Pilgrimage opportunities abound in 2010
By Tim Puet
Catholic Times
The year 2010 should be one of the best ever for Catholic travelers, first-timers and veterans alike, who are looking for opportunities to take part in activities which are related to the Faith and don’t occur very often.
“This is a year for many big events that will attract pilgrims from around the world,” said Kevin Wright, president of the World Religious Travel Association, a Lexington, Ky.-based organization (www.wrtareligioustravel.com) which assists the $18 billion faith tourism industry by providing networking, educational, job market, and vacation opportunities for the travel trade and consumers.
“The Oberammergau Passion Play will be returning for its once-a-decade performances, the Shroud of Turin will be unveiled in Italy, it’s a Holy Year at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, one of the oldest pilgrimage sites, and the continuing Year of the Priest celebration is bringing large numbers of pilgrims to Ars,” the small town in France that was the home of St. John Vianney, declared as the universal patron of priests by Pope Benedict XVI.
Rome and the Vatican always attract pilgrims, and Wright said trips there will become even more popular if the speculation that Pope John Paul II will be beatified during the course of the year turns out to be true.
Oberammergau is a village of about 5,000 people in Bavaria, southern Germany, near the Austrian border, that has put on a passion play once every 10 years since 1634, save for exceptions resulting from the two world wars and other secular events. It usually takes place in years ending in zero, with additional stagings in years such as 1934 and 1984 that marked significant anniversaries for the play.
One of every two families in the village was mourning dead relatives in 1633 as the result of the plague which occurred in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Villagers vowed to put on the play the following year and to continue to do so every decade. Similar vows were made and plays were performed elsewhere in Bavaria and Austria in the first half of the 17th century, but the one at Oberammergau is the only one to survive through four centuries.
A description of the play can be found in a related story in this week’s Catholic Times. This year, the two-part, eight-hour event, which includes a three-hour meal break, will take place 102 times between May 15 and Oct. 3 on a five-day-a-week, 2:30-to-10:30 p.m. schedule.
The Shroud of Turin will be shown at the cathedral in the northwest Italian city from April 10 to May 23. As of mid-February, more than 1 million people had made reservations to the view the cloth in its bulletproof, climate-controlled case for three to five minutes apiece.
Organizers anticipate more than 2 million people will see the shroud during the 44 days it will be on view. Pope Benedict XVI will be among that number. His visit is scheduled for May 2. Viewing is free by reservation, which can be made online or by phone. For details, visit www.sindone.org.
Traditionally, the shroud is displayed every 25 years, but an exception was made for the celebration of the Holy Year in 2000, just two years after its previous exhibition.
The shroud was not shown during the Winter Olympics in 2000, but the decision to display it this year was made with the permission of Church officials “understanding the importance to the economy and employment” an exhibition would have, said shroud committee chairman Fiorezo Alfieri. Turin in Italy’s automobile capital and has been suffering the same kind of difficulties other automaking cities have.
The shroud is revered by many Christians as Jesus’ burial cloth. Skeptics describe it as a medieval forgery. It bears a faded image of a bearded man and what appear to be bloodstains that coincide with the wounds Christ suffered when he was crucified.
A Vatican researcher said she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher words written in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, the languages used on the inscription on the cross which described Jesus as “King of the Jews.” Skeptics said she was reading too much into the cloth and said carbon dating in 1988 could trace the cloth back only as far as the 13th or 14th century.
Those results have been challenged by people who say that contamination may have skewed the test results and that a larger sample needs to be analyzed. The Vatican has never made a claim about the authenticity of the shroud, but has described it as a powerful symbol of Christ’s suffering. Former King Umberto II of Italy bequeathed the shroud to the Vatican upon his death in 1983.
Santiago de Compostela, in the province of Galicia on the northwest tip of Spain, midway between Portugal and France, is celebrating a Holy Year because the Feast of St. James, July 25, falls on a Sunday this year. This won’t occur again until 2021. The most recent previous occurrence was in 2004.
“Santiago de Compostela isn’t as well-known today as some of the other European pilgrimage sites such as Lourdes and Fatima, but it has a tremendous history,” said Father Pius Pietrzyk, OP, of Zanesville St. Thomas Aquinas Church, who has led a pilgrimage there. “In medieval times, only Jerusalem and Rome were its equals as a site for Christian pilgrims.”
The city was the termination of a number of pilgrimage routes which spread from there throughout Europe. Tradition has it that the apostle James is buried there, with the city’s cathedral built in the late 11th and early 12th centuries on the spot where his remains were said to have been found in the year 814. It replaced a chapel and two earlier churches.
A pilgrim’s hospice, now a luxury hotel, was founded across from the cathedral by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492, a year more noted for another significant event to which they are connected. The city drew 400,000 people to the World Youth Day celebration in 1989.
Ars is a farm town of about 1,300 people in east central France which probably wouldn’t be known beyond its immediate environs were it not for St. John Vianney.
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