Let’s Bring Back Pilgrimages
The Basilica of Our Lady of Consolation is the tallest building in Carey, Ohio, a sleepy town halfway between Toledo and Columbus. It’s a beautiful place — an oasis hidden in the Midwest — but when I agreed to walk a 64-mile pilgrimage to get there, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I was one of eight pilgrims standing outside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary on the last Saturday of May after the 9 a.m. mass. The city hummed around us as we touched the front doors of the Cathedral and picked up the pebbles that we would carry with us as a symbol of our intentions — both centuries-old traditions. Our pilgrimage had begun. (READ MORE: Faithful Catholic Institutions Defy Trend of Secularization)
Over the next three days, we trekked across the Ohio countryside, staying in parish schools and halls and singing rosaries and Marian hymns amid cornfields. There was a tangible and spiritual sense of camaraderie; we were spiritually walking alongside millions of pilgrims who had undertaken similar journeys across time and space.
From Notre Dame to Notre Dame
Our trip began with a trek through downtown Toledo. We were in high spirits for the first few hours and played several rounds of the alphabet game. In case you are unfamiliar, it’s a game where players try to see who can spot all 26 letters of the alphabet first — the twist is that players can’t use the same words as their opponents. (READ MORE: Paganism and the Culture Wars)
Once we had crossed the Maumee River, we began our first rosary. There’s something remarkable about being in the middle of a city, amid passing cars and pedestrians, while on a pilgrimage and saying a rosary. The clash between the rushed modern world and the deliberate old world is incongruous.
We knew we weren’t the only pilgrims on foot and in prayer. Some 4,000 miles away, 16,000 people had set off from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, walking toward the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres. It was by serendipity that the pilgrimages happened to fall on the same weekend — and we felt a kind of connection across time and space.
The Chartres pilgrimage is a centuries-old event. Pilgrims first made it in the 12th century. The adventurer Guy de Larigaudie wrote in the 1930s, “When you are alone in Paris, with two free days ahead of you, go to Chartres, you will come back better.”
The French-Catholic writer Charles Péguy made the pilgrimage alone in 1912 to ask for Mary’s intercession for his sick son. “My old friend, I am a new man,” he wrote afterward in a private letter. “You can see the Chartres bell tower 17 kilometers away on the plain. As soon as I saw it, I was ecstatic. All my impurities fell away at once.”
This year, the Chartres pilgrimage was packed. The National Catholic Register reported that this was the first time the organizers had to turn would-be pilgrims away, concerned that a walking column of more than two hours would mean that the people at the end of the line would not make it to the Cathedral in Chartres in time for the final mass.
According to the organizers, the record registration “attests to the growing influence of the Chartres pilgrimage…. And shows the growing interest of Chartres pilgrims, the majority of whom are under 20 years old.”
Our first “campsite” was the parish school at St. Aloysius in Bowling Green. The church is about a 30-minute drive from the Cathedral in Toledo, but it took us just over eight hours to walk there. We were welcomed by our support team. An old professor from college who volunteered to drive a pickup truck and walk a few miles when we needed a break, and a friend of ours who met us every few miles in her Subaru with snacks and Gatorade and helped supply us with dinners and moral support (she cheered every time we reached a rest stop — definitely our all-wheel-drive guardian angel in disguise).
We pulled up chairs in a circle and chowed down on a home-cooked taco dinner finished off with Gatorade and “birdseed” cookies — a treat from our friend’s mom — all while comparing muscle cramps and blisters.
After an early Mass on Sunday morning, we ate a quick breakfast of bagels, peanut butter, and bananas before religiously applying moleskins to our feet and hitting the road again.
The Road Eternal
There’s no doubt day two was the hardest. Long, straight country roads are relentless, they yawn into the distance and seemingly multiply the miles. By Mile Four, we began singing “Ave Maria” as a marching song, which made it easier to forget that our muscles were politely suggesting we stop.
Around Mile 11, we were hiking past one-story farmhouses and sparse patches of trees when a woman called out from her front porch. She had been one of the readers at mass that morning and had heard about our journey — she offered us water and the use of her bathroom, porcelain encouragement gladly received.
The journey wasn’t without its perils: Later that afternoon, as we walked on the curb of a busy state route, the largest dust devil I’ve ever seen formed in a recently plowed field next to us. It must have been hundreds of feet tall and made us feel minuscule. It dispersed before it could reach us, and we joked that it was our pillar of cloud.
The fact that our pilgrimage was small gave us room for things like home-cooked meals and encounters with the people we passed. “We’re on a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Consolation, do you have any intentions we can pray for?” became the mantra of our journey.
And pray we did — for two brothers who are farming together somewhere in northwest Ohio, for a grandfather whose infant granddaughter passed away earlier that month, and for a woman’s 95-year-old mother with cancer, for a young man starting a new job — our pebbles came to symbolize more than just our individual intentions.
Small pilgrimages like ours have become far more popular. The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales organizes a similar pilgrimage in mid-August. A tribute to growing popularity and visibility, what was once a small group of people walking to Walsingham has begun to expand rapidly.
“Last year we had 160 pilgrims, including the volunteers,” Joseph Shaw, the organizer, told National Catholic Register. “Early indications are that we have another record-breaking year this year.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, a group of 5,000 pilgrims traveled by foot from the National Shrine of St. Joseph in De Perre, Wisconsin, to the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion some 21 miles away — despite the fact that it was 50 degrees and raining. Last year, a mere 3,000 people had made the trip.
At the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation
On the last day of our pilgrimage, we tackled 17 miles, beginning early Monday morning to make it to the shrine by 3 p.m. The walking took its toll — I strained my left hip muscle and couldn’t lift my leg more than a few inches from the ground. We also discovered that if you make the mistake of stopping, it takes at least a mile of walking for your muscles to warm up.
While the third day was the most difficult physically, our proximity to our goal made it the easiest day psychologically and spiritually. We were on half-paved country roads and surrounded by sweet-smelling wildflowers in fields — reminiscent of English writer and poet G.K. Chesterton’s observation: “If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
Sometime around 2 P.M., we saw the finish line in the distance. Tradition says that when you see the spire of the shrine you are trying to reach on the pilgrimage, you kneel in the road and sing an ancient Marian hymn — the “Salve Regina.”
It was at that moment that the import of what we were trying to do really sunk in. For three days, the world had melted away: the to-do lists, social media, the news cycle, and personal insecurities. I could manage one simple thing — walking.
Nothing else mattered.
The word “pilgrim” comes from the Latin word peregrinus, meaning “foreign.” The point of making a journey like this is to remind ourselves that we are foreign to the world: Not of the world, but in the world. It was a chance to refocus on the pilgrimage that really matters in life — the one toward God.
I can’t say I experienced a miracle or an out-of-body experience or even that all my “impurities fell away,” but I can say that the journey was a confirmation that I was part of a universal experience of faith. I was walking alongside millions of people who make similar journeys around the world and throughout history for the same ultimate purpose: to praise God.
Ave Maria, gratia plena Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in muleribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesu
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
Aubrey Gulick is a recent graduate from Hillsdale College and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Fellow at The American Spectator. When she isn’t writing, Aubrey enjoys long runs, solving rock climbs, and rattling windows with the 32-foot pipes on the organ. Follow her on Twitter @AubGulick.
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