8 Great Places of Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage destinations like the Holy Land and Rome are well-known, but there are many others. PAT McCARTHY looks at eight hugely popular sites.

For a Catholic, a pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred location — sacred because of its place in the Bible, its association with a holy person, or its connection with a miracle or apparition.

Millions of Catholics set out on pilgrimages each year.

Untold numbers go to the Holy Land, visiting sites directly associated with the life of Christ; to Rome, with its basilicas and museums, the burial place of St Peter and the seat of the papacy; and to sites in Greece and Turkey, where St Paul preached and early Christian communities were founded.

Apart from those destinations, each of the following shrines receives more than two million pilgrims a year:

Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City: The shrine contains the cloak of a devout Indian, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531, just a decade after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

The cloak, or tilma, is imprinted with a miraculous image of Mary with native features and in native dress.

Devotion to this image of Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe quickly spread, and millions of native Mexicans became Catholics. St Juan Diego was canonised in 2002.

The shrine receives 20 million pilgrims each year.

 National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil: The shrine’s basilica—the second-largest church in the world, after St Peter’s in the Vatican—houses a miraculous statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

In 1717 local three fishermen prayed to Our Lady to help them catch fish for a banquet to honour a visiting dignitary. They caught no fish, but one of them netted the headless statue. With his next cast he netted the head.

When the trio cleaned the statue and renewed their prayers they caught all the fish they needed. The statue was identified as the work of a monk from São Paulo around 1650.

This shrine attracts about eight million pilgrims a year. Pope Francis visited it during World Youth Day in 2015.

San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy: The body of St Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is displayed here. This Capuchin friar, priest and mystic died in 1968 and was declared a saint in 2002.

Besides bearing the stigmata of Christ, Padre Pio manifested the gifts of healing, bilocation, levitation, tongues, prophecy and extraordinary abstinence from both sleep and food. On one occasion he is recorded to have subsisted for at least 20 days with no other nourishment than the Eucharist.

To people who came to him with problems, his advice was: “Pray, hope and don’t worry.”

About seven million pilgrims visit his shrine each year.

The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, France: This is where 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous received 18 apparitions of the Virgin Mary at the Grotto of Massabielle in 1858.

The sanctuary is especially a destination for sick pilgrims who bathe in water from the Lourdes spring, although only 69 cures have been recognised as miraculous by the Church.

With three basilicas (one underground) and several churches, the sanctuary has 22 separate places of worship.

Lourdes receives about six million pilgrims each year.

Jasna Gora Monastery at Czestochowa, Poland: This national shrine has been home to the miraculous icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa since the 14th century.

The painting is in a traditional Byzantine style, with the Virgin May directing attention from herself to the child Jesus as the source of salvation. Its name comes from the soot residue left by centuries of votive candles.

The origin of the icon and the date of its composition are uncertain, though one tradition asserts that it was painted by St Luke on a table used by the Holy Family.

About 4,5 million pilgrims visit the monastery each year.

Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima, Portugal: This site commemorates apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1917 to three children, Lucia Santos and her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, while they guarded sheep.

Mary, identifying herself as Our Lady of the Rosary, said God had sent her with a message of prayer, reparation, repentance, sacrifice and turning away from sin.

The apparitions culminated in the Miracle of the Sun on October 13, 1917, witnessed by more than 30000 people, including several newspaper reporters. The sun appeared as a spinning disc, shining multi-coloured lights across the landscape, then careering towards the earth in a whirling pattern.

About four million pilgrims visit Fatima every year.

Holy House of Loreto, Italy: This small stone structure is reputed to have been Mary’s house at Nazareth.

Legends surround its transportation to Loreto “by angels” in 1295, after Islam overran the Holy Land. More credible evidence indicates the stones may have been taken by the aristocratic De Angelis family, to save the house from destruction by Muslims, and reassembled at Loreto on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

The primitive building has only three walls and no foundations. Its dimensions and limestone construction appear consistent with being a one-room dwelling originally standing in front of the cave-grotto over which the basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth now stands.

The Holy House, now encased in marble within a huge basilica, receives four million visitors a year.

St Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, Québec: This national shrine, Canada’s largest church, contains the remains of St André Bessette.

St André, a lay brother in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, was credited with thousands of miraculous healings during his lifetime. He eventually needed four secretaries to handle the 80000 letters he received each year.

He attributed all the cures to St Joseph, for whom he began a campaign to build a chapel on the slopes of Mont Royal in 1904. Br André died in 1937, aged 91, and was canonised in 2010.

The oratory attracts two million visitors a year.

Pat McCarthy directs the website seetheholyland.net which details each site of pilgrimage in the Holy Land.