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Pilgrimage in the Twentieth Century
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19249 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
5,835 Words |
| Author
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David Ehrlich
David Ehrlich is a frequent contributor to The World & I and
writes from his base in Washington, D.C. |
He who would valiant be 'gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy follow the Master.
There's no discouragement shall make him
once relent--
His first avowed intent: to be a pilgrim.
-- Lines by John Bunyan, adapted to a familiar hymn.
To be a pilgrim? What does that mean in this last decade of the twentieth century? To some, it may mean making a solitary journey in remembrance or in celebration of someone or something cherished. To others, it may be a purposeful exodus from a known, bad situation in search of an unknown, perhaps better one.
To 325,000 fervent Catholics from all over Europe in the summer of 1989, to be a pilgrim was to answer a call to revive an ancient tradition. Men and women of all ages, but mostly under twenty-five, were summoned by Pope John Paul II to make their way across Europe--on foot or bicycle, by automobile or boat. Their destination was a giant rendezvous in the northwest corner of Spain, at the medieval pilgrim shrine of Saint James the Greater in Santiago de Compostela.
They followed the ancient routes trod by the hundreds of thousand of pilgrims who flocked there between the years 900 and 1500. Much of what was erected in that period still stands, although the world has long since forgotten what it was put up for. So the twentieth-century devotees of the saint and his cult found it a fairly easy trip--far easier than the ordeal that their ancestors had experienced.
The Origins of Santiago
Santiago lies in Spain's far northwest province of Galicia. The city is often buried in the mists that swirl in from the Bay of Biscay a few miles to the west, and its origins are, metaphorically speaking, equally murky.
The most commonly accepted legend is that Saint James, one of the twelve apostles, was whisked mysteriously off to Spain shortly after the Crucifixion had robbed his band of its leader. He did some good works there, among them consecrating the first Christian church in this land that the Romans had begun to subdue. Following his own martyrdom in Jerusalem in A.D. 42, his body was spirited back to Spain
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