages of St. Francis at the Carceri and La Verna, St. Benedict's cave at Subiaco, or a monastery that still sings the hours. It has fewer stops, longer stays and protected quiet. The silence is not the goal. The Catechism describes contemplative prayer as a gaze of faith fixed on Jesus, and the journey exists to make room for that.
What is the difference between a pilgrimage and a retreat?
A retreat stays in one house, usually in silence and often with a director; withdrawing is the point. A pilgrimage is a journey to a holy place, and the road, the arrival and the people you travel with are part of the prayer. A contemplative pilgrimage borrows the retreat's slowness and quiet but keeps the destination and the saints.
Full answer: What is the difference between a pilgrimage and a retreat?
What is contemplative prayer?
Contemplative prayer is silent, attentive prayer of the heart before God. The Catechism begins with St. Teresa of Ávila's description: a close sharing between friends, taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. It calls this prayer a gift accepted in humility, a gaze of faith fixed on Jesus, a hearing of God's word, and silence. Meditation, in Catholic usage, is the more active work of thinking over Scripture or a mystery of Christ; contemplation uses fewer words and more attention.
What is lectio divina?
Lectio divina, Latin for divine reading, is an ancient way of praying with Scripture. The U.S. bishops describe four steps. Reading: go slowly through a short passage, several times. Meditation: enter the scene and ask what it means for your life. Prayer: answer God with thanks, petition or sorrow. Contemplation: turn your gaze toward Christ and rest there. It needs no training, only a Bible and unhurried time. On pilgrimage it is often prayed with the Gospel passage that belongs to the place where you are standing.
Do monks take a vow of silence?
Not the orders best known for it. The Trappists state that they have never taken an explicit vow of silence; their vows are stability, obedience and conversion of manners. The Carthusians, who live in greater solitude still, name the same three vows, and their fathers take a weekly walk on which they converse freely. Silence is a discipline kept so that prayer can be continual, with speech when work, community life or spiritual guidance requires it. Guests at a monastery are asked to respect that quiet, not to take a vow.
Where can I go on a contemplative pilgrimage?
In Spain: Ávila, where St. Teresa was born and began her reform; Alba de Tormes, where she died and is entombed; and Segovia, where St. John of the Cross is entombed. In Italy: St. Benedict's cave at Subiaco, the Carceri hermitage above Assisi, La Verna, and Camaldoli, where a monastery with a guesthouse and a hermitage of cells stand about three kilometres apart. In France the Grande Chartreuse can be seen only from outside, with a museum two kilometres below it. In the Holy Land, Mount Carmel. These are places of Catholic pilgrimage, not a list of Bold Pilgrim departures; no dated departures are currently announced.
Can I find silence on a group pilgrimage or at a busy shrine?
Yes, with planning. A priest who directed a Rome-based pilgrimage organization named three risks for modern pilgrims: living through images, staying in constant contact with home, and speed. He named the Lourdes grotto, the tomb in the Holy Sepulchre and the Sea of Galilee as places where one can do little but pray, and suggested the lake in the silence of early morning or late evening. Ask any organizer how many bases the itinerary has, how much of each day is unscheduled, and whether there is a quiet day. Then do your part: look and pray before you photograph, and leave the phone in your room for a few hours.
I have never prayed in silence. How do I start?
Start small and start with a text. Choose a quiet church or chapel, set a short time, and read a few verses of a Gospel slowly. When your attention wanders, and it will, return to a single phrase or to the name of Jesus without scolding yourself. The Catechism says that words in this prayer are like kindling that feeds the fire of love, and that one can always enter into inner prayer. If nothing seems to happen, stay anyway. Benedict XVI taught that God's silence does not indicate His absence.
