Pilgrimages

Christians go to the Holy Land because Our Lord lived, died, and rose there. Every later pilgrimage learns its shape from that one. A person leaves home. A person walks. A person comes to a place that is named in the Gospel, and prays. The shepherds did it on the night of the birth. Mary and Joseph did it when they brought the child to the Temple. The disciples did it on the road to Emmaus, and then turned back to the city. The Church has kept those places ever since, above all the Basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where the crucifixion and the empty tomb are venerated.

The seven stops, and what a pilgrim finds at each of them now, are studied in The Journey of Jesus. They should be read there, in that order, and not repeated here as if a second account could improve on the Gospel. Bethlehem is the birth. Nazareth is the hidden life and the day the Word was made flesh. The Jordan is the baptism. Cana is the first sign. Capernaum is the town of the public ministry by the lake. Jerusalem is the Supper, the cross, and the tomb. Emmaus is the risen Lord known in the breaking of the bread. The distances, the churches, the Custody of the Holy Land, and the photographs of those shrines belong to that study.

A pilgrim who can go should go to the altar, not only to the view. At the Holy Sepulchre the Church gathers the memory of the death and the resurrection in one building. The other great shrines in this file, Lourdes and Fátima and Walsingham and Loreto among them, send the pilgrim back to him. They do not replace the places where he walked.

The Holy Land is the pilgrimage of Our Lord himself. Our Lady is there with him, from Nazareth to the cross. The Apostles are there. The Saints of the later roads are his friends. They are not a second centre.

The feasts that govern this pilgrimage are the feasts of the Lord: Christmas, the Epiphany, the Baptism of the Lord, the Annunciation on 25 March, the Passion, Easter, and the Ascension. The Church also keeps the dedication of the great shrines in their own days. Those days are named in the Journey, at the places they belong to.

From Jerusalem the old pilgrim roads led on to Rome. Peter and Paul died there. The Pope teaches there. The four great basilicas are the next study, and they are one pilgrimage, not four separate outings.

Rome is the second city of Catholic pilgrimage because the bodies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are there, and because the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of Peter. People go to pray at the tomb of the Apostle who was told to feed the sheep. They go to pray at the tomb of the Apostle of the Gentiles. They go to the cathedral of the Pope, which is not Saint Peter's. They go to the basilica of Our Lady which holds the relic of the Crib. In a Holy Year they go to pass through the Holy Doors. They go, if they can, on foot, as Saint Philip Neri used to lead the Romans around the seven churches.

A pilgrim who has only one morning still needs the map, or the four churches collapse into one dome in the memory.

Saint Peter's is the shrine of the tomb. It stands on the Vatican hill, to the west of the old city, where the Church has held the grave of Peter since the basilica of Constantine. The church a pilgrim enters now was begun on 18 April 1506 under Pope Julius II and consecrated on 18 November 1626 by Pope Urban VIII. The dome is Michelangelo's. The great bronze baldachin over the high altar is Bernini's. Under that altar is the Confessio, the opening down toward the tomb. Near the tomb the Church keeps the pallia, the woollen bands the Pope confers on metropolitan archbishops, which is a way of saying that their office leans on Peter's. The square in front, with Bernini's colonnades, is part of the pilgrimage: the city comes into the arms of the church before it enters the door. In a Jubilee the Holy Door in the facade is opened. On ordinary days the pilgrim still aims at the altar and the tomb, not at the museum. The treasury and the dome are worth seeing. They are not why the Church walks here.

The cathedral of Rome is the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour and of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist at the Lateran. An inscription on the church calls it the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world. Constantine gave the land. The Popes lived beside it for a thousand years before the move to the Vatican. Fire, earthquake, and rebuilding have changed the walls. What the pilgrim sees inside is in large part the seventeenth-century remaking. The rank of the building has not changed. The Pope is Bishop of Rome, and this is his cathedral. A Catholic who has been to Saint Peter's and not to the Lateran has seen the tomb and missed the chair of the diocese. Beside the basilica is the baptistery, one of the oldest in the West. Close by, the Holy Stairs are venerated. Tradition says they are the stairs of Pilate's house in Jerusalem, climbed by pilgrims on their knees. They are a devotion next to the cathedral, not a substitute for it.

Saint Paul Outside the Walls stands on the Ostian Way, at the place the Church keeps as the tomb of Paul. The basilica Constantine began was replaced by a great church, and that church burned on the night of 15 July 1823. The rebuilt basilica was consecrated by Pope Pius IX. The medieval cloister survived the fire and is one of the quiet places of the visit. Along the nave the medallions of the Popes teach the same point as the tomb: the line does not stop with the Apostle. It continues. A pilgrim who has prayed at Peter's tomb in the morning can pray at Paul's in the afternoon. The two are one feast in June, and they are one pilgrimage.

Saint Mary Major, on the Esquiline, is the largest church in Rome dedicated to Our Lady. The basilica the pilgrim enters is the one Pope Sixtus III raised in the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus had confessed her as the Mother of God. The mosaics of the nave belong to that age. Under the high altar the Church keeps the relic of the Crib, the boards venerated as the manger of Bethlehem. In the Borghese chapel is the icon Salus Populi Romani, Salvation of the Roman People, before which the Popes have prayed, and before which a pilgrim may still pray. The feast of the dedication is 5 August, Our Lady of the Snows. Tradition tells of a fall of snow in August that marked the plan of an earlier church under Pope Liberius. The snow is tradition. The fifth-century basilica, the Crib, and the icon are what the visit is for. In a Jubilee this basilica too has a Holy Door.

Saint Philip Neri, in the sixteenth century, gave Rome the walk that still joins these churches to three more. The seven are: the Lateran, Saint Peter's, Saint Paul's, Saint Mary Major, Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and Saint Sebastian Outside the Walls. Lawrence is the deacon and martyr. Holy Cross keeps relics of the Passion. Sebastian, on the Appian Way, belongs to the old cemetery road and to the memory that the Apostles' bodies rested for a time in that quarter before they were taken to their present tombs. The seven churches are one Roman pilgrimage. They can be walked in a day by the determined, or divided, as Philip divided them, so that prayer survives the distance. The point is the walking and the prayer, not a record.

What a pilgrim does in each basilica is simple, and it should not be skipped for the sake of the facade. Make the sign of the cross. Go to the altar of the tomb, or of the Blessed Sacrament. Hear Mass if the hour allows. Pray for the Pope. Light a candle only where the basilica provides for it. Do not treat the nave as a corridor to a photograph.

Saint Peter and Saint Paul are the Saints of this pilgrimage. The Lateran also honours Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, and its first title is the Saviour himself. Saint Mary Major belongs to Our Lady. Saint Philip Neri is the Saint of the walk around the seven churches. His feast is 26 May.

The solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul is 29 June. The Chair of Saint Peter is 22 February. The dedication of the Lateran Basilica is 9 November. The dedication of the basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul is 18 November, the day Urban VIII consecrated the present Saint Peter's. The dedication of Saint Mary Major is 5 August. In a Jubilee year the Holy Doors of the four major basilicas are the doors of the pilgrimage.

North of Rome, in the hills of Umbria, is Assisi. A pilgrim who has prayed at the Apostles' tombs goes on to the poor man who rebuilt a church and was marked with the wounds of Our Lord. Loreto, on the Adriatic, can wait until after Assisi. It is the house, and Assisi is the man who heard the crucifix speak.

People go to Assisi because Saint Francis lived and died in this valley, and because the Church keeps his body under the double basilica on the west edge of the town. They go to Saint Clare, who learned poverty from him and stayed when others might have gone home. They go to the little chapel of the Portiuncula, where he died, down in the plain. They go to San Damiano, where the crucifix spoke to him and where Clare lived with her sisters. They go to stand in front of a life that was poor, and to ask for the love of Our Lord that Francis had. The town is beautiful. The beauty is not the pilgrimage. The tomb is.

Francis was born in Assisi about 1181, the son of a cloth merchant, and baptised John, though the town called him Francis. He died at the Portiuncula on the evening of 3 October 1226. Pope Gregory IX canonised him on 16 July 1228. The next day the foundation of the basilica was laid, and on 25 May 1230 his body was brought there. Pope Innocent IV consecrated the basilica on 25 May 1253. It is two churches, one above the other, built into the hillside. The lower church is low, dark, and painted. The upper church is a single Gothic volume of light, and its walls tell the life of Francis in fresco. The earthquake of September 1997 brought down part of the vault of the upper church. The basilica was restored, and pilgrims pray there again.

For centuries the exact place of the body inside the basilica was hidden, to protect it. It was found again in 1818. The pilgrim now goes down to the crypt under the lower church and prays at the tomb. That is the centre of the visit. The frescoes are a catechism in paint. They are not a reason to miss the tomb.

Below the town, a short descent toward the plain, is San Damiano. It was a ruined chapel when Francis, still uncertain, prayed before its crucifix and heard the call to rebuild. He began with stones, and only afterwards understood that the rebuilding was the life of the Church, not only a wall. The original crucifix is no longer in the chapel. It is kept in the basilica of Saint Clare in the town, and a copy hangs at San Damiano. Clare came here. She and her sisters lived the poor life in this house. Francis, ill and nearly blind, wrote the Canticle of the creatures in this place. A pilgrim who only sees the great basilica and never walks down to San Damiano has missed the house where the vocation was lived.

In the town, the Basilica of Saint Clare holds her body. She was born in Assisi, fled to the Portiuncula to be received by Francis, and died on 11 August 1253. Pope Alexander IV canonised her in 1255. The basilica is rose-coloured, with a wide piazza, and the body lies in the crypt. The San Damiano crucifix is in a chapel of this church. People stand in front of it because this is the image before which Francis prayed.

Down in the valley, the enormous Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels covers a tiny chapel, the Portiuncula, which means the little portion. It was a chapel of Our Lady, given to Francis, and it became the home of the first brothers. He died here. The great church around it was begun in the sixteenth century so that the crowds could pray without losing the hut. On 2 August the Church keeps the Pardon of Assisi, the Portiuncula indulgence, a plenary indulgence attached to this chapel and, under the usual conditions, offered also to those who visit their parish church that day. The size of the outer basilica is a lesson. The holy place is the small one in the middle.

Above the town, in the ilex woods of the mountain, the Carceri are the hermitage where Francis and the brothers went to pray. The cells are caves and small rooms. They are part of the same life as the basilica. The stigmata were not received here. They were received on Mount La Verna, further into the Apennines, in September 1224. The Church keeps that memory on 17 September, the feast of the Impression of the Stigmata. La Verna is its own pilgrimage, joined to Assisi by the same Saint. A study of Assisi that never mentions the wounds would be incomplete, and a study that pretends the mountain is inside the town would be false.

The Rule the brothers live is the Rule Pope Honorius III confirmed in 1223. The place teaches it better than a summary. Francis wanted the brothers poor, praying, and obedient, and he wanted them to love the Mass and the priesthood. He was buried here by the Church that canonised him, and the poor chapel where he died is still the poor chapel.

Saint Francis of Assisi is the Saint of the basilica and of the Portiuncula. Saint Clare is the Saint of San Damiano and of her own basilica. They are not interchangeable. He was the founder. She was the woman who held the same poverty in one house until she died. Pilgrims pray to both, and they should know which door they are entering.

The feast of Saint Francis is 4 October. The Church keeps it on the day after the evening of his death, which was 3 October. The feast of Saint Clare is 11 August. The stigmata are kept on 17 September. The Pardon of Assisi is kept on 2 August. The dedication of the basilica is remembered in the Franciscan family on 25 May, the day of the consecration of 1253.

From Assisi the pilgrim who is still in Italy crosses to the Adriatic. Loreto is the Holy House. It belongs beside Nazareth in the mind, and beside Assisi on the map of a journey through the centre of the country.

People go to Loreto to pray in the Holy House. The Pontifical Sanctuary stands on a hill in the Marche, a short distance from the sea at Porto Recanati. Before the house came, the hill was empty. The house made the town. Pilgrims come because this small set of walls is venerated as the house of Nazareth, the house of the Incarnation, and because the Church has set a feast for it in the calendar of the whole Roman Rite. They come for families, for a vocation, for the sick, and for anyone who travels by air. Pope Benedict XV proclaimed Our Lady of Loreto patroness of air travellers on 24 March 1920.

The basilica was built between 1469 and 1587 around the house. The house itself is three walls. The Pontifical Sanctuary holds them, by ancient and authoritative tradition, to be the walls that stood in front of the cave of Nazareth, the walls of the house where Our Lady was born, lived, and received the Annunciation. A fourth wall was built at Loreto, and on it stands the statue of Our Lady of Loreto. The statue a pilgrim sees was made in 1922. The earlier statue was lost in a fire in the Holy House in 1921.

The devout tradition tells that angels carried the house from Nazareth. A chronicle written in 1465, which the Holy See recalls in the decree of the feast, says the house was found on this hill on the night between 9 and 10 December 1294. The sanctuary adds that the three walls fit the rock of the Grotto of Nazareth, and that the stone is the building stone of that land, not of the country round Recanati. The pilgrim does not come to settle a means of transport. The pilgrim comes to pray where the Church keeps this house, and to say the words Mary said. The Douay-Rheims gives them: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38).

Round the house is a marble screen, the work of the sixteenth century, with prophets and scenes cut by the sculptors who served the sanctuary, among them the Lombardo workshop. Girolamo Lombardo's prophet David is on the south wall. The screen is not the relic. It is the shrine's way of honouring the walls and of setting the Bible around them. Inside, the room is small. That is the point. The Word was made flesh in a house, not in a palace. John Paul II, writing for the seventh centenary of the finding of the house, asked that it be understood as an icon of the Incarnation: a real event, in a real place, when the fullness of time had come.

The Litany of Loreto grew here and belongs to the whole Church. A pilgrim who has only said it in a parish can say it in the house it is named for. The sick were among the first to be carried up the hill. The decree of the feast still names them, and names families, the young, and those who travel by air. Pope Francis visited Loreto and celebrated Mass in the Holy House on 25 March 2019, the Annunciation.

Many copies of the Holy House exist, some as far as Prague and Taiwan. They are memorials. The pilgrimage is to the walls on this hill.

The pilgrimage is to Our Lady, and to the mystery of the Incarnation. Saint Joseph belongs to the house because it was the house of the Holy Family. There is no separate founder-saint of Loreto who replaces her. The Popes have been the guardians. The sanctuary is pontifical, tied to the Apostolic See.

On 7 October 2019 the Congregation for Divine Worship, by the authority of Pope Francis, inscribed the optional memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Loreto in the General Roman Calendar on 10 December, the day the feast was already kept at the sanctuary. The readings are those of the Annunciation: the prophecy of Isaias, and Luke 1. The Annunciation itself remains 25 March. A pilgrim who cannot come on 10 December is not late. The house is open, and the Mass is the same mystery.

Down the Adriatic coast, on the Gargano, two pilgrimages sit within reach of each other. San Giovanni Rotondo is the town of Saint Pio. Monte Sant'Angelo, on the same mountain, is the cave of Saint Michael. A pilgrim can pray at both without pretending they are the same shrine.

People go to San Giovanni Rotondo because Saint Pio of Pietrelcina lived, heard confessions, offered the Mass, suffered, and died here, and because the Capuchins keep his body for veneration. They go to confess. They go to pray for the sick. They go to the hospital he founded, not as sightseers of a famous building, but because he wanted suffering relieved and the soul cared for in the same place. The town is in the province of Foggia, under the Gargano. It was small when he came. The pilgrimage made it a city of hotels and churches. The friary is still the reason.

Francesco Forgione was born at Pietrelcina, in the province of Benevento, on 25 May 1887. He became a Capuchin and took the name Pio. He was ordained priest on 10 August 1910. He came to the friary of Our Lady of Grace at San Giovanni Rotondo and remained. On 20 September 1918, while he was praying before a crucifix in the choir, he received the wounds of Our Lord in his hands, his feet, and his side. He bore them for fifty years. He died on 23 September 1968. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 2 May 1999 and canonised him on 16 June 2002. The Church keeps his feast on 23 September.

The older church is Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church of the Capuchin friary where he lived. The sanctuary still begins the memory of the stigmata there. On 20 September the habit of the stigmata is carried in procession from Santa Maria delle Grazie to the church of San Pio. A pilgrim should enter the old church, not only the new one. This is the choir, the confessional, the altar of his daily Mass.

The large pilgrimage church of San Pio was designed by Renzo Piano and raised beside the friary to hold the crowds. The body of the Saint is venerated in the lower church. The Capuchin sanctuary keeps the novena there, at the relic of his body, in the days before the feast. The vigil is kept on the evening of 22 September, and the feast on the 23rd. Confession, the Rosary, and the Mass are the pilgrimage.

Across from the friary is Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering. An earlier small hospital in the town failed. Padre Pio's plan was a house near the convent where care of the body and care of the soul would not be separated. It opened on 5 May 1956. It is a working hospital. Pilgrims do not wander the wards. They can pray for the sick, and they can understand that the canonised friar's monument is a hospital as well as a tomb.

Pietrelcina, his birthplace, is a separate visit, inland from Benevento. The house and the church of his childhood are real, and they are not San Giovanni Rotondo. This file keeps to the shrine where he lived as a priest and where his body rests.

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, Capuchin priest. He is a son of Saint Francis, and the sanctuary says so in the novena. The feast of Francis on 4 October is kept in the same friary a few days after Pio's own feast. A pilgrim who has come from Assisi can see the line: the wounds of Francis, and a Capuchin in the twentieth century marked in the same way, and then canonised by the Church.

The memorial of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina is 23 September. The sanctuary keeps a novena through the preceding days, the memory of the stigmata on 20 September, and a vigil on the night of the 22nd. His birthday, 25 May, is not the feast. The Church keeps the day of his death, as the Church keeps the day of Francis.

The cave of Saint Michael is on the same promontory, at Monte Sant'Angelo, a short journey from San Giovanni Rotondo. The two should not be folded into one outing in the mind. One is a Capuchin friar of the twentieth century. The other is the Archangel, and a cave the Church has entered since the early Middle Ages.

People go to Monte Sant'Angelo because Saint Michael the Archangel is venerated in a cave on the Gargano, and because the sanctuary traces its beginning to his apparitions to the bishop of Siponto. They go to confess. The stone over the door promises forgiveness where the rock opens. They go because this is one of the great Michael shrines of Christendom, kin in devotion to Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy and to Saint Michael's Mount in Cornwall, though the roads between them are long. John Paul II came as a pilgrim in 1987, and the modern bronze door of the upper entrance tells the history of the sanctuary as far as that visit. Pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land put in here for centuries. The cave is the pilgrimage. The town around it is the shell.

The sanctuary's own account, cut into its walls and painted above its doors, is the one to learn.

The first apparition is the episode of the bull. A fresco over the inner doorway, called the Bull Door, shows it. The sanctuary does not ask the pilgrim to treat the fresco as a photograph of an afternoon. It asks the pilgrim to receive the story the church has told for centuries: the Archangel made himself known at this cave, and the bishop was brought to it. The bishop is Saint Lawrence Maiorano, bishop of Siponto. In a later apparition the Archangel was understood to have consecrated the cave himself. The Latin cut in stone at the upper entrance says that it is not for men to dedicate the basilica he has built, because he who founded it has also consecrated it. Another inscription, over the Romanesque portal at the bronze doors, gives his words to the bishop as the sanctuary preserves them: where the rock opens wide, the sins of men will be forgiven, and this is a dwelling in which guilt is washed.

The other plaque at the top quotes the words of Jacob after the vision of the ladder. The Douay-Rheims reads: "How terrible is this place! this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:17). The sanctuary sets that sentence over the way in. At the foot of the stair a further stone addresses the pilgrim: this is the crypt of Saint Michael, famous through the world, where he deigned to appear to mortals; bow down, and venerate the rock, because the place on which you stand is holy.

The way down is the Angevin stair, built in the thirteenth century. It has eighty-six steps in five flights, broken by four landings, under Gothic arches. Tombs of old local families open off the sides. At the bottom, past the Bull Door, the lower atrium ends in the bronze doors.

Those doors were made in Constantinople in 1076. Pantaleone of the Mauroni family, a nobleman of Amalfi, commissioned them and gave them to the basilica. Twenty-four panels are set on a heavy wooden frame. They show scenes of the Old and New Testaments in which the angels act, the apparitions of Saint Michael to Bishop Maiorano, and moments of the early history of the Church. They are the door a pilgrim touches. They are also a Bible for people who read pictures.

Inside, the cave is the church. Part of it was ordered as a Gothic nave. In the apse a baroque altar of 1690 keeps the Blessed Sacrament, with stone figures of Saint Joseph, Saint Nicholas of Bari, and Saint Anthony of Padua. To the left is an older altar of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Pope Gregory XIII granted a plenary indulgence for the dead to those who pray at it. The statue of the Archangel stands at the heart of the cave, on the altar of the footprints. It was placed there in 1507. It is Carrara marble, one metre and thirty centimetres high, and is commonly attributed to Andrea Contucci, called Sansovino. Michael is shown as a young warrior, trampling the enemy underfoot, the sword held across the body. On 29 September that sword is taken from the statue and carried through the streets of Monte Sant'Angelo. The statue stays. The sword goes out, and comes back.

Above ground, the bell tower was begun on 27 March 1274 by Charles I of Anjou, in thanksgiving to Saint Michael. The architect was Giordano of Monte Sant'Angelo, working with his brother Maraldo. The tower is octagonal. It was finished in 1282, then forty metres high, and was later reduced to the present twenty-seven. The largest of its bells is dated 1666. The upper facade, with its two pointed arches, is of 1865. The cave is also listed, with the other Lombard places of Italy, on the World Heritage list. That is a cultural title. It does not make the cave holier. The holiness, for a Catholic, is the altar in the rock, the Archangel's protection, and the forgiveness promised at the door.

Saint Michael the Archangel. With him the Church always names Saint Gabriel and Saint Raphael, because the feast is one. At this cave the devotion is to Michael as the prince of the heavenly host and the guardian of the Church. He is not a dead man whose body rests here. There is no tomb. There is a place where the Church has long held that he made himself known, and a statue, and a sword, and the Blessed Sacrament.

The feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael is 29 September. That is the day the sword is carried through the town. Older calendars also kept a day in May for the apparition on the Gargano. The day a pilgrim should know, and the day the statue's sword leaves the cave, is 29 September.

Saint Michael's Way is not a path from this cave to Cornwall. It is a real walk of its own, at the other end of Europe, from the north coast of Cornwall to a mount that bears the same Archangel's name. It comes next because the devotion is one, and because that short English road was used by people who were trying to reach Santiago without rounding Land's End by sea.

People walk Saint Michael's Way because it is a true pilgrim road in Cornwall, waymarked, published by the county, and aimed, as the old western roads were aimed, toward the tomb of Saint James. They also walk it because it ends at Saint Michael's Mount, and because a single day on foot is sometimes the pilgrimage a person can actually make. It is not a substitute for Santiago. It is a beginning, and a crossing, and a devotion to the Archangel in a country where many of the great shrines were stripped and the roads forgotten.

Cornwall Council describes the trail exactly enough for a student to follow without invention. It runs from Lelant, near St Ives, to Marazion, near Penzance. It is 12.5 miles, 19.5 kilometres. It is waymarked in both directions with a stylised scallop shell, drawn from the Council of Europe's sign for pilgrim routes. The arrows are yellow on footpaths, blue on bridleways, and red on byways. On roads the council uses black arrows. The train is the ordinary way to the start: the main line to St Erth, and then the branch to Lelant.

The council's account of the history is carefully worded, and it should not be made louder than the evidence. The way is thought to have been used by pilgrims, missionaries, and travellers, especially from Ireland and Wales, so that they would not have to round Land's End by sea. The land crossing is the narrow neck of Penwith. The published walking route leaves Lelant, follows the coast path by Carbis Bay, turns inland, and climbs toward Trencrom Hill. A standing stone at Beersheba is pointed out on the way, a mark that people crossed this ground long before a scallop was cut on a post. From the ridge the path comes down toward Mount's Bay and finishes at Marazion, with Saint Michael's Mount in front of it.

The Mount is reached on foot by a causeway when the tide is out, and by boat when the causeway is covered. A pilgrim who ignores the tide is not being devout. The medieval chapel on the rock is dedicated to Saint Michael. A Benedictine priory stood here, in the family of Michael shrines which looks back to Mont Saint-Michel, and it was dissolved at the Reformation. The chapel a visitor enters now is not a Catholic parish church. The Way can still be walked as a Christian pilgrimage. The shell on the post is the sign of James. The Mount at the end is the sign of Michael. Both are real, and they should not be confused.

What this day does not do should be said plainly, because pilgrim offices are strict. The Compostela, the certificate of the cathedral of Santiago, is granted by that cathedral to a person who has walked at least the last 100 kilometres, or cycled the last 200, on a route the Pilgrim's Reception Office recognises, for a Christian reason, with the credencial stamped, and who arrives at the cathedral. A walk of twelve and a half miles in Cornwall does not by itself earn that certificate. Cornwall Council is right to call Saint Michael's Way one of the European routes that lead toward Santiago. The cathedral is also right to require the last hundred kilometres. A pilgrim can walk the Cornish day for the love of God and of the Archangel, and then, if Santiago is the vow, begin the recognised road in Spain and keep the stamps.

There is a second Cornish route, the Saints' Way, from Padstow to Fowey, which the county also counts among these paths. It is not Saint Michael's Way. The two should not be merged. This section is only the road from Lelant to the Mount.

Saint Michael the Archangel, at the Mount which bears his name, and Saint James the Greater, whose shell marks the posts, because the road looks toward Compostela. The old saints of the peninsula belong to the churches at the start of the walk. They are local fathers of the faith. They are not the goal of the Way.

The feast of Saint Michael, with Gabriel and Raphael, is 29 September, the same day the sword is carried at Monte Sant'Angelo. The feast of Saint James is 25 July. A parish that keeps either day can send people onto this path without pretending the path is longer than it is.

Walsingham is the other great English pilgrimage, on the far side of the country, in Norfolk. It is not on Saint Michael's Way. It is Our Lady's shrine, not the Archangel's, and it is the English Holy House.

Catholics go to Walsingham because England kept, for centuries, a shrine of the house of Nazareth, and because that shrine has been restored to Catholic worship. They go to ask Our Lady's prayers. They go in thanksgiving. They go for a child, a marriage, a sickness, a decision. The Catholic National Shrine says that people leave those petitions before the statue in the Slipper Chapel. They also go because this is the English Holy House, a daughter of the Annunciation, and a Catholic in Britain who cannot reach Nazareth or Loreto can still kneel here.

The medieval shrine stood in the village of Little Walsingham. Tradition says that in 1061 Richeldis de Faverches was asked by Our Lady to build there a copy of the Holy House of Nazareth. An Augustinian priory grew up around that chapel and became one of the great pilgrimages of England. Pilgrims came from the whole country. Kings came. The priory was destroyed in 1538, in the dissolution. The ruins are still in the village. They are the scar of the old shrine, and a Catholic should know them. They are not the place where the Catholic Mass of the National Shrine is offered now.

The place of the Catholic shrine is the Slipper Chapel at Houghton St Giles, about two kilometres from the village. It was the last wayside chapel on the road in. Pilgrims took off their shoes there and walked the last stretch barefoot, which is why it is called the Slipper Chapel. It was spared the destruction of the priory because it was bought intact when the priory and the friary fell. Afterwards it was a poorhouse, a forge, a cow barn, and at one time two cottages. Pugin drew it while it was in that neglect. The Catholic National Shrine records that since 1934 it has been the heart of the National Shrine of Our Lady for Catholics in England. The chapel is small. Pilgrims say they find it quiet enough to pray.

The chapel is dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a patron of pilgrims, whose feast is 25 November. The dedication is older than the Catholic restoration and it still names the building. The statue inside, before which the petitions are left, is Our Lady of Walsingham. Both facts belong in a study. A pilgrim who thinks the Slipper Chapel is a modern hut has not looked at the fourteenth-century walls. A pilgrim who thinks it is only a museum of Saint Catherine has missed the statue and the reason for the 1934 restoration.

The large church of the Catholic shrine, where the pilgrim crowds hear Mass, is the Chapel of Reconciliation, built beside the Slipper Chapel so that the small medieval building would not be crushed by numbers. The walk from the Slipper Chapel to the priory ruins in the village is the last of the old road, now walked again, often with a prayer and often, by some, still without shoes. The Catholic shrine and the ruins should both be seen, in that order if a day allows: Mass and the statue first, then the walk, then the broken walls of what was once the English Nazareth.

In the village there is also a twentieth-century shrine served by Anglicans. It is named here only so that a visitor does not enter the wrong door and think it is the Catholic National Shrine. The Catholic shrine is at the Slipper Chapel. The feast, the statue of the Catholic pilgrimage, and the Mass of the Catholic Church are there.

Our Lady, under the title of Walsingham, asking for a memorial of the house of the Annunciation. Saint Catherine of Alexandria is the patron of the Slipper Chapel itself. Saint Joseph belongs to any house of Nazareth. There is no substitute saint who replaces Mary here.

In England the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham is 24 September. The Annunciation, 25 March, is the mystery the shrine exists to honour, and it is kept by the whole Church. Saint Catherine's day, 25 November, belongs to the chapel's own dedication. A pilgrim who comes on none of those days is still a pilgrim. The shrine is a place of prayer all year.

From England the roads toward Spain run through France. Lourdes began in 1858, so it is not on the medieval itineraries. It is on the road a Catholic pilgrim now takes before Santiago, and it is the next shrine to study.

People go to Lourdes because Our Lady appeared there to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, and because the Church judged the apparitions worthy of belief. They go to the Grotto of Massabielle. They go with the sick, who have the first place. They go to wash and to drink at the spring, to walk in the torchlight procession, to be blessed with the Blessed Sacrament, and to hear Mass. The Sanctuary of Lourdes invites the pilgrim to repeat Bernadette's gestures at the rock, to drink the water, to light a candle, and to pray the Rosary with Mary. Lourdes is a school of charity as well as a shrine. The helpers of the sick are part of the pilgrimage, not an optional extra.

Between 11 February and 16 July 1858 Bernadette, then fourteen, saw Our Lady eighteen times at the grotto by the Gave. On the first morning she had gone with her sister and a friend to gather bones and dead wood. She heard a sound like a gust of wind and saw a lady in white, with a white veil, a blue sash, and a yellow rose on each foot. Bernadette made the sign of the cross and prayed the Rosary with her. On 25 February, at the lady's bidding, she dug in the earth and uncovered the spring. At the thirteenth apparition the lady asked that people come in procession and that a chapel be built. On 25 March, the Annunciation, Bernadette asked her name. The answer was: I am the Immaculate Conception. The last apparition was on 16 July, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. By then the grotto had been barred. Bernadette saw her from the far bank of the river, and said she had never seen her so beautiful.

The Bishop of Tarbes, Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, published his judgement on 18 January 1862. He declared the apparitions genuine and worthy of the belief of the faithful. That is the Church's act. A pilgrimage rests on it.

Bernadette Soubirous was born at Lourdes on 7 January 1844. She entered the convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers, and died there on 16 April 1879. Pope Pius XI canonised her on 8 December 1933. Her feast is 16 April. Her body rests at Nevers, not at Lourdes. A pilgrim who expects to venerate her body beside the grotto has confused two shrines. At Lourdes the pilgrim venerates Our Lady at the place of the apparitions, and learns Bernadette's obedience. At Nevers the pilgrim may venerate the Saint's body. Both are Catholic. They are not the same afternoon.

The sanctuary covers some fifty-three hectares and has twenty-two places of worship. About ten thousand Masses are offered there in a year. Three of the churches are basilicas, and each one answers a crowd.

The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is the upper church, begun in 1866. It is the chapel Our Lady asked for. It bears the name she gave. It stands on the rock above the grotto. A pilgrim climbs to it from the square, or comes down from it to the rock.

The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary stands below. The architect was Léopold Hardy. It was blessed on 7 August 1889 and consecrated on 6 October 1901. The mosaics of the mysteries cover the interior. The Rosary is not a decoration here. It is the prayer Bernadette prayed at the first meeting, and the prayer of the torchlight procession.

The Basilica of Saint Pius X is underground, inaugurated in 1958 for the centenary of the apparitions. It runs beside the great esplanade and holds the international Masses, the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and the blessing of the sick. It exists because the earlier churches could not hold the pilgrimages. A student should be able to tell the three apart: the upper church of the Immaculate Conception over the rock, the Rosary basilica at its foot, and the underground basilica of Pius X under the processional avenue.

The grotto itself remains the heart. The statue stands in the niche where Bernadette saw her. The spring is there. Candles burn. The rock is touched. The baths and the water taps are the sanctuary's way of letting pilgrims use the water she uncovered. The sanctuary does not sell the water as a charm. It invites a gesture of prayer. Healings are part of the history of the place, and the Church treats them with a rule. A cure is studied by doctors, and it is recognised as miraculous only when the bishop of the person who was healed judges it so. This page does not number the cures and does not retell them one by one. The judgement belongs to those bishops. The pilgrim's task at the grotto is to pray, and to let the sick go first.

The day has a shape the sanctuary repeats. Morning prayer, Mass, the Rosary at the grotto, the procession of the Blessed Sacrament with the blessing of the sick, and at night the torchlight procession. On 11 February, the feast, that shape is gathered into one day. The World Day of the Sick, instituted by John Paul II in 1992, is kept on the same date. The first apparition and the care of the sick are one feast on purpose.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous is the witness. The person venerated in the apparition is Our Lady, who named herself the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette is not Our Lady. The shrine exists because of what Bernadette saw and obeyed, and because the bishop believed her. Pilgrims pray to Our Lady of Lourdes, and they ask Saint Bernadette to teach them to do what the Church asks.

The feast of Our Lady of Lourdes is 11 February. It is also the World Day of the Sick. The memorial of Saint Bernadette is 16 April. The last apparition fell on 16 July, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and the sanctuary remembers the series of apparitions across those months. The Immaculate Conception, 8 December, is the dogma Our Lady named at the grotto, four years after Pope Pius IX had defined it. A pilgrim who knows that date understands why the name she gave was a sentence a poor girl could not have been expected to invent, and why the bishop listened.

Across the Pyrenees, the road that many Lourdes pilgrims join is the road of Saint James. Santiago is the third of the old great pilgrimages, with Jerusalem and Rome.

People go to Santiago to pray at the tomb of the Apostle Saint James the Greater, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John. The Douay-Rheims gives his death in one verse: "And he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword" (Acts 12:2). Herod had him beheaded in Jerusalem. Tradition holds that his body was brought to Galicia. The Church has received pilgrims at this tomb since the early Middle Ages. They go to fulfil a vow, to do penance, to ask for a grace, or, in the cathedral's own words, out of an attitude of devotion. They go on foot when they can. The walking is not the tomb. The walking is how most of them arrive.

The cathedral stands on the burial. The great church was consecrated in 1211. The Portico of Glory, inside the western end, was completed by Master Mateo in 1188. It is a stone Last Judgement and a stone welcome, with James at the centre column. The facade a pilgrim sees from the Obradoiro square is later, the baroque front set before Mateo's work. Both are the cathedral. The square is where people sit down and realise they have arrived. Then they go in.

The botafumeiro is the great thurible swung through the crossing on solemn feasts and at certain pilgrim Masses. It is a sign of honour to the altar, and a practical mercy in a church full of people who have walked. It is not the tomb. The tomb is below, in the crypt under the high altar, and the embrace of the statue of James above the altar is an old pilgrim gesture. Mass in the cathedral is the arrival that counts.

The Pilgrim's Reception Office, in the Rúa Carretas, issues the Compostela. The cathedral's rule should be learned exactly.

The Compostela is given to a person who comes to the tomb for a Christian reason, along a route the office recognises. On foot or on horseback the pilgrim must complete at least the last 100 continuous kilometres on the same recognised route, and the last stage must be the one that enters the cathedral. If the pilgrim has already begun, outside Spain, on a route the office recognises, the distance still to be walked in Spain is not less than 70 kilometres. By bicycle the distance is at least 200 kilometres, on the same terms. The credencial, the pilgrim's record, has to be stamped along the way, with dates, so that the continuity can be seen. Other forms of travel do not receive the Compostela, except in the case of the disabled, and the chapter reserves special cases to itself. Children who understand the religious nature of the road can receive it. The very young are named on a parent's certificate, or given a simpler one. The old scallop shell was the first badge, easily forged, which is why the Church moved to letters and then to this document. The Hostal dos Reis Católicos, founded by the Catholic Monarchs as a pilgrim hospital and now a hotel, still feeds the first pilgrims of the day who present the Compostela. That is hospitality, not the certificate itself.

The roads are many. The French Way is the most walked, crossing the Pyrenees and running west across the north of Spain. The Primitive Way, the Northern Way, the Portuguese Way, the English Way from Ferrol or A Coruña, and others, are also used when the office recognises them. This study will not invent stage lists, hostel names, or prices. Those change, and they belong to the current guides and to the cathedral. What does not change is the reason. The Latin of the Compostela says the chapter, custodian of the seal of the altar of Saint James, acknowledges that this pilgrim has visited the church devoutly.

A Holy Year, a Jacobean year, is kept when 25 July, the feast of James, falls on a Sunday. The Holy Door of the cathedral is opened. The year does not lower the distance. It adds a door.

Saint James the Greater. He is not James the Less, the son of Alphaeus, and he is not the James of the epistle. The James of Compostela is the fisherman called from the boat, one of the three who saw the Transfiguration, and the first of the Twelve to be killed for the Lord. The shell is his sign, because the medieval pilgrim wore it home from Galicia.

The feast of Saint James the Apostle is 25 July. In Spain it is kept with the rank of a solemnity. When that day is a Sunday, the year is holy at his cathedral.

South of Galicia, in Portugal, is Fátima. Many pilgrims visit both in one journey, though they are not the same vow. James is an Apostle's tomb. Fátima is Our Lady in 1917, and the Rosary, and two canonised children.

People go to Fátima because Our Lady appeared in 1917 to three children at the Cova da Iria, and because the Bishop of Leiria judged those visions worthy of belief. They go to pray the Rosary, which she asked for every day. They go to do penance. They go for peace, which she asked them to pray for while the Great War was still being fought. They go to the tombs of Saint Francisco and Saint Jacinta, and they go to learn from the Venerable Lúcia, who lived long enough to write the message down and to become a Carmelite. The shrine is in the diocese of Leiria-Fátima. It is built for crowds. The crowds are not the point. The Rosary is.

The apparitions of Our Lady were prepared, as the sanctuary tells it, by three apparitions of the Angel of Portugal in 1916, at Loca do Cabeço and at the well of Lúcia's house in Aljustrel. The angel asked for prayer and sacrifice, and taught the children to adore. Then, on 13 May 1917, Our Lady came to Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who were keeping sheep at the Cova. She asked them to return on the thirteenth of each month for six months, at the same hour, and to pray the Rosary every day for peace. In June she asked again for the Rosary, and made known that Francisco and Jacinta would not live long, and that Lúcia was to remain to make her Immaculate Heart known.

On 13 August the children were taken away by the local administrator and could not keep the appointment. Our Lady came to them on 19 August at Valinhos, near Aljustrel. In September and on 13 October she came again to the Cova. The last apparition is the one the crowd came to see. The children had said a sign would be given. A great multitude stood in the rain. The bishop, judging afterwards, judged the visions. On 13 October 1930 José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, declared worthy of belief the visions of the children at the Cova da Iria from 13 May to 13 October 1917. That sentence is the Church's permission for the shrine and for the preaching of the message.

The message a pilgrim can practise, without chasing secrets, is the one the sanctuary repeats: pray the Rosary, offer penance, and honour the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The children were also entrusted with words for the Church and the world. The Holy See published the third part of that secret in the year 2000, with a theological commentary, when Francisco and Jacinta were beatified. The publication is an act of the Church. It is not an invitation to prefer rumour to the Rosary.

Francisco was born on 11 June 1908 and died at home on 4 April 1919. He wanted to console Our Lord. Jacinta was born on 11 March 1910 and died in hospital in Lisbon on 20 February 1920. Pope John Paul II beatified them at the Cova on 13 May 2000. Pope Francis canonised them at the shrine on 13 May 2017, during the centenary. Their bodies rest at the basilica. Lúcia dos Santos was born on 28 March 1907. She became a Dorothean sister and then a Discalced Carmelite at Coimbra, and died there on 13 February 2005. On 22 June 2023 Pope Francis recognised her heroic virtues. She is Venerable. She is not yet a canonised Saint. A study page must not run ahead of the Church.

The Chapel of the Apparitions stands in the open square, on the spot of the holm oak where Our Lady stood. The statue is the one the shrine crowns and carries. Pope Pius XII had it crowned in 1946. John Paul II, shot in Saint Peter's Square on 13 May 1981, believed she had saved his life, and the bullet taken from his body was placed in the crown. He came to the Cova on 13 May 1982, and again for the beatification in 2000. The chapel is small on purpose. Pilgrims walk on their knees across the square toward it. The walk is prayer if it is prayer.

At the head of the square is the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, with its colonnade. This is the church of the tombs of Francisco and Jacinta. A pilgrim who only photographs the tower has not yet gone to the tombs or to the little chapel.

On one side of the precinct is the great church of the Most Holy Trinity, built because the basilica could not hold the greatest days. It is the church of the huge international Masses. It does not replace the chapel.

Aljustrel, a short walk away, is the village of the three houses. Valinhos is the place of the August apparition. Loca do Cabeço is the place of the angel. A day at Fátima that includes them is a better day than a day spent only on the square, provided the Mass is not missed.

Saint Francisco Marto and Saint Jacinta Marto were canonised in 2017. The Venerable Lúcia dos Santos is the third witness, and her title is the title the Church has given, no higher. The person at the centre of the apparitions is Our Lady of the Rosary of Fátima. The angel of 1916 is venerated as the Angel of Portugal, a preparation, not a rival.

The feast of Our Lady of Fátima is 13 May. The optional memorial of Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto is 20 February. The thirteenth of each month from May to October is a pilgrim day at the shrine, whether or not it is a feast in the universal calendar. 13 October is the day of the last apparition and the anniversary of the bishop's judgement.

Two Marian pilgrimages remain in Europe before the road leaves the continent: Knock, in County Mayo, and Częstochowa. Knock comes next because it is the apparition of silence, and of the Lamb.

People go to Knock because on the evening of 21 August 1879 Our Lady appeared at the gable of the parish church, with Saint Joseph and Saint John the Evangelist, and with a Lamb upon an altar. They go because no word was spoken, and the silence itself is the catechism: the Mass, the Lamb, the Mother of God, and the beloved disciple. They go with the sick. They go on the National Novena. They go because the Church received the testimony of the witnesses.

The apparition lasted about two hours, in the rain. Fifteen official witnesses gave their evidence to a commission that Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam set up on 8 October 1879. The commissioners were Archdeacon Bartholomew Cavanagh, parish priest of Knock, Canon James Waldron of Ballyhaunis, and Canon Ulick Bourke of Claremorris. They took the statements in the sacristy. They reported that the testimony, taken as a whole, was trustworthy and satisfactory. In 1880, receiving the first organised pilgrimage, the archbishop said that it was a great blessing to the poor people of the West that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, had appeared among them.

The witnesses included the very young and the old. Patrick Hill, then eleven, said the figures were full and round, as if they had bodies and were alive, and that they said nothing. Mary Byrne, later Mary O'Connell, repeated her testimony on oath in 1936, from her bed, six weeks before she died. A second commission, under Archbishop Gilmartin, heard her and Patrick Byrne that year. In 1937 the Archdiocese of New York examined John Curry, the youngest witness, who had emigrated. In 2017 his remains were laid in old Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, after a pilgrimage from Knock. The witnesses were real people, not a symbol.

What they saw, and what the shrine still sets before the pilgrim, was this. Our Lady, crowned, her hands raised in prayer. Saint Joseph, inclined toward her. Saint John the Evangelist, vested as a bishop, with a book. An altar, a cross, and a Lamb, and angels. The Lamb is the reason Knock is a Eucharistic shrine and not only a Marian one. A pilgrim who looks only for a conversation with Our Lady will be met by her silence, and by the altar.

The old parish church remains, and the Apparition Chapel stands at the gable. That chapel is the place of the silent prayer. Pope Francis prayed there in August 2018, during the World Meeting of Families. The Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, was completed for the centenary years and opened in 1976. John Paul II visited on 30 September 1979, celebrated Mass for a vast congregation, gave the shrine a golden rose, and raised the church to the rank of basilica. The basilica was refitted for its fortieth anniversary, and a mosaic of the apparition, more than a million pieces of glass, was set up so that the gable vision could be read from inside the church.

The Knock Shrine Society was founded on 21 August 1935 by Dame Judy Coyne and Liam Ua Cadhain, with the approval of Archbishop Gilmartin, to give the shrine order and to care for the sick. The National Novena runs each year from 14 to 22 August. In the Marian Year of 1954 Pius XII blessed the shrine's banner, and on 8 December the processional statue was crowned. On 19 March 2021, the feast of Saint Joseph, Pope Francis recognised Knock as an international Eucharistic and Marian shrine. That title matches what the witnesses saw.

Mother Teresa was here in June 1993. The airport, opened in 1985 through the labour of Monsignor James Horan, exists so that pilgrims can arrive. It is not the shrine. The gable is the shrine.

Our Lady of Knock. Saint Joseph. Saint John the Evangelist. The Lamb upon the altar is Our Lord in the mystery of the Eucharist, not a fourth saint beside them. The witnesses are not canonised. They are the Church's tested reporters of what was seen.

The anniversary of the apparition is 21 August, and the National Novena surrounds it from 14 to 22 August. The shrine keeps that week as the high days of the year. Pilgrims who come on an ordinary Thursday still have the chapel, the basilica, and the Mass.

From the Atlantic the road of this study turns east, to the monastery of Jasna Góra at Częstochowa, where Poland keeps the icon of Our Lady, and where the Pauline monks have prayed since 1382.

People go to Jasna Góra because the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa is there, and because Poland has gone to her in invasion, partition, and persecution. They go to kneel at the image. They go on the great walking pilgrimages that still arrive for the feast, parishes on foot for days. They go to confess and to hear Mass in a monastery that has not stopped being a monastery. The Paulines are not keepers of a museum. They are an order of hermit origin, living the Rule of Saint Augustine, and this is their house.

The Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit began in Hungary in the thirteenth century, under Blessed Eusebius of Esztergom. Approval of the order, with the Rule of Saint Augustine, came at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In 1382 Prince Władysław Opolczyk founded the first Pauline monastery in Poland, at Jasna Góra, the Bright Mount, in Częstochowa. The chapel of Our Lady was built between 1429 and 1450. The great church of the Holy Cross and the Blessed Virgin Mary, now the basilica, was consecrated in 1463.

The icon is the pilgrimage. Tradition says that Saint Luke painted it. The monastery has long received that account. What the pilgrim sees is an image of the Mother of God of the kind called Hodegetria: she points to the Child, and the Child blesses. Two scars mark her cheek. The monastery remembers them as the wounds of a violent attack on the image. They were not painted out. They are part of the face Poland knows.

In 1655, during the Swedish invasion, the monastery was defended under the prior, Father Augustine Kordecki. The defence held. In 1656 King Jan Kazimierz made his vows in the cathedral of Lviv and proclaimed Mary Queen of Poland. The shrine and the vow belong together. The image was crowned with papal crowns in 1717, the first such coronation outside Rome. Those crowns were stolen in 1909. Pope Pius X gave new crowns, and the image was crowned again in 1910. On the day before he died, John Paul II gave a further set of crowns for the icon. He had already come to Jasna Góra as Pope six times, in 1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1997, and 1999. Benedict XVI came in 2006. Francis came in 2016. The visits matter because they show the Pope kneeling where the people kneel.

The monastery is a fortress as well as a church. The walls are there because the shrine was besieged. Inside, the chapel of the icon is the room that counts. The basilica is beside it. A pilgrim hears Mass, confesses, and spends time in front of the image. The walking pilgrimage, for those who come that way, ends at the gate. During the Second World War a German garrison was stationed in the fortress. The sanctuary was not destroyed. That survival is part of the modern pilgrimage, as the siege of 1655 is part of the older one.

Pope Pius X instituted the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa in 1904. It is kept on 26 August. The day gathers the walking pilgrimages. A parish far from Poland can put a copy of the icon before the people and tell the truth about the scars, the vow, and the queenship, without pretending that a printed copy is the panel at Jasna Góra.

Our Lady is the heart of the pilgrimage. The order that guards her is named for Saint Paul the First Hermit, whose feast the Church keeps on 15 January. Blessed Eusebius, founder of the Paulines, is kept by the order on 20 January. Father Augustine Kordecki is the prior of the siege, a historical servant of the shrine. The image the pilgrim has come to see is hers.

The feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa is 26 August. The solemnity of Our Lady Queen of Poland is kept in Poland on 3 May, joined to the memory of the king's vow. A pilgrim should know both days, and should know that 26 August is the feast of the icon.

The last two pilgrimages in this file are outside Europe. Guadalupe is the apparition that marked the evangelisation of the Americas. Old Goa is the body of the Apostle of the Indies. A Catholic who has studied only the roads of Italy, France, Spain, England, Ireland, and Poland has not yet seen how far the same Church walked.

People go to Tepeyac, in Mexico City, because in December 1531 Our Lady appeared to Saint Juan Diego and left her image on his tilma, and because she asked for a church where she would hear the people. They go to see the image. They go with the sick, with families, and with the poor, because the apparition was given to a poor man of a newly baptised people, not to a court. They go because the Church keeps her as patroness of the Americas, and because the feast on 12 December fills the basilica. The shrine is Mary, carrying the Son, present to a people just hearing the Gospel.

The apparitions are kept across the days from 9 to 12 December 1531. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, a baptised indigenous man, was walking by Tepeyac when Our Lady met him. She asked for a chapel on that hill, where she would show the compassion of her Son. He went to the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, and was not believed. He went again. The bishop asked for a sign. On the last morning Juan Diego tried to avoid her, because his uncle, Juan Bernardino, was dying and he was going for a priest. She met him anyway, told him not to be afraid, for she is his mother, and sent him up the barren hill to gather flowers. He found roses in December, brought them to her, and she arranged them in his tilma. When he opened the cloak before the bishop, the flowers fell, and the image of Our Lady was on the cloth. The uncle was healed, and he too had seen her. She had asked for a church. The church was built.

That is the Church's account of Guadalupe. The image is still the sign. It hangs above the high altar of the new basilica, so that the people in the nave can see it. The Church does not ask the pilgrim to become an expert in the cloth. The Church asks the pilgrim to pray before the image, and to hear Mass.

Saint Juan Diego was canonised by Pope John Paul II at this basilica on 31 July 2002. His feast is 9 December, the day the apparitions began. He is the reason a poor man's obedience is the door of the shrine. The bishop's part matters too. Zumárraga asked for a sign, received it, and built. The shrine is not a private vision kept in a family. It is a church, because the bishop acted.

The present great basilica was opened in 1976, round in plan, holding thousands, on the plain below the hill. The older basilica stands beside it, with its towers. Both buildings are part of the visit. The hill of Tepeyac, with the chapels on its top, is where the apparitions are placed. A pilgrim who only enters the new church and never climbs the hill has seen the image and missed the ground she asked for. A pilgrim who only climbs the hill and never looks at the image has reversed the error.

John Paul II came to Guadalupe at the start of his pontificate, in January 1979, and returned. He called her the star of the evangelisation of the Americas. The title teaches the right use of the shrine. It is the Mother of God leading a people to her Son. The Mass on 12 December is the feast as it is actually kept. A parish far away can keep the same Mass with a copy of the image, and should say that the original is at Tepeyac.

Saint Juan Diego, whose feast is 9 December. Our Lady of Guadalupe is the title of Mary in the image. The uncle who was healed is remembered in the story. The bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, is the pastor who received the sign.

The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is 12 December, on the general calendar. The feast of Saint Juan Diego is 9 December. In Mexico 12 December is kept with the joy of a solemnity. The days between, from his feast to hers, follow the shape of the original days, and a pilgrim who can stay through them will understand the shrine better than a pilgrim who arrives for an hour.

The last place is further east, on the coast of India. Old Goa holds the body of Saint Francis Xavier, who left Paris with Ignatius and died on an island off China. The pilgrimage is to that body.

People go to Old Goa to pray before the body of Saint Francis Xavier, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus. They go especially when the Church exposes the body for public veneration. In recent generations that solemn exposition has been held about once in ten years, always at the archbishop's announcing, not on a rumour. They also go on any ordinary day, because the basilica keeps him even when the casket is not carried out. He is a patron of the missions. Goa was his base. The churches of the old city are what remains of the capital from which the Gospel was carried further east, and his body is the relic that makes the city a pilgrimage rather than a row of monuments.

Francis was born on 7 April 1506 at the castle of Xavier in Navarre. At Paris he met Ignatius of Loyola. He was one of the first companions who bound themselves to the life that became the Society of Jesus. He was sent to India, and he landed at Goa on 6 May 1542. From Goa he went to the pearl fishers of the southern coast, to Malacca, to the islands further east, and to Japan. He died on 3 December 1552 on Shangchuan Island, off the coast of China, waiting for a way into the country. His body was brought back to Goa. Pope Gregory XV canonised him on 12 March 1622, together with Ignatius, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Philip Neri, and Saint Isidore the Farmer. The feast of Francis Xavier is 3 December, the day of his death.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus, the Good Jesus, is the Jesuit church of Old Goa. It was consecrated in 1605. The body rests in a silver casket above a marble mausoleum made in Florence by Giovanni Battista Foggini and set up at the end of the seventeenth century. The casket is the pilgrim's goal. The facade and the gilded wood of the interior belong to the same house. Bom Jesus is still a church. The Mass is offered here. A visit that treats the basilica as a carved box has missed the Saint, who was a priest.

The exposition shows the ordinary arrangement by changing it. The eighteenth solemn exposition began on 21 November 2024 at the Basilica of Bom Jesus. Filipe Neri Ferrão, Cardinal Archbishop of Goa and Damão, received the people at the opening Mass. The casket was carried in procession from Bom Jesus to the Sé, the cathedral of Old Goa, and the body was venerated there daily into January 2025. Between expositions the body is housed in the basilica. A pilgrim who comes in an exposition year must learn which building holds the casket that season. A pilgrim who comes in any other year goes to Bom Jesus.

The Sé Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria because the city was taken on her feast, is the cathedral of the old archdiocese. It is vast, and the city that once stood around it has gone. Plague, the silting of the river, and the move of the capital left Old Goa as a sacred enclosure rather than a living port. The other churches of the site explain the missionary city. They should not distract from the body. The Church of the Gesù in Rome, the mother church of the Jesuits, keeps a relic of his right arm. A pilgrim who has been to Rome and then comes to Goa can join the two: a relic in the city of Peter, the body in the city of the missions.

What to do is the same as at every tomb in this file. Kneel. Pray the Mass if it is offered. Ask his intercession for zeal without bitterness, and for love of the people to whom one is sent. He baptised in villages and taught children their prayers. The silver casket is the honour the Church has given his body. The life was a life of journeys and catechisms.

Saint Francis Xavier, priest of the Society of Jesus. His companions in the canonisation of 1622 are a map of that age of the Church: Ignatius, Teresa, Philip Neri, Isidore. At Old Goa the body is his. Saint Catherine of Alexandria is the patron of the cathedral, not of the basilica that holds him.

The memorial of Saint Francis Xavier is 3 December. In Goa the day is kept with great solemnity, and the novena before it fills Bom Jesus. The expositions, when the archbishop announces them, are a season of their own. They do not move the feast off 3 December.

Old Goa is the furthest shrine in this file. It is not the end of pilgrimage. The end of a pilgrimage is the return, with the prayer still in the hands, to the church where one will stand next Sunday.