The Oxford History of Christianity by John McManners

Author:John McManners
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-01T16:58:00+00:00

Pilgrimage

If modern transport had effects in the government of churches, and their ecumenical relations, it also increased pilgrimage. The new age of mass travel was the new age of mass pilgrimage. Pilgrimage and tourism were often hard to distinguish. Far more people could visit the historic goals of pilgrimage, Rome and Jerusalem. For the first time large numbers of Protestants were able to go on pilgrimage to these two cities of Christian origins, or hire a travel firm to take them `in the steps of St Paul'. The old goals of Catholic pilgrimage apart from Rome had declined in the eighteenth century. With the coming of the railways some of them began to recover. Le Puy, an ancient pilgrimage site, had 300,000 pilgrims in 1853. Einsiedeln in Switzerland, another old site, had 15o,00o pilgrims a year during the first decade of the twentieth century. The Holy House at Loreto in North Italy had never quite lost its drawing-power. Compostela in north-east Spain maintained itself but never quite recovered the numbers of an earlier age despite better access.

Certain old shrines, defunct for decades or centuries, were consciously revived. Rocamadour was recreated as a shrine by an intelligent bishop of Cahors, though it never recaptured its old drawing-power. Walsingham in Norfolk, destroyed at the Reformation, began to revive as a goal of pilgrimage about 1897 and by 1934 attracted Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics. More interest was paid to certain places because of relics-Trier because of Christ's garment, the Holy Shroud at Turin (which was tested scientifically in 1988 and proved not to be genuine). One city became a modern place of pilgrimage which it never was before: Assisi, because knowledge of St Francis, spread from 186o, proved to be magnetic to both Catholics and Protestants.

As in past centuries new shrines came into existence, usually from some rural vision after which miracles happened. The icon of the Virgin on the island of Tenos in the Aegean was found early in the nineteenth century after the dream of a nun and soon became the chief centre of pilgrimage in the Greek world. At La Salette near Grenoble (1846), Lourdes (1858), Ilaca in Croatia (1865), Philippsdorf in Bohemia (1871), Knock in Ireland (1879), Fatima in Portugal (1917), modern shrines were created as a direct result of visions, in almost all cases by children, which then were followed by healings. Parish priests would be sceptical, agnostics would mock, bishops would enquire, and occasionally the people's cult was ruled illicit; but in all the cases mentioned the church after hesitation sanctioned the people's cult. Among them Lourdes grew to be the big new shrine of the modern age; so that Pope Leo XIII even built `a grotto of Lourdes' in the Vatican gardens. In the centenary year 1958 Lourdes attracted six million pilgrims. Bernadette Soubirous, the child of 14 who saw the visions of the Virgin, was worthy of the strange vocation in which she afterwards found herself, and was canonized in 1933.

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