Our Tabard Inn was La Rosa Negra café. Not exactly a 14th-century inn on the Thames in Southwark, but a neighbourhood bar in Vigo serving albariño wine, crisps and local Galician beer, across the road from our unfashionable travellers’ hotel. The evening before we headed off in the morning towards Santiago on our 100km Camino adventure, arriving at the cathedral on the feast of St James (25th July), I sent a WhatsApp message to the Herald’s 11-strong pilgrim band of strangers. “There is no hotel bar. Please can we all meet for welcome drinks at the wine bar opposite at 8pm.”
Every pilgrimage has to start with its own Tabard. A first meeting point where I said that everyone in our group should set off in the morning with a pilgrimage intention; I dedicated my walk to the Herald’s 134-year spiritual mission. I quickly learned we had two gin-and-tonic drinkers among us.
The Tabard Inn made an impression on Chaucer as the place where his pilgrims begin their medieval holiday outing of some 60 miles.
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felawshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle
Of various sorts of people, by chance fallen
In fellowship, and they were all pilgrims
Among our pilgrim cast was Michael, a retired Lancashire teacher; Mary, a former senior civil servant and board member with NHS Scotland; and Mark, a retired senior civil servant at the Home Office who served as a Whitehall adviser from the days of Willie Whitelaw until those of Jack Straw.
On the first day, Mark was wearing dark suit trousers held up by a smart pair of navy blue Jermyn Street braces. He was a polymath, foodie, wine lover, choral singer, musicologist and organist at his local Catholic church in Kent. He wife, Amanda, created an icon for the Rededication of England as Our Lady’s Dowry which was blessed by the Pope.
Mark was a man of sound traditional faith and had clear opinions on most subjects from catechism to culinary matters. After a brief tasting experiment, he made it clear what he thought of pulpo – fried octopus, a Galician speciality – at our first group dinner. Given a choice between being subjected to pulpo or another “heretical” theological sermon, he admitted it was hard to choose between them.
We were lucky to have our own wonderful priest and spiritual leader, Father Nicholas Leviseur of the Ordinariate. He served as an army officer before becoming a military chaplain. He is also, unusually for a Catholic priest, a barrister specialising in medical negligence. His St Anselm’s parish website states that Father Nicholas “enjoys shooting and being eccentric”.
One of these eccentricities was – like James Jeffrey, our highly organised ex-Ampleforth Camino guide and leader – insisting on walking with a full pack, despite us having arranged baggage transfer every day. “It just doesn’t feel right,” he said, “walking to Santiago without a pack.”
When I picked up Father Nicholas from Santiago airport he was wearing his beads and a black clerical top with a dog collar. He looked like a priest from Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote. He had been surrounded on the plane, he said, “by African ladies en route to distribute Bibles to Compostela pilgrims.” As we sped along the coast towards Pontevedra, he said: “I need three things: A good bottle of wine, toothpaste and a bank.” It took me a few miles before I realised the wine was for Holy Communion. We would celebrate Mass every day, usually around 5.30pm. “It doesn’t matter where,” he said. “We’ll find a place. I’ve said Mass in a trench before.”
There was no shortage of Chaucerian drama along the way. At the end of the first day’s walk – around 16km in searing heat from Vigo to a former Nunnery in Redondela – there was a tricky moment when Michael, in his early seventies, turned horribly white and collapsed outside the cold studded green door of the Convento de Vilavella. Fortunately it was only dehydration and severe sunstroke. Then, 30 seconds later, Jamie MacGuire, our US editor, also collapsed after his legs started to give out 100 yards from home. He was revived with cans of Coca-Cola and salted salami hurriedly bought by Herald researcher Tom Colsy. As the two men lay semi-conscious, doused in water, Rachel – Tom’s girlfriend – fell to her knees praying.
Her prayers were answered. Within an hour we were all assembled for our first makeshift Mass, celebrated on the first-floor landing up the great flight of stairs. Tom was drafted in as altar boy. A deft sermon was delivered on the importance of walking as a public pilgrim of faith, and holy communion was administered to Michael in his room.
Over the next few days Mass was said in a Pontevedra hotel room, a farmhouse sitting room (at the Os Lambrans) and, memorably, the poolside garden of a Roman spring bath in the spa town of Caldas de Reis.
After Jamie MacGuire began hearing Irish accents in the swimming pool – part of a Camino group from Tipperary – he invited them to the evening Mass which ended up with a poolside congregation of 20. Birds sang along to the Angelus in Latin and the Mass ended with the hymn “To Be a Pilgrim”, using Bunyan’s lyrics, Music was piped out of iPhones.
A sacramental first for me was the “walking confession” and the walking rosary, often in blistering heat.
It was easy to compare our pilgrim band to Chaucer’s holidaying Christian souls who set off for Canterbury without knowing each other. In the 14th century, the three most popular pilgrim destinations in Europe were St Peter’s in Rome (along the Via Francigena), Santiago in northern Spain (along the way of St James, whose tomb is in the cathedral) and Canterbury. Six-hundred years later, the Camino de Santiago is now – thanks to endless books, its designation in 1993 as a UNESCO world heritage site and the 2010 movie The Way, starring Catholic actor Martin Sheen – the most popular with over 330,000 official pilgrim passports being stamped in churches, bars, and hostels every year.
The ever-growing number of pilgrim hostels, bars, and agritourism farm houses, have rescued the local economy of Galicia. Before the Camino pilgrim circus got going in the 1990s, there were a few hundred peregrinos each year and rural Galicia was on its knees economically.
Camino pilgrims are usually looking for a form of spiritual or mental rescue – or redemption. This could be atonement for past sins; taking time to reflect on the mess of a career, relationship or life; taking a few months out to readjust after the whirligig of depression or office life; or just to join solitary company with your soul for a week and enjoy having your phone turned off. Walking the Camino is as much a state of mind as it is a physical journey.
For Catholics at least there is another strong appeal with the Camino: the plenary indulgence. Known as the “Jubilee”, this gives absolution for all past sins. An indulgence, according to official guidelines, is the “remission of all temporal punishment” (time spent in purgatory) up to that point in a person’s life. In order to gain this Jubilee indulgence, individuals must: Visit the Tomb of St James the Great; attend Mass and say a prayer: ‘at least the Apostle’s Creed, the Our Father and a prayer for the intentions of the Pope.’ I certainly prayed for the Holy Father only not perhaps as is intended.
It is a chance to wipe the slate clean and pray for hope and the future as well as to pray for the souls of the deceased. No questions asked – just so long as you take the sacrament of confession and receive communion at Mass within 15 days of walking the Camino. I said my “walking confession” on the last day as we walked towards Santiago.
At the first spiritual pep talk that Father Nicholas gave us in the hotel lobby, he presented us with pilgrim badges of Our Lady of Walsingham attached to lengths of blue string. He blessed them all before we tied them to our rucksacks or pilgrim’s scallop shells. Our Lady smiled on us many times. When Jamie MacGuire lost his gold watch on day one – a family heirloom that had been engraved for his mother – it was miraculously returned to the convent’s door by two locals who had seen Jamie struggling in the heat, with sweat pouring off him. Likewise, when I left my iPhone in the back of a taxi after dropping the bags off at the at the Redondela convent, and began walking the Camino, the tattooed taxi driver returned to find me after the phone had rung in the back of his car. It had been my uncle calling – a very rare event. But divine providence and the grace of God works in strange ways.
Over five days, we walked roughly the same distance as London to Canterbury (you need proof you have travelled 100km to get your official Camino certificate, in Latin). Chaucer’s pilgrims, of course, were all of “ful devout” “corage”. Of our 11 members, nine were Catholic.
The non-Catholics were Mary, who knew the Mass as well as anyone, and Tracy, an expat British entrepreneur and self-styled feminist whose Sticky Toffee Pudding Company supplies the preferred pud of British Airways’ first class and is stocked in US gourmet supermarkets. She sent her boy to Stonyhurst so he could understand our religious rites and habits.
I had long put off the Camino as I thought the idea of a “life-changing” pilgrimage was almost cliché, but I was entirely wrong. The Camino de Santiago may be the Big Daddy of pilgrimages but it is no Disney-style pilgrimage circus. From the beautiful ceramic waymakers to climbing up to the very rocks in Padròn – a day’s walk from Santiago – where Saint James the Apostle preached, it was the most authentic pilgrimage I’ve ever been on.
When you climb these rocky steps to reach the Mount of St Gregory, where St James was reputedly moored after his death, you feel you are stepping into ancient yet lived religious history. On the last Herald pilgrimage along the Via Francigena to Rome, we were lucky to see one or two pilgrims a day. But the Camino is a living sea of fellow pilgrims. I regularly saw families with children as young as five or six walking. On 25 July an entire school of around 300 pilgrims marched behind us singing.
Whenever I saw a father bombing along the way on a bike with his young son behind him, I felt a twinge of remorse that I had left my own family behind and was reminded that I need to be a better father, not just a computer hunchback.
Another unusual aspect of Father Nicholas, for a Catholic priest, is that he has four children of his own. God sees everything and judges accordingly.
After attending the pilgrim’s Mass on St James’ feast day, I vowed to be back to experience a different Camino route, only this time with my family. And the next time I would also pray that the Parador hotel next to the cathedral might be open.
In a comic twist that Chaucer would have relished, Santiago’s most famous hotel was closed on 25 July over a strike for more pay.
As we knelt at Mass, we could hear the deafening sound of protestors’ horns blocking out the rites of Mass. Still, although I couldn’t hear a word, I think I qualified for my Jubilee indulgence.
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