276 PILGRIMAGES TO A HOLY PLACE

YOUCAT Lesson 276

YOUCAT the catechism for Catholic youth

276  What is the purpose of a pilgrimage?

Someone who goes on a pilgrimage “prays with his feet” and experiences with all his senses that his entire life is one long journey to God.  [1674] 

Top photo: …..Notre Dame Academy theology students pilgrimage to Our Lady of Good Help Shrine at Champion, Wisconsin. …..276

Lower painting: …..Each year, it was the custom of the Holy Family to pilgrimage from their home at Nazareth to Jerusalm for the Jewish feast of the Passover.  (The modern Highway 6 between Nazareth and Jerusalem measures 91 miles!)   In this painting Mary and Joseph, after searching for Jesus among  their relatives and friends, have returned to Jerusalem to find their Jesus teaching the elders in the Temple.  Luke 2:41. …..276

In ancient Israel people made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem.  Christians adopted this custom.  And so this developed, especially in the Middle Ages, into a regular pilgrimage movement to the holy places (above all to Jerusalem and to the tombs of the apostles in Rome and Santiago de Compostela).  Often people went on pilgrimage so as to do penance, and sometimes their actions were affected by the false notion that one had to justify oneself before God by tormenting and punishing oneself.  Today pilgrimages are experiencing a unique revival.  People are looking for the peace and the strength that come from those grace filled localities.  They are tired of going it alone; they want to get out of the rut of the daily routine, get rid of some ballast, and start moving toward God.

 “Unwaveringly, the Church marches forward on her pilgrim way between the world’s persecutions and God’s consolations.”  St. Augustine (354-430)

 “God’s ways are the ways that he himself walked and that we must now walk with him.”  Dietrich Bonnoefer (1906-1945)

 SACRAMENTALS

Popular piety

1674 Besides sacramental liturgy and sacramentals, catechesis must take into account the forms of piety and popular devotions among the faithful. The religious sense of the Christian people has always found expression in various forms of piety surrounding the Church's sacramental life, such as the veneration of relics, visits to sanctuaries, pilgrimages, processions, the stations of the cross, religious dances, the rosary, medals,(Compare Council of Nicaea II: Denzinger-Schonmetze 601; 603; Council of Trent: DS 1822.)¹⁸⁰ etc. –-Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition