World Youth Day tied to 'culture of pilgrimage.' - includes related article on anti-Catholic reaction to the papal visit

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1993 by Peter Hebblethwaite

My visit to Denver," Pope John Paul II told the bishops of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, May 28, "will be truly a pilgrimage which I, along with so many young men and women, am preparing for through reflection, prayer and penance." He invited the bishops to join him in this exercise.

Addressing the bishops of New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming, June 8, John Paul further explained: "This is a pilgrimage of faith and friendship to encounter Christ in the city -- in his Eucharistic self-offering, in the sufferings of our brothers and sisters, in the prayers of his people."

John Paul is probably the first person to have spoken of a visit to Denver as a pilgrimage. He thinks of all of this globe-trotting trips in this way. He sees them as "pilgrimages to the heart of the church."

The idea of "going on pilgrimage" comes naturally to him and owes a great deal to his European background. Moreover, in communist Poland the church was denied any public visibility. Catholics were confined to the church building and the sacristy. The only exception to this rule was the annual pilgrimage to Czestochowa to venerate the "Black Madonna" -- an icon that mysteriously arrived there some time in the 14th century.

Slashed by a Swedish Lutheran sword in 1665 and saved by the warrior monks, the Madonna of Czestochowa became a symbol of Catholic resistance to foreign tyranny. In the early 19th century Czar Alexander I razed its fortifications to the ground.

For John Paul, the pilgrimage is not some kind of accessory to the spiritual life; it is at the very center of it. On becoming pope, he tried to transfer this same attitude first to Italy, then to Europe and finally to the whole church.

His international trips should not blind us to the fact that he has traveled more freely within Italy than any previous pope. And he has reanimated ancient pilgrimage centers.

June 19 he was in Macerata, a city 27 kilometers from Loreto. There John Paul said Mass for several thousand young members of the Communion and Liberation movement who then set out on pilgrimage throughout the night, arriving, as dawn broke, at the hilltop shrine of Loreto.

Legend says that the house at Nazareth where Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived, was miraculously transported from the Holy Land and deposited here on this rocky eminence overlooking the Adriatic. Antedating Lourdes and Fatima -- not to mention the upstart Medjugorje -- by several centuries, Loreto is the chief shrine of Italy.

Dioceses organize bus trips there. Pope John XXIII went to Loreto to pray for the Second Vatican Council -- the only time he left the Vatican. It is moving because it is a place where many people have prayed hard. It has an atmosphere independent of the legend of its origins.

As an Englishman, I much prefer the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. For the medieval pilgrim it was more important even than Canterbury, about which Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his tales. Kings went there to do penance. Erasmus visited it on the eve of its dissolution. Now, though Anglican and Catholic pilgrimages have been revived in the 20th century, medieval Walsingham lies in ruins.

The origin of Walsingham was a dream or a vision in which Our Lady revealed the exact dimensions of her house at Nazareth so that it could be rebuilt in the English countryside according to her specifications.

But my first pilgrimage ever was to Chartres in the 1950s, when I was a student in Paris. It started on the Friday before Whitsunday.

It involved serious physical effort. We traveled from Paris by train to three different towns within 60 kilometers of Chartres. We then marched along the road in "chapters" of 60, singing the rosary.

Each "chapter" had a chaplain. For some reason, I have forgotten, I marched with the Paris School of Agriculture (known familiarly as les fumiers (the dung heaps). Our chaplain was a brilliant young Jesuit patristic scholar called Jean Danielou.

We spent the night in barns, sleeping on the hay. On the Saturday morning, we met in a natural amphitheater where 200 priests said Mass simultaneously. It was the best they could do in pre-concelebration days.

Of course the pilgrimage to Chartres, which in those days gathered 20,000 students, owed a lot to the Catholic poet and socialist patriot Charles Peguy, killed on the first day of World War I.

What emerges from all this is that in Europe there is a "culture of pilgrimage" in which it is taken for granted, even by someone like myself who lives in "Protestant" England. If that is true of me, how much more is it true of Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II.

In Communist Poland the pilgrimage to Czestochowa in the month of August was the only way in which the church could have any contact with youth, let alone influence.

Going on pilgrimage to Czestochowa was a serious business. It took a week of backpacking. Friendly farmers along the route put you up in barns -- just as in France.

Priests mingled with the students, heard confessions at halts, dispensed spiritual advice. It was like going on retreat. Then Vatican II discovered that the church was a "pilgrim church." That was what we had all learned, with much sweat and toil, on the dusty roads that led to Loreto, Walsingham, Chartres, Czestochowa.