Is it me or can Catholics be a bit headstrong these days? I asked myself that question after attempting to marshal the Catholic Herald’s latest pilgrimage from Coimbra to Fátima. We all got to the end and, despite some narrowing of eyes over route distance estimations and the assured presence of café breaks that didn’t materialise, without mutiny. Yet there were times when I thought I could have been in charge of a group of radical students on pilgrimage.
Especially during dinner times—those glasses of fine Douro and Alentejo red wine loosening minds and lips—I strained to keep up with conversations railing across the table against the wrongs and injustices of society. Those impassioned mealtimes, along with discussions on the trail ranging from the problems with Oxford’s 15-minute city traffic restrictions, to myopic media narratives about Covid-19 lockdowns and feminism, to the hypocrisy of US President Joe Biden’s proclaimed Catholic credentials, got me thinking how pilgrimage increasingly serves as an act of rebellion against many of the shibboleths of the modern world.
In addition to proving stimulating and educational, it was rather uplifting too. Through rubbing shoulders with your fellow pilgrims, you realise you are not going it alone, despite the impression created by mainstream media echo chambers and being surrounded by progressive modernity’s shrinking parameters and moral relativism. Ideas and views that during normal daily life you might rarely get to share—both through lack of opportunity or unwritten censure—when on pilgrimage you have a chance to develop these increasingly “alternative” views through your fellow pilgrims, while making a physical declaration in defence of your beliefs through every step you take.
Pilgrimage is also a physical act of rebellion against the sedentary desk- and laptop-bound lives in which we only communicate with people through screens and message boxes. During pilgrimage you are on the move in the manner you were designed for—by boldly striding out—while encountering strangers face to face, both within the pilgrimage group and all along the route in chance encounters.
For sure, such bare-faced encounters risk tempers becoming frayed; things can be misunderstood—especially directions about which turning to take! But the swirling Chaucerian social cauldron that you are immersed in is also great fun, enlightening and rewarding, even a source of hope when confronting “my weakness, my wounds, concerns, desires and fears”, as a leaflet at Fátima described encountering Jesus on pilgrimage.
With pilgrimage offering an effective antidote to many of the dystopian ills besetting modern society, a resurgence in UK-based pilgrimage couldn’t come soon enough. And while the purists might disagree, its lack of dogma could well prove a strength in reaching people; as Geoffrey Chaucer highlighted in the Canterbury Tales, there are many aspects to pilgrimage, and often more important than the reason for setting out on pilgrimage is what the individual subjectively discovers in themselves.
“The British Pilgrimage Trust has helped develop the idea that pilgrimage is ‘open to all’ and has tapped into a new kind of pilgrimage culture in which pilgrimage is linked to many western social values such as emotional and spiritual well-being, self-improvement, and the need to ‘take time out’,” says Anne Bailey, a pilgrimage scholar at the University of Oxford.
“A pilgrimage in Britain is an excellent way of experiencing British culture, of enjoying the rich diversity of our country’s natural landscapes, and of sampling the country’s cultural and Christian heritage. There are so many routes to choose from with varieties of lengths, terrain, and regional attractions that, collectively, our pilgrim routes have the potential to have a much wider appeal than the Camino.”
Created in 2014, the British Pilgrimage Trust offers free access to a pilgrim route network that currently covers more than 250 routes across Britain, supported with maps, photos and information. Its co-founder, Guy Hayward, agrees that the British have a somewhat unique relationship to pilgrimage, which presents both obstacles and opportunities.
He highlights, as does Bailey, how the tradition and practice of pilgrimage has been a somewhat taboo topic in the UK ever since the Reformation, when Henry VIII banned pilgrimage in a 1538 injunction by Thomas Cromwell commanding his subjects “not to repose their trust and affiance in any other works devised by men’s phantasies besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same.”
As a result, the UK lost most of its physical pilgrimage infrastructure and shrines, putting it at a pilgrimage disadvantage to Spain and Portugal, which, for all their own great social changes, remain Catholic countries in which the veneration of saints does not cause apoplexy.
“There’s very little of the material heritage left and much of what we see now has been either largely re-created or re-imagined, Bailey says. “Added to this, established British churches must negotiate the troublesome balance between heritage and religion, as well as between Protestantism and Catholicism.”
But, at the same time, pilgrimage is also a great match for British sensibilities.
“We care deeply about our heritage, maybe even more so than on the continent, and we love nature, hence the likes of the National Trust,” Hayward says. “Our folk culture is relatively strong and deep, our pub culture is special, our public footpath network—and right to roam in Scotland—is very precious and possibly unique.”
Even the (in)famous British recalcitrance when it comes to overt religion isn’t as much of an obstacle as it might seem.
“The anti-establishment and anti-religion generation of the 1980s has largely been replaced by new generations for whom Christianity is not something to be reviled, but something new and interesting to explore and perhaps to be fitted into a larger picture of personal spirituality,” Bailey says.
Though getting onboard the government and church leaders—in Hayward’s case, the Church of England—is another matter. Meetings with government culture ministers and approaches by the trust to CoE leaders have not proved fruitful yet. Though Hayward remains optimistic, noting how the Camino took off in the 1990s “following hearts being won” by the Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho—who wrote “The Pilgrimage” about his personal Camino—and other artists who engaged with the topic at the time.
“Britain needs a brilliant group of filmmakers, novelists, artists, musicians, etc., to start getting people revved up, and the government and Church of England will follow,” Hayward says.
He hopes that the April 28 film release of the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, starring Jim Broadbent, could go a long way to help. For now, Hayward describes British pilgrimage as being at the understated startup stage compared to the Camino being the Microsoft or Google of Western pilgrimage.
In addition to all the above in favour of British pilgrimage, it has one simple advantage over offerings on the Iberian Peninsula. English is spoken. This makes pilgrim daily life much easier and could make a big difference in attracting pilgrims from the US, which remains the most religious country, while also containing the most Catholics, in the Western developed world.
James Jeffrey is a freelance journalist, writer, editor, and the Herald’s official pilgrim guide who splits his time between the US, the UK, the Iberian Peninsula and further afield. Follow him on Twitter: @jrfjeffrey. For more on the Camino go to www.santiagotrails.co.uk.
(Photograph of pilgrims saying lauds in a Byzantine chapel in a hotel in Fatima by James Jeffrey)
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