Pilgrims in america full#
The roads were full of brigands ready to rob and kill easy prey not only that, there were inhospitable deserts to cross. In addition, it cost a great deal of money, and entailed considerable danger.
First of all, it took several years out of a person’s life. Undertaking a pilgrimage so far away from Christian areas of Europe was a daunting task indeed. Sadly, both for Henry and his wife Catherine, and for English Catholics, that son died shortly after his birth.Īs one would expect, the greatest of all pilgrimages a Christian could take part in was to the Holy Land itself. This is the case, even though Henry VIII, only a few years before he broke with the Catholic Church, made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in 1511 to give thanks for the birth of a son. Following the dissolution of the monasteries and the taking over of the Catholic churches and shrines after the Anglican defection in 1535, the practice of pilgrimage was considered “too Catholic” and disappeared from England. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, studied by every high school student of English literature, tells the story of pilgrims on their way to venerate the relics of Saint Thomas a Becket, who was murdered in the act of singing Holy Mass by agents of the English king in 1170. His work, Peregrinatio, described a Christian spiritual journey as a kind of self-imposed exile of the pilgrim in which he searched for God’s Truth in his wanderings while visiting the holy shrines of the Faith.ĭuring the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrimages became a very common thing, especially for those who could afford to leave their daily lives behind for a period of time. One of the earliest usages of the word is found in the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Some pilgrimages were done in penance for sin some were done in petition for a special blessing or favor and some were undertaken simply out of devotion. What were their motives? Basically, they were the same as that of the pagans, but with a true supernatural bent, knowing that in honoring His saints, they were honoring God Himself. Even in the early centuries, when millions of Christians were martyred for their Faith, the faithful flocked to the tombs of favorite saints to venerate their remains, sometimes at the risk of being martyred themselves. After the death and resurrection of the Incarnate God and the spread of Christianity, adherents felt a longing to tread in the footsteps of their Savior, His Holy Mother, and His chosen followers, the holy Apostles. When local gods were worshipped, as we see in ancient Greece and Rome, in pre-Colombian Central and South America, in certain areas of ancient Europe, and in the ancient Middle East (Palestine, Syria, and Israel), devotees of a particular god would travel to his or her shrine to beg for favors, for forgiveness of wrongdoing, or some other religious motive.īut our interest here is in Christian pilgrimage, of course.
Similar practices of pilgrimage can be seen in pagan religion, too. To this day, these feasts are called, “Pilgrimage Festivals” by the Jews. On their way to the Temple, they would sing the “pilgrim songs” (also called “songs of assent” or “gradual canticles”), namely, Psalms 119-133. 957 B.C.), all Jewish men were obliged to present themselves at it for the three major feasts: Pesach (the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or Passover), Shavu’ot (the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost), and Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles, or Festival of Ingathering), as per God’s ordinance in Deuteronomy 16:16-17. Once the temple was built at Jerusalem (ca. Pilgrimage has a long history in the true religion. It is a journey with a purpose, and that purpose is to honor God. The word “pilgrim,” derived from the Latin peregrinum, conveys the idea of wandering over a distance, but it is not just aimless wandering.
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